Weight Loss: Taking the Slow and Healthy Road

In our point-and-click world, we have come to expect instant gratification, and we usually get it. When it comes to weight loss, however, "slow and steady" beats out "fast and furious" every time.

So says Keith Ayoob, Ed.D., R.D., a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, who would like to see the whole concept of "dieting" laid to rest. Diets, he says, typically work only in the short term. It is so easy to be lured into a diet program that promises a quick fix with minimal effort. The catch is that after going off the diet, you will most likely gain back any weight you lost. The danger is that some diets--like those that leave out entire food groups--are potentially harmful to your health.

The key to long-term weight management is incorporating a series of small, yet permanent dietary and lifestyle changes into your daily routine. These incremental changes will enable you to achieve a healthy weight and maintain it for the rest of your life.

The idea of making permanent changes may seem daunting, especially if physical activity has not been one of your priorities. "A lot of people have real resistance to any kind of exercise," says Ayoob. "They think it means running marathons. But it doesn't. It simply means doing more than you're doing now."

It is important to keep your goals realistic, he says. Don't expect to look like a supermodel if you've been overweight most of your adult life. Research suggests that you can reap enormous health benefits by losing just 10 percent of your body weight.

If you've been very sedentary, you might begin by walking for 5 or 10 minutes six or seven days a week, Ayoob suggests. In a week or so, add another few minutes to your walk. And take the stairs instead of the elevator, when feasible. For weight training, you might start with one or two pushups a day, and add one more each week. In just six months, you will be doing 25 or 30 pushups a day.

"If you become more physically active gradually, it's sort of painless," Ayoob says. "It becomes something that you incorporate into your lifestyle as opposed to doing something for a quick result then forgetting about it."

Ayoob, a registered dietitian in New York who holds a doctorate in nutrition education and teaches at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, advocates the same principle for eating. Some ideas:

• Rethink second helpings: If you're used to having seconds, have seconds only on vegetables. Or continue to have second helpings but focus on limiting the practice to just two dinners a week or every other dinner.
  
  
• Be picky: Analyze which foods you absolutely cannot live without--even if you are committed to changing your dietary habits. For example, if you cannot eat a baked potato without butter, don't try to change that. But ask yourself: "Do I really need butter on my bagel and every slice of bread, too?"
  
  
• Don't set yourself up for sabotage. If a carton or bag of your "trigger" food is no farther than your kitchen, bingeing is a snap. Instead, keep no more than one portion in your home at any given time. Better yet, don't bring your trigger food into your house at all. If you crave chocolate ice cream, have a cone at a ice-cream parlor instead of stashing a half-gallon in your freezer.
  
  
• Desserts: If you are accustomed high-calorie desserts, such as cake or ice cream, continue to enjoy these items but only half as often. After a few weeks, cut to having dessert just once or twice a week. On the interim days, have fresh fruit salad or a low-calorie sherbet, sorbet, or angel-food cake, instead. Also consider adopting Ayoob's "rule of one": Have one serving of dessert, and be comfortable in the knowledge that you won't have to go too long before you can have it again.
  By making one diet or lifestyle change a month, you will have made a dozen changes by the end of one year. You may not even need to make that many changes in order to drop 1 or 2 pounds a week--an ideal, healthy pace for most people.
  

"Think of this as a lifetime solution that requires a lifetime commitment," says Ayoob. "That does not mean your are sentenced to life of a drudgery. On the contrary, if you go slowly and steadily, you're much more likely to feel comfortable about it and feel it's a lot easier than you thought it would be."