The Fast way to Weight Loss

CEBU, Philippines - You can help your church raise ministry and missional funds the fast and healthy way – fast on fastfood. The LifeBridge Christian Church in Longmont, Colorado raised $40,000 in one month with a fast-food fast. With 3,000 members, LifeBridge challenged their attendees to refrain from buying fast-food for a month and donate the money saved to a local food bank or other organizations that help feed the hungry.

Can the same challenge be applied to Christian churches in the Philippines and more particularly to Cebu?

In promoting healthy lifestyles and weight management, the National Nutrition Council has strongly discouraged fast-food dining after finding this to have increased the incidence of obesity in adults and children among Filipinos.

Weighed Down With Weight Management.

But the phenomenon of obesity seems to be science and technology driven as it is psychological. Advances in science and technology have provided the ease for which humanity would require minimal physical effort. Gadgets for instance have substituted playgrounds for children. Elevators and escalators have substituted taking the stairs. A present-minded, time-shackled world has created concoctions of instant, ready-to-mix and if that isn’t enough, there is what is called fastfood  –meaning cholesterol laden food that’s heavy on transfat, sugars and calories but light on the budget and yes, less time consuming to prepare.

Obesity is also psychological because an advertisement-mediated world is programming and manipulating the minds of people in espousing fastfood eating. As a result, fastfood eating, ready-to-mix instant food eating has become the culture and lifestyle with no thought if this is healthy and nutritionally beneficial. Lifestyle lorded over nutrition. Until one day, people got weighed down with weight management.

In an online definition by Ezine Articles.com, weight management is described as the managing of one’s weight with a healthy diet of low fat meat and dairy products, fruits, vegetables, pulses and cereals coupled with regular exercise. In other words, weight management is not just about losing weight or gaining weight. It is not about being fat or being thin, but rather, it is about calorie balance and wellbeing.

A person can determine whether or not he is of the ideal weight by calculating his body mass index and sometimes waistline. To know the correct body mass index, just go online and type body mass index and several URL will pop up that will give you a menu of how body mass index is calculated. All you have to do is point and click. If you cannot go online, you can visit your local health unit and ask the nutrition counselor to help you with the computation.

Take The Stairs.

While weight management consists of dieting and physical exercise, working on a nutrition-based meal plan has been found to be difficult to follow. Even with aggressive campaigns for a fruit and vegetable diet, this must be complemented with fasting – that is, deliberate cutting down on fastfood. The use of transfat, salts and sugars in fastfood meals has been found to be the culprit why many Filipinos are weighed down by weight management. This is because weight management requires lifestyle changes first and diet modification to complement the change of life.

What is the ideal meal? It is often said that diets that promote weight loss are divided into four categories including low fat, low-carbohydrate, low-calorie and very low calorie. But then trials have found no difference among the diet types.

The National Nutrition Council 7 said that weight management is about balance that is, balancing the calories you consume and the calories that need to be burned off. When eating the same number of calories that the body is using, the weight remains stable. When eating more calories than the body is eating, there is weight gain and when eating few calories that the body is eating, there is caloric deficit. It takes approximately 3,500 calories below your calorie needs to lose a pound of body fat. Hence, to lose about one to two pounds per week, will need to reduce caloric intake by 500 to 1000 calories per day. Taking the stairs has been recommended to burn calories when you are weighed down with sedentary lifestyle.

A calorie is a unit of energy supplied by food. Anything that you eat whether these be carbohydrates, sugars or fats contain calories.

It is precisely because weight management is calorie in and calorie out that it involves diet modification and exercise. The same science and technology that drove you to a fastfood diet is the same driving force that will drive you out of the obesity diet. It is the psychological component that will drive you to the lifestyle change.

But then again, while Christian churches in the Philippines and in Cebu may have difficulty raising a campaign to fast on fastfood and donate the amount for missionary work, there is one simple option to weight loss — take the stairs.