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Posted: November 13, 2004

Health and Fitness: Over Weight? Lose weight and reduce your chance of sports injury!

A massive amount of material has been written about the benefits of maintaining your body weight within your optimum healthy weight range. Some of the most talked about benefits include:

* Preventing heart disease and hypertension;
*
* Preventing diabetes;
* Reducing blood pressure; and
* Improving sleep patterns.

Up until know, not a lot has been written about how weight loss can lead to a reduction in sports injury. The rest of this article will cover how losing a few kilo's can help to reduce sports injury and then finish with seven tips to help you shed those extra kilo's quickly and painlessly.

How does losing weight prevent sports injury?

When performing any sports activity your body is put under a huge strain. The impact forces and stresses on your muscles, joints and tendons can be up to seven times greater than your actual body weight. The simple act of running places a big strain on your ankles, knees, hips and lower back. By reducing your body weight, even by as little as a few percent, you will see a benefit in two areas.

Firstly, you will see a reduction in chronic, overuse injuries like persistent knee pain, shin splints, and hip and lower back pain. By reducing the amount of weight your body needs to carry, you're able to reduce the strain and stresses on your muscles and joints, which leads to a reduction in overuse injuries.

Secondly, you will also see a reduction in acute injuries like sprains and strains. By reducing the weight and pressure on your muscles and joints, you're less susceptible to sprain and strain injuries like ankle sprains and muscle tears.

7 Tips for Improved Weight Loss

1. Do You Have a Goal? >BR>Successful people in any endeavor, whether it is business, family or health, are goal orientated. Nothing worthwhile happens without first having a definite plan of what you want to accomplish. Not a vague, general idea. I am talking about a detailed, structured, written plan for your improved health and fat loss success. If you are not prepared to take half an hour to sit down and write out what you want to achieve, you are only wasting your own valuable time and effort.

Your success will largely depend on how well you are able to picture yourself as the person you want to be. Can you see yourself in six months time? What are you doing? How active are you? What new activities are you doing? How do you look? How much do you weigh? What dress or trouser size are you? What is your waist measurement? You must know all this and have it written out, preferably on 3x5 cards that you can carry with you wherever you go.

Before you start any weight loss program, sit down and write out the answers to the above questions. Then keep your answers close by and read them to yourself everyday. Start by asking yourself why you want to improve your health in the first place. You must come up with a good answer to this question. This is the reason you are going to do what you need to do. Without a good reason for wanting to improve your health and lose weight, you are fighting a losing battle. Get the answer to this question and everything else will flow from here.

2. Are You Looking Long Term?
Are you jumping on the bathroom scales everyday and constantly being disappointed with what you see? Focusing on the short term can be very discouraging. However, if you keep focused on the big picture, looking six to twelve months down the track, you will not get put off by minor setbacks along the way.

Too many people tend to throw everything out the window at the first sign of hardship. If you are looking long term it is a lot easier to take things in your stride. When you are working towards a six or twelve month goal, missing one exercise session because of bad weather is not a big deal, but when you are trying to lose two kilos by tomorrow, missing that training session can just about be the end of the world.

Remember, there are no magic formulas for achieving improved health and a permanent reduction in body fat. The best results come from a long-term strategy involving a permanent change in both eating and activity habits. Not from a pill, potion or some celebrity diet you have cut out of the latest magazine.

It is very easy to get caught up in the 'quick results' or 'fast acting' diet scams around today, but it is important to look at the long-term effects of such fad diets. Your ultimate goal should be to improve your energy levels, be free from sickness and disease, and achieve your own personal desired body weight and stay there. That is why goal setting and planning are so important.

Your goals need to go beyond the next couple of weeks. They must be structured and planned out to give you something to look forward to. Your weight loss should be focused on more than just looking thin and should be part of an overall plan to increase your health, fitness, well-being and quality of life. Try to see past losing just a few kilos and look one or two years down the track. I hope you are seeing a fit, healthy and active person with lots of energy and a great zest for life.

3. Is Your Approach Too Radical?
What is one of the hardest things for all humans to do? "CHANGE"

Change is the most psychologically uncomfortable thing for humans to do. So let us be realistic, you do not have to be a psychologist to figure out that it is going to be difficult for anyone who is used to eating three square meals a day to suddenly start eating only carrot sticks and brown rice.

For this reason, any change you make to your eating habits and exercise regimen should be incorporated in a gradual, systematic way. Try not to incorporate too many big changes all at once. Start with a few changes and then, when you are comfortable with them, incorporate a few more. Over a period of time you will be able to incorporate quite large changes without upsetting your regular daily patterns.

The good thing about changing your patterns and habits this way is that they are much more likely to become a consistent part of your daily activities and eating habits instead of just a fad diet or a passing phase. This will contribute greatly to the long-term success of your weight loss goals.

4. Have You Ever Felt Like a Yo-Yo?
When you do not know why you are on a weight loss program or you do not have a goal and a plan to follow, it can be very difficult to know if you are doing the right thing. This uncertainty usually leads to you trying anything and everything without ever really getting the results you were looking for. Your energy levels and weight tend to go up and down like a yo-yo, which can be very frustrating and disappointing.

The answer is firstly to have your goals and plans written out so you know exactly why you are trying to improve your health and lose weight in the first place. Then, stay away from the so called 'fad' or 'celebrity' diets and stick to the more traditional approach of gradually reducing or modifying your eating habits and incorporating a moderate amount of physical activity into your lifestyle. Your own common sense will go a long way here.

5. Food!
For the most part, 'diets' and 'weight loss schemes' just do not work. In fact, nutritionally speaking, most of them are simply dangerous. Try not to look at your weight loss in terms of a diet, try to concentrate on gradually changing your eating habits over the long term and making them a consistent part of your lifestyle.

Firstly, although all food is made up of carbohydrate, protein and fat, the reduction of dietary fat should be the main concern in any weight loss program. The trick is to know which fat to cut out. Many people today are mistakenly eliminating all fat from their diet and are finding that they are actually gaining weight, not losing it like they had hoped.

You see, when you eliminate all fat from your diet, your body actually goes into a form of survival, where it rapidly stores as much fat as it possibly can. So in effect, the less fat you consume the more your body will store fat. But, as I said before, the trick is to know which fats are good and which fats are bad. Give your body enough of the good fats and there will never be a need for your body to store fat.

So what sort of foods should you be eating? Well, you have probably heard it all before but try to substitute the fatty and fried foods for a wide variety of lean meats, fish, poultry, eggs, nuts, fruits, vegetables, legumes and moderate amounts of bread, cereal, pasta and rice. Also, stay away from foods that have been heavily processed and modified.

Do not over-do the complex carbohydrates (bread, cereal, pasta, rice and heavy vegetables like potato and pumpkin). Make sure you get a good supply of lean protein from foods such as chicken, fish, nuts, and lean meat. Limit your intake of sugar and salt, and reduce your tea, coffee and alcohol.

Importantly, increase your intake of water and water-rich foods. These foods include fruit, vegetables, sprouts and their juices. These foods are great because they take the least amount of energy to digest and give your body the most in return.

Another point, which is more a matter of self-discipline than anything else, is: Never, Never, Never keep eating until you are full. This point alone will see a dramatic effect on your energy levels and weight loss success.

Another often neglected and overlooked challenge to effective weight loss revolves around the type and variety of food that you consume over an extended period of time. One of the major problems with most diets is that they are too restrictive in the variety of food that they offer. When the body becomes familiar with the same type of food, it tends to get lazy and ineffective at digesting and metabolizing that particular food. To combat this you need to vary the type of food that you eat, always giving your body something different to digest.

For example, people who eat nothing but whole meal toast for breakfast run the risk of their body becoming familiar with that particular type of food. This leads to their metabolism and digestive processes becoming sluggish, which can lead to a very frustrating weight gain even though you may be eating less. To make sure this does not happen to you, vary your breakfast choices; try white, multi grain, or fruit breads. Have some boiled or poached eggs occasionally. Maybe even try some bacon and eggs for a treat, or maybe just some fruit, nuts or yogurt. The main point is to try and vary your diet as much as possible.

6. Don't Forget to Stay Active!
The advantages of exercise are so many that it is virtually pointless to undertake any health improvement or weight loss program without including some form of physical activity. Any weight bearing activity that uses most of the major muscle groups will be beneficial for weight loss. The type of exercise you should consider are things like walking or easy jogging.

Many people do not realize this, but one of the best benefits of exercise is that a physically active person burns more calories at rest than does someone who leads a sedentary lifestyle. This means that even while sleeping you can burn more calories if you lead a physically active lifestyle.

Another great advantage is that any form of extra physical activity obviously burns more calories, thus leading to a reduction in body weight. But the best advantage of all is that the correct exercise leads to a reduction of body fat, while helping to tone and define your muscles. This means that you can do away with that odd-looking body shape which is caused by diets that lead to a reduction in muscle tissue and not body fat.

7. Relax & Have Some Fun!
People can become so fanatical when they are trying to lose weight. Do not get me wrong, your health and fitness should be very important to you, but try to keep things in perspective. Remember, you may have a husband or wife and family, you may have a career or a business, all these things are important too. Do not neglect the things that are most important to you. Try to have some balance in your life by maintaining some interests outside of weight loss and keep things in perspective.

I hope you enjoyed this month's issue of The Stretching & Sports Injury Newsletter. Please take a moment to review the additional information below and if you have any comments or suggestions regarding this newsletter or any other aspect of our web site, please feel free to contact us.

Article by Brad Walker. Brad is a leading stretching and sports injury consultant with over 15 years experience in the health and fitness industry. For more articles on the prevention & treatment of sports injury, subscribe to The Stretching & Sports Injury Newsletter by visiting The StretchingHandbook.com.