Weight Management

The word used to describe the bodily/physiological changes that contribute to a person’s ability to attain and maintain a certain / appropriate weight is known as “WeightManagement”. Most weight management process encompass long term lifestyle strategies that promote healthy diet and daily physical activity. Also, weight management involves developing meaningful ways to track weight over time and to identify ideal body weights for different individuals.

Because of increase in obesity ratio in many parts of the globe, proper weight management techniques mostly focus on achieving healthy weights through slow but steadyweight loss, followed by maintenance of an ideal body weight over time. Understanding the root cause of weight management and implementing the strategies for attaining and maintaining a healthy weight is very important to a person’s overall health because obesity is a risk factor for many chronic diseases, like diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

The Body Mass Index (BMI) is the derived value from the mass/weight and height of an individual person. The BMI technically defined as the body mass divided by the square of the body height, and is expressed in units of kg/m², resulting from mass in kilograms and height in meters.

The BMI can also be depicted by using a table/chart which shows BMI as a Function of Mass and Height using contour lines or colors for different BMI categories, and which may use other units of measurement. It’s an attempt to quantify the amount of tissue mass (muscle, fat, and bone) in an individual, and then can classify/scale the concerned person as underweight, normal weight, overweight, or obese based on that value. In case of children, a high amount of body fat (Weight gain) can lead to weight-related diseases and other health issues and being underweight (Weight Loss) can also put one at risk for health issues. Let put this way high BMI is an indicator of high body fatness. BMI does not measure body fat directly. BMI is also directly proportional to measures of body fat. BMI value ranges are termed as like these Overweight 25 to 30, Underweight < 18.5 kilogram/m², Normal weight 18.5 to 25, Obese >30.

Metabolism is the rate at which our body utilizes our nutrition and factors that influence our metabolism (hormone levels, enzyme secretion, chronic disease conditions, medications, stress, activity level and sleep patterns). The rate of metabolism directly impact caloric need and in turn show up in weight loss or weight gain of an individual.

Healthy, physically active individuals generally have an appropriate BMI, and are within their ideal body weight columns. When we become less active or ingest more calories than we are using for energy and activity, those additional, unused calories are stored as fat in our adipose tissue. BMI can be an indicator of the rate and efficiency of your metabolism.

Physical activity increases the utilization of glucose and fat, and generally increases our metabolic rate. Stress and sleeping difficulties can decrease metabolism due to increase levels of cortisol, which slows down the rate of metabolism to conserve calories for the increased nutritional needs that occur during stress.