There are many approaches to weight loss, but not all of them are beneficial to your wellness, and half of them don’t even work! Sometimes, you need someone to point you in the right direction, and, if you’re serious about losing weight whilst looking after your wellbeing, a nutritionist or a dietician could be your new best friend.
According Vanessa Provins, a clinical dietician at Porter Regional Hospital in Valparaiso, individuals who consult a health professional to help them lose weight are on the right track, because ‘at least they’ll know they’re talking to someone with credentials’ who won’t steer them wrong. Weight loss can be even more complicated if you’re also also struggling with other health issues, and Provins says, ‘Other diseases often coexist with obesity including heart disease and diabetes. We can address all those issues.’
So what can your dietician do for you? Aside from recommending online resources to help you, your dietician can, depending on your needs, customise and individualise a food and exercise programme. ‘We try to determine what’s best for them,’ she explains, because dieters may not know about how many calories, proteins, and other nutrients are necessary for their individual bodies. She adds, ‘Many fad diets are lacking in certain nutrients.’
Before your dietician does this, he or she will ask you questions about your lifestyle, eating habits, health and other issues. ‘When they come to me, I want to know what they’re tried already but they still have to do the work,’ Provins says. ‘And I put the emphasis on behaviour modification.’ According to Provins, it’s not just about cutting out or adding certain foods to your diet, but also making healthy lifestyle changes and implementing a regular exercise programme.
What Provins stresses is that people with serious health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, kidney problems and other issues, to ask those in the know what they should be doing. Diabetics, for example, need to balance and control their blood sugar level and exercise to improve their condition, but exercise can throw your blood sugar out of whack when you don’t do it properly. Provins says that ‘we’re at their fingertips,’ to provide a sensible exercise plan, so ‘it’s safer.’
Comments are closed.