Over the last several decades, an increasing percentage of Americans have become obese. Beyond that, many more people are simply overweight and not fit. Curiously, as the population in general grows ever heavier, height and weight charts which show norms among populations have become all but useless.

Weight Watchers International, a company with a vested interest in helping people lose weight, but which also knows a lot about obesity, reports that one-third of the American population today is obese. “Research shows that obesity increases the risk for disabling and life- threatening chronic diseases including diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and some cancers.

There is overwhelming scientific consensus that achieving and maintaining a healthy weight, or at a minimum preventing further weight gain, should be a national public-health priority,” says Linda Webb Carilli, General Manager of Corporate Affairs, Weight Watchers International.

Weight Watchers reports that obesity costs the nation more than $100 billion annually and causes the premature death of approximately 300,000 people each year. “There’s indisputable evidence that being obese is unhealthy,” says Carilli. She observes that the public is often confused on this serious health issue. A very small percentage of people may be both fat and fit but most people who “are fat are out of shape and unhealthy,” says Carilli. Obesity is one of “the most rapidly growing health problems in this country.”

Losing Weight by Having Fun

If it has been a continuing wish or desire of yours to get back into shape, perhaps the most important element to your future success is to look for ways to make achieving the goal fun. If you regard working out as drudgery, then don’t do it. There are other ways to get to your chosen weight. Here are some ideas for achieving your targeted weight in a manner that you can sustain:

• Look for little ways all day long to engage in a few moments of exercise. For example, park your car a block or two away from a store you’re going to. If you’re in a mall parking lot, park at the far end of the lot and walk the two to three blocks.
• If you use public transportation, get off the bus or subway one stop or a few blocks before you normally would, and walk the rest of the way.
• If you’re in a high-rise building, take the stairs whenever you’re heading down to the bottom. Also, take the stairs if you’re only going up one floor or two. If you’re going more than two, feel free to take the elevator. Still, you have the option of getting off one or two floors before your desired floor and using the stairs the rest of the way up.
• Get in the habit of taking a walk before and after each meal, even if it’s for a couple minutes. You’ll feel the difference, and after a while begin to notice the difference. Walking after dinner, in particular, will likely enable you to enjoy the rest of the evening and, surprisingly, and help diminish your appetite for anything else.
• Enroll in an exercise course with a friend. That way, you reinforce each other, attend more regularly, and stay the whole time. Don’t start off with something rigorous; even simple stretches will do for beginners.
• Investigate courses you might not have considered previously, such as yoga, tai chi, belly dancing, power walking, or water calisthenics.
• If you watch television regularly, get in the habit of doing some kind of exercise while you watch. With all those exercise machines being advertised on the infomercials, perhaps there is something being offered that will be fun and enjoyable for you.

In many communities throughout the U.S. there are stores called Play It Again Sports where used equipment is offered for sale. The advantage of shopping in such stores is that you can survey and sample a variety of exercise devises all in one setting, and you may purchase equipment in excellent working condition at half or less of the original price and start using it that evening.

If it turns out the equipment isn’t right for you, you can go back to the same store, which almost always will buy it back from you (obviously at a lesser price so that they can make a profit when they resell it). You then have the opportunity to try something else.

Come-ons You Can Safely Ignore

Consistently losing one pound a week is no easy feat. That would mean four pounds in a month and perhaps as many as eight pounds in two months. Don’t be fooled by the infomercials, advertisements, and just plain come-ons. When you see a parade of people come up to a microphone and say how they lost eight pounds in the first four days or six pounds in the first week, switch the channel. Gentle reader, most of this loss is water.

It is not healthful or desirable to lose weight too fast. Those who do crash course weight loss are most susceptible to putting it on just as quickly, and then some. People who have lost forty or fifty pounds often turn around months later and add sixty or seventy pounds.

You don’t need to be conned like the masses. Annually, just in America, there are as many as 120 diets published, and that’s not including diet-related sections in fitness and exercise books. If the diet books were effective, there would only need to be three or four published, and then everyone could simply buy those, follow what’s said, and achieve their goals. Then, every few years the handle of books could be updated as new breakthroughs in research are achieved.

Honoring the Basic Equation

You don’t need to watch infomercials or even buy a book about dieting. Simply honor the basic equation that governs the weight of each and every creature on earth. In a nutshell, to maintain your weight, eat that number of calories that equals the number you burn.

Remember, an incremental approach is desirable even if your results are anything but incremental. When it comes to weight loss, your results will likely not be incremental. As your metabolism changes and your body receives less calories than it’s burning on any given day, at first, your attempts to lose weight will be stymied. For a week or two you may find no weight loss; yet, as you’re throwing up your hands in despair (not a bad gesture, since it’s a form of exercise) take heart. Your body is readjusting to the new you, and soon enough, you’ll see progress.

Physiologically, what happens when you initiate a weight loss campaign is almost beyond belief. Your body–the product of millions of years of human physiological development–retains calories when it senses that there might be a food shortage or drought. As time passes and you consistently burn more calories than you consume, your body is forced to surrender part of its fat in storage.

Slow and Sure Weight Loss

Suppose you start consuming less calories. Your body goes into conservation mode saying, “Hmm, Chris isn’t eating as much as usual, I’d better hang on to what we have because there could be some tough times ahead.” Each day, week after week, as Chris burns more calories than eaten, Chris’s body gradually draws upon the fat reserves available to maintain proper functioning.

If you sustain the pace for a month or two months, eating healthfully, taking vitamins, but nevertheless burning more calories than you ingest, you’ll find that reducing your weight is not the ominous, near impossible task that everyone makes it out to be.

Indeed, you can get to the point where it even becomes fun. Fun? Yes! It all boils down to what your goals are.

Let the Fun Begin

If your goal is to reach a target weight in six months, it’s the third month, and you’re making tremendous progress, many aspects of your pursuit will seem like fun.

• It’s fun to have your clothes start to fit again, or when you’ve reached your goal, go shopping for entirely new clothes.
• It’s fun to have admiring glances from people who didn’t previously offer them.
• It’s fun to have more energy, to feel more fit, to feel more in control of your life.
• It’s fun to go to high school reunions weighing what you did when you were in high school.
• It’s fun when you go to the health club, and blend right in with all the other slim people out on the aerobics floor.
• It’s fun to gather up an armload of diet books and drop them all into the recycling bin.

Looking Forward to Hunger Pangs!

Any goal for your physical well being is achieved through both physical and mental means. For the few times each year when I gain five to seven unwanted pounds, despite doing all the things possible to keep them off, mentally, I look forward to hunger pangs. Don’t start making rash judgments here — I’m not masochistic.