Celebrities have bodies that most of us admire and aspire to have. However You may not know the extremes some of these celebrities will go to in order to lose weight. Here’s some info on weight loss the right way and a little background about dieting.
The effort to achieve a certain weight through diet, exercise, or both is known as weight control. It involves keeping a balance between the energy, or calories, consumed in food and the calories expended in physical activity.
The number of calories necessary to maintain current weight depends on how physically active a person is. A moderately active person requires about 15 calories a day per pound of body weight. When more calories are consumed than are needed by the body, the excess energy is stored as fat. One pound (about 0.5 kilogram) of body fat represents 3,500 stored calories.
Definitions of ideal weight vary among cultures and also change over time. The ideal beauty of the 16th century was overweight by modern standards. Today ideal weight is defined in terms of the percentage of body fat to total body weight. The recommended values are about 18 percent for men and 21 percent for women. Medical and actuarial weight tables, calculated for individual height, sex, and body frame, reflect this ratio.
Food plays important social, religious, and psychological roles. Since many attitudes toward food are established during childhood, weight control often requires a change in one’s way of life.
The American Medical Association estimates that over half of the adults in the United States are either overweight or obese. Obesity is defined as a 20 percent excess of body fat over ideal weight. Obesity has been associated with higher rates of diabetes and diseases of the circulatory system and kidneys. It can also complicate such existing illnesses as arthritis.
Very rarely is obesity the result of a disease. Overeating is probably the major cause of overweight and obesity, and physical inactivity also contributes greatly to the condition. The most common type of weight gain occurs gradually when activity is decreased without a corresponding decrease in caloric intake.
The only healthy diet plan is one that supplies balanced nutrition from the four basic food groups . Diets that emphasize one type of food over others have caused serious health complications and have even been implicated in some deaths. Fasting in order to lose weight is a particularly dangerous practice. Diet pills offer little benefit and are also potentially hazardous. While it is possible to lose several pounds quickly on a “crash” diet, the body is in fact shedding only water, not fat, and the lost weight is rapidly regained later. In general, weight loss should not exceed 2 pounds (0.9 kilogram) per week without medical supervision.
Exercise is an effective alternative to crash diets because it actually increases the enzymes that help burn fat. Studies have shown that with dieting alone, 30 percent of the initial weight lost comes from muscle tissue. Exercise, on the other hand, increases muscle tone while decreasing fat. It thus prevents the sagging that often results from loss of muscle tissue while dieting.
Obesity may also be treated by a number of surgical procedures, including removing part of the intestines (a procedure called an intestinal bypass), stapling the stomach, and wiring the jaw closed. Because of frequent, serious complications, however, these techniques are seldom performed anymore. A device called a gastric balloon may now be inserted into the stomach to induce a feeling of fullness and to discourage overeating.
In more recent years stomach reduction surgery is the new craze. It has become very mainstream, but still need a doctors strict approval.