Health & Fitness: How to lose weight
KIRSTIE ALLEY LOST 75 POUNDS AND GAINED IT ALL BACK, by Gretchen Voss MSN.com
LOS ANGELES – All you have to do is wheel your grocery cart into a checkout line to see the cautionary tales screaming at you from the tabloids: Kirstie Alley regained the 70-plus pounds she lost on Jenny Craig. Maureen “Marcia Brady” McCormick got even heavier after she was on Celebrity Fit Club. Oprah, well, we all know about her struggles. Janet Jackson, Kelly Clarkson… the list goes on and on. It makes you wonder: If these rich, powerful women, with their personal trainers and private chefs, can’t win the weight war, what chance do I have?
It doesn’t help that the statistics are grim: By some estimates, more than 80 percent of people who have lost weight regain all of it, or more, after two years. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles analyzed 31 long-term diet studies and found that about two-thirds of dieters regained more weight within four or five years than they initially lost. Women who want to lose weight know these painful numbers all too well. “I’ve been on a roller coaster for the past two years,” says Leigh Moyer, 31, of Philadelphia.
In 2003, she lost 25 of her 155 pounds by diligently counting calories and logging daily sweat sessions at the gym. Four years later, busy with graduate school and her job at a software company, Leigh blew off her workouts and stopped monitoring her portions… and shot up to 175. “It was so sad, so frustrating,” she says. “I let myself down.” Along with the emotional toll is a physical one: Not only is the extra weight a health risk, but recent studies have linked the gain-lose-gain cycle to such potentially life-threatening conditions as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, depression, heart disease, and cancer.
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