Healthy attitude must precede healthy body
Healthy attitude must precede healthy body
Teach body acceptance, take focus off food
Americans are obsessed with losing weight. Magazines that promote a diet or exer-cise plan on the cover frequently sell out. Manufacturers are increasingly catering to consumers’ demands for low-fat versions of high-fat treats. Yet, people are getting larger.
This obsession with thinness and dieting plays a role in creating weight problems, says Karen Carrier, MEd, director of the Houston (TX) Center for Overcoming Overeating. "Dieting, or restrictive eating, is one of the main drivers of the increasing obesity rate," she says. When people diet, the body gets more efficient with fewer calories and better at storing fat.
Children are taught to override appetite and eat according to a social schedule. They lose the ability to eat according to their physiological need for food, which leads to overeating. Also, people learn to use food to cope with emotional difficulties. "Deprivation, and following rigid external guidelines, keep people disconnected from their body and create bizarre eating habits," says Carrier.
People need to develop a way of eating and exercising that is healthful for them rather than to adhere to an all-or-nothing attitude, says Pat Lyons, RN, MA, director of Connections Women’s Health Consulting Network in Oakland, CA. "People are either on a diet and eating good food, or they are off a diet and eating cheeseburgers and high-fat food. It’s the same with exercise. They are either doing 20 minutes of exercise three to five times a week at their target heart rate or they are doing nothing," she says.
If outreach programs that focus on lifestyle changes are to be successful, patient education managers must first get people to examine emotional issues about food, says Carrier. Then refrain from presenting any foods as forbidden. Instead, get people to examine how the food tastes and what it feels like in their body. "When someone is eating in response to their body and they have done their work on emotional eating issues and food doesn’t glitter anymore, then their body is not going to lead them to eating huge amounts of bad foods," says Carrier.
It takes more than willpower for people to make changes. Dietary habits are formed over a long period of time, often learned in childhood and difficult to change as adults. "What seems to be effective is if people can make small changes, shifting from whole milk to 2% to 1% to skim milk over a year’s time," says Lyons.
Just as people are different heights, people come in all different body shapes and sizes. "About 60% to 70% of body weight is determined by genetics. There is only so much people can do to change that without developing an eating disorder," says Lyons. Weight loss should never be the focus of dietary changes. Instead, people should focus on having a healthy body no matter what size they are.
"If people resolve their problems around eating, they will be whatever size is healthy and natural, and it may or may not conform to the ideal for beauty," says Carrier.
[Editor’s note: Karen Carrier consults with health professionals who deliver wellness programs and advises on ways to make programs more successful. For more information write: Karen Carrier, The Houston Center for Overcoming Overeating, P.O. Box 841436, Houston TX 77284-1436. Telephone: (281) 345-8692. Pat Lyons also works as a consultant. She can be reached by writing: Pat Lyons, Connections, Women’s Health Consulting Network, P.O. Box 10248, Oakland, CA 94610. Telephone: (510) 763-7365. E-mail: [email protected]]
Subscribe Now for Access
You have reached your article limit for the month. We hope you found our articles both enjoyable and insightful. For information on new subscriptions, product trials, alternative billing arrangements or group and site discounts please call 800-688-2421. We look forward to having you as a long-term member of the Relias Media community.