If you are thin now, here’s how you stay thin

Keeping your current weight on the scale may not be the healthiest body composisiton as you age.

We are not necessarily suggesting you ever have to change your weight. We would like to measure both your weight and your body composition on a yearly basis. Staying the same weight may mean getting a thicker waistline and more fat, thus not always fitting into the same clothes at 40 as 20 or at 60 as at age 40. (We can discuss styling later!)

The optimal maintenance of one’s weight, even if of normal weight, often requires a combination of diet, exercise and behavioral modification to account for the additional weight and weight distribution that occurs as we get older.

In addition, some patients eventually require active lifestyle, nutrition management, fitness instruction, change of medications, monitoring of hormone levels, and medication management. The optimal weight for individuals is a matter of discussion. Weight being integrally aligned with your current health, your ethnicity, body water (swelling does add some pounds), and other complex factors.

Body fat % and having a lean body is important even for those over weight. We thus suggest that even normal weight individuals look to their body fat % to determine if they are truly at their healthiest weight. If your weight has crept up, even in the normal weight ranges, you may have health benefits of actively trying to get to your healthy stable weight that you were in your younger years.

If you have not paid attention to diet advice as you have never been overweight, we want you to understand how to reduce the reduce risk factors for those illnesses particularly complicated by weight gains including hormonal imbalance, cardiovascular disease, such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, arthritis, joint disease, cancers, gall bladder disease, fatigue, diabetes, mobility, and mood.

On any nutritional plan your rate of weight stability or weight loss, if that is the goal, is directly related to the difference between energy intake and energy expenditure.

Normal weight women need to realize that their normal intake, may result in about a 1.5 pound per year average gain, meaning that holding body composition means slightly reducing.

Reducing caloric intake to equal energy expenditure should result in a predictable weight stability. However, prediction of weight stability, for an individual, is difficult. Factors that predict response to a diet include dietary adherence, medications you are on, your hormones, and genetic factors influencing body composition and energy expenditure.

That’s where we can help! Come to discuss options.