Just like cars need fuel and regular servicing to function and extend their life span, our bodies need a balanced diet and regular exercise to function best.
Maintaining a healthy weight is very essential to everybody, especially for women because it provides several benefits to overall well-being.
A healthy weight isn’t just about looking good but also about staying active and energetic. It involves balancing the calories you consume with the ones the body uses for daily activities and bodily functions.
When you maintain a healthy weight, you manage and prevent dangerous health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and other forms of cancer. You’re also sure of keeping a good reproductive health that can positively affect your menstrual cycles, fertility and the health of your pregnancy.
Understanding Healthy Weight and Unhealthy Weight For Women
It’s vital to grasp the difference between a healthy weight and an unhealthy one as this would help you to make informed decisions.
A healthy weight is one that has minimizes your chances of health problems such as diabetes or heart diseases. It’s based on a mix of factors like age, height or family traits.
To determine if you have a healthy weight, we use Body Mass Index(BMI). This calculates weight in relation to height. It’s a very useful general guide, although it comes with a couple of delimitations as it is not able to differentiate between muscle and fat mass.
An unhealthy weight on the other hand can either be underweight or overweight, both of which can pose significant risks to your health.
Let’s try and understand the terms:
- Underweight: This is when your weight is significantly lower for your height, and it can lead to health issues like weakened immune system, bone weakness, etc.
- Overweight or Obese: Being over the ideal weight range for your health. This could put strain on your heart, muscles and bones and might heighten your risks of chronic diseases. It can also affect mobility and moods.
How To Maintain A Healthy Weight
Maintaining a healthy weight basically comprise eating nutritious meals and staying active. Here’s how you can keep fit:
1. Eating a balanced diet
This is the ultimate factor to maintaining a healthy weight for so many reasons. It ensures your body gets the actual nutrients to function better, helps regulate calorie intake as well as supports a healthy metabolism. Let’s break down these a little bit further.
Provides essential nutrients
A balanced diet includes a variety of fruits and veggies, whole grains, lean proteins and healthy fats. These foods are a powerhouse of vitamins, minerals and fiber.
These nutrients support overall health. It helps to maintain a strong immune system, repair worn-out tissues and ensure the usual functioning of bodily processes.
Regulates calorie intake:
Taking in balanced meals also helps you to lower consumption of high-calorie foods with low nutritional value like sugary snacks and processed foods.
All-rounded foods gets you very satisfied with fewer calories. For instance, foods high in fiber like fruits, vegetables and whole grains can keep you feeling full for very long, which intend prevents you from overeating.
Supports a healthy metabolism
Also, consuming a variety of foods would help your metabolism processes. Protein-rich foods for instance, require more energy to digest, absorb and process fats and carbs, a process known as the thermic effect of food (TEF).
This means you burn more calories by digesting proteins and other nutrients. A balanced diet supplies the body with enough vitamins and nutrients to supplement this process of food conversion into energy.
Prevents extreme dieting
Extreme dieting, many a time leads to a cycle of weight loss and gain. And this eating habit slows down your metabolism.
A balanced diet on the other hand is sustainable and avoids extreme restrictions that can lead to overeating or giving up on the diet altogether. This promotes steady and healthy weight management.
2. Regular Physical Activity
Staying active or exercising is another major aspect of weight control, especially for women. A lot of us might think of exercise as very difficult or boring, like running on a treadmill with no end in sight. But it is fantastic!
Exercising not only helps with weight loss but can also make you feel good and happier. When you’re happy and energized, you might not need to snack out of boredom, or because you’re feeling down.
So how can you make exercise fun and a regular part of your life? It all starts with finding things you love – dancing to your favorite pieces of music, going for brisk walks in the park or trying out a yoga class. You can also try cycling, swimming or strength training exercises like weight lifting, resistance bands or HIIT(High-Intensive Interval Training).
Try to get atleast 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity each and every week as recommended by health authorities.
If you find exercising boring, you can make it a social thing and do it along with your friends, or even join a class.
Go ahead and set goals for yourself as it can be motivating enough to do so.
3. Getting plenty of sleep
You might easily skip sleep because your routine has always been from work and family to other social commitments and personal care. Getting enough sleep is really important as it helps maintain a healthy weight.
Sleep helps our bodies to balance hormones that make us satisfied or hungry. These hormones are ghrelin and leptin. If you don’t get enough sleep, you make more ghrelin, which is the hungry hormone and less of leptin, also the satisfaction hormone.
This can lead to binge eating because you may feel hungrier and may resort to high-calorie foods to satisfy cravings.
Sleep also helps in managing the insulin hormone. Not sleeping enough can make our body respond harshly to insulin, leading to weight gain and may even put us at risk for diabetes.
Experts say most adults need 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night. Also, it’s not always the amount of sleep that matters, but the quality. Good sleep is when you go through several cycles of deep and light sleep.
This sleep type helps your body and brain to take rests too, helping you maintain the healthiest weight you could ever wish for.
4. Drinking plenty of water:
We mostly hear this, “water is life”. Why is this magical liquid so essential, especially for women looking to keep fit? It turns out that keeping hydrated goes beyond quenching your thirst; it plays a great role in helping us manage and maintain overall well-being.
Our bodies make up 60 % of water. Water is involved in almost every function, from flushing out toxins to keeping our skin healthy and maintaining weight.
It does help with weight management by boosting our metabolism. Some studies have found that drinking water increases the amount of calories we burn. This is known as resting energy expenditure.
In adults, drinking half a liter, which is about 17 ounces can increase metabolism by almost 30% for up to an hour. Water also acts as a natural appetite suppressant. Sometimes, our bodies confuse thirst with hunger. And so by drinking water regularly, we can easily avoid unnecessary snacking or binge eating.
Taking a full glass of water before meals can make us feel fuller, leading to smaller portions and less calorie intake. 8-ounce glasses of water each day is an excellent starting point, but needs can vary with factors like your overall activeness and where you live(hotter climates might make you drink more).
A good rule of thumb is to quickly drink when you’re thirsty and to keep urine is in light yellow color. That’s usually a sign you’re well-hydrated. If drinking enough water seems like a challenge, then here are a few tips to make it easier.
- Carry a Water Bottle: Drinking water wherever you go when you keep a water bottle becomes very convenient.
- Infuse Your Water: If water alone becomes boring, try adding fruit slices like lemon, lime, or cucumber for a natural flavor boost.
- Eat foods rich in water. Watermelon, cucumbers and oranges are perfect.
- Set reminders: Utilize your mobile phone by setting reminders or using water tracking apps that would prompt you to drink more throughout the day.
Conclusion
Maintaining a healthy weight isn’t just about your number on the scale but feeling strong, energized and confident in your skin.
Remember, it could be choosing water over soda, hitting the pillow an hour earlier or taking brisk walks during lunchtime. Small changes make the big wins for your health.
It’s all about listening to your body and giving it what it needs to survive. Set realistic goals, be patient, and celebrate the victories, regardless of how small they seem.
At the end of the day, you’re going to reap the benefits of looking very beautiful plus living life to the fullest.
The Editorial Team at Healthcare Business Today is made up of skilled healthcare writers and experts, led by our managing editor, Daniel Casciato, who has over 25 years of experience in healthcare writing. Since 1998, we have produced compelling and informative content for numerous publications, establishing ourselves as a trusted resource for health and wellness information. We offer readers access to fresh health, medicine, science, and technology developments and the latest in patient news, emphasizing how these developments affect our lives.