Weight loss solution: Eat less, exercise more

The solution to the growing problem of obesity sounds deceptively simple: increase activity and decrease caloric intake. Obviously, the answer is more complex, or weight loss clinics would be going out of business faster than you can say “Richard Simmons.”
   
Learning to incorporate activity into one’s lifestyle and learning to eat a healthy, balanced diet are skills that require investments of time, patience, focus and practice, said Dr. A. Kenneth Olson, Internal Medicine and Clinical Nutrition Consultant for Baptist Medical Center, Montclair, in Birmingham.
   
“It’s the day-to-day activity of doing something over and over until it becomes a habit,” he said.
Olson doesn’t use the word diet with his overweight patients, preferring the term “pattern of optimum eating.” Practicing principles learned under his mentor, the late Dr. Roland L. Weinsier, founder of the Clinical Nutrition Research Center at UAB, Olson tells patients to concentrate on high-fiber carbohydrates. These require longer time to eat, making people more quickly satisfied while taking in a lower amount of calories than if they were eating foods with little fiber. Also, foods high in fiber are naturally low in fat.
   
“Three dimensions that I work with when patients come to me include teaching a pattern of optimal eating, encouraging them to increase their activity and changing their mind-set or attitude,” Olson said. “It’s crucial to change your thought pattern, or you’re doomed to 100 percent failure.”
Depression, which often leads to psychological and physical inertia, is common in obese and overweight persons, Olson said. That part of the problem must be addressed, too.
   
“I recommend people focus on daily practice and not get so anxious about getting on a scale,” he said. “I look at how successful they have been in practicing a new pattern of eating, being more active, practicing a new way of thinking and feeling.”
   
He doesn’t recommend high-protein, high-fat diets that are low in carbohydrates, because they are dangerous over long periods of time due to the nutritional deficiencies they produce. “The brain, kidney and blood elements require carbohydrate support, and when the body takes in only proteins and fats, it has to break down protein sources to create glucose for brain function and for use by other organ systems that require glucose to function,” he explained. “The result is ketosis, the same mechanism in which starvation occurs. It’s better not to borrow from the body; it will catch up with you.”
   
For the morbidly obese (those more than 100 pounds overweight) who have failed at other means of weight loss and weight management, surgery may be the answer. The accepted surgical procedures for reducing body weight are gastroplasty and gastric bypass, two different methods that reduce the stomach to a pouch smaller than an egg. But even with such drastic methods, a change in eating habits and thought practices are necessary, according to Olson. “Surgery still doesn’t displace the other three dimensions but becomes another aspect,” he said.