Fruits

You've learned how to lower your cholesterol and blood pressure. Now you can learn to work with your body to reach — and maintain — your natural weight.

Train your body to eat automatically — meaning eat when you're hungry and stop when you're not. Easier said than done, however. So here are 10 tips to help you work with your body, not against it, for regulating your weight.

The goal is to stop overriding your body's natural processes

Your body is a well-oiled machine, or at least it can be. For example, the protein leptin — when it's working the way it should — gives the body a signal to stop eating. It also stimulates your body to burn more calories.

Now that's a system you want to work right!

But, if you're overweight, you might have leptin resistance - where your body overrides leptin's message, or does not receive or respond to leptin signals.

So your challenge is to let leptin do its job. Stop overriding it. But how?

10 Tips

Here are 10 ways to help your body work the way it should:

  1. Walk 30 minutes a day which increases your energy and muscles.
  2. Build more muscle with resistance training, which is pulling or pushing weight — either dumb bells or your own body weight — to build muscle mass. Muscle burns 50 times more calories than fat does. See www.realage.com for a free exercise routine.
  3. Read food labels to avoid eating simple sugars, or enriched, bleached or refined four. Also avoid HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup) — which is in salad dressings, soft drinks, and many low-fat foods. Your body doesn't count these as calories and wants to keep eating. And HFCS foods can be high in calories, causing weight gain!
  4. Avoid saturated fats including high-fat meats like sausage, baked goods, whole milk dairy products, anything from a four-legged animal, and palm or coconut oil. Choose foods with unsaturated fats instead, like olive oil, nut oil, fish oil, canola oil, avocado, or flaxseed oil.
  5. When you're hungry, drink one or two glasses of water. You might be surprised to see you've been confusing thirst with hunger.
  6. Avoid excess alcohol calories. One drink a day is enough — if you want to spend your calories that way.
  7. Watch your labels for carbs. Eat complex carbs,such as whole grains and vegetables, and make sure they're not more than 50 percent of your diet.
  8. Have a healthy sex life. The hypothalamus in the brain controls both your appetite for food and for sex. Apparently, keeping one appetite satisfied can help to satisfy the other.
  9. Keep some healthy emergency foods on hand such as foods that will help you when you get cravings, such as juice, nuts, fruit, and vegetables.
  10. Eat. To lose weight, you have to eat. Don't let your body think it's being deprived - even though you feel deprived because you've turned down the chocolate candy bar! Dieting by depriving yourself will never work. Your body will fight deprivation with everything it's got.


Bottom line

Your body is supposed to work like a well-oiled machine, but you've had a lifetime of not listening to your body's signals. By following these simple ideas — and a few more we'll deal with in future columns — you can work with your body to lose weight and keep it off.

Humana's Medical Advisor for Consumer Health, Michael Roizen, M.D., is personable, witty, and full of health insights offered through his books, a radio show, and his Website www.realage.com. He's also chair of anesthesiology, critical care medicine, and pain management at the Cleveland Clinic, where he practices both internal medicine and anesthesiology. He's listed - along with his physician wife - as one of the 1,000 Best Doctors in the United States.