Successful weight management takes a long-term commitment — build a healthy lifestyle you can stick with. Overall, don’t focus on how to lose weight fast. Ideally, follow a healthy lifestyle to lose weight — one that you can live with and be happy with for the long-term. Setting reasonable and manageable lifestyle goals means paying attention to what we have the most control over — our behaviors. Referred to as a SMART goal:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant to the things that are most important to you
- Time-bound
Set goals to walk 30 minutes five times per week, include vegetables for dinner, stop eating after 7 p.m, and get plenty of sleep. These modest changes often lead to one to two pounds of weight loss per week. Weight loss is likely to taper off over time, and we’re less likely to get discouraged if we pay attention to the non-scale victories — like better sleep, more energy, and improved fitness.
Measurements for Ideal Health:
Ideal BMI for women = 18.5 – 24.9 → your current BMI is 28
Ideal Waist-to-Hip Ratio (WHR) for women is below 0.85
Healthy Waist to Height Ratio (WHtR) for women is 0.4 – 0.49
Follow a Manageable Diet
The backbone of a healthy diet for weight loss is to eat more natural foods and fewer processed foods. That’s the basic tenet of the Mediterranean diet — largely considered to be the healthiest eating pattern. Eat plenty of protein from healthy sources to help build and repair muscle.
Food and Fitness Tracker
Food and fitness trackers are available as mobile applications, physical journals, and wearable devices that sync your nutrition and activity data. Here is one popular example: Myfitnesspal has the best for overall nutrition tracking due to its massive database. It’s a comprehensive food and fitness tracker – track it all.
Medication for Weight-Loss
Weight is important for health and avoidance of disease. If you are struggling to keep weight off, especially after menopause, consider a GLP-1, such as Tirzepatide, brand name Zepbound®. It is a rather pricy medication and is usually not covered by insurance; compound versions are more inexpensive. This medication is a tool for weight-loss, a person still has to workout and maintain a healthy diet; but it has demonstrated significant efficacy in reducing body weight and improving glycemic control. Let me know if you want more info on this medication; I am very knowledgeable about it.