It’s important to strive for a healthy weight. Excess weight contributes to multiple health issues. It’s an underlying factor for diabetes, heart disease and several cancers. It worsens conditions like arthritis, asthma and sleep disorders.
The holidays present a special challenge to anyone when it comes to gaining weight, but for those who are already overweight or obese the effects might be worse. Multiple studies have reported average weight gains of a pound or two among adults during the period between mid-November and mid-January. While that seems like a small amount, the range between the lowest and the highest weight gain is large. People who were already overweight or obese tend to gain more weight than people who are at a healthy weight.
When the average gain across the year is measured, holiday weight is the major contributor to annual excess weight gain and for many people the pounds just keep adding up. As of this date more than 70% of adults in the United States are either overweight or obese.
On the bright side, studies show that programs designed to increase awareness about energy balance (calories consumed vs. calories burned) and body weight have been shown to be successful at reducing weight gains. As an example, my gym has a special program between Thanksgiving and Christmas that encourages people to focus on maintaining their weight during the holidays.
The concept of energy balance is important to understand for anyone who wants to lose or maintain weight. For weight loss to occur, the calories you eat must be less than the calories you burn on average.
There are several tools that can help you to determine the appropriate number of daily calories for your body. My favorite is the body weight planner that comes from the National Institutes of Health (NIH): niddk.nih.gov/bwp. It takes age, sex, height, current weight and activity level into consideration and it can be used to calculate calories for weight loss, weight maintenance or weight gain.
The other side of that coin is to keep track of how many calories you are eating. I recommend phone apps like MyFitnessPal or LoseIt for that.
It takes a lot of extra calories (3,500) to gain just one pound of body fat in a week’s time so most of us can indulge in a few holiday treats and still maintain our weight but we can’t go overboard every day. And, if you already have lots of pounds to lose you may need to be more careful.
- Sherry DeWalt is the healthy lifestyles coordinator for the CGH Health Foundation in Sterling.