Shedding Pounds, Easing Pain
One of the recommendations your doctors have for you for back pain is always to lose weight if you need to lose weight. However, it's easy to put this recommendation on the back burner when you're suffering from back pain. After all, there are hundreds of diets to choose from, but what do you do if you don't want to go on an actual diet to lose weight? Let's look at weight loss for back pain.
The answer is to make up a diet plan, not an actual diet. To do this, you can take five basic principles of weight loss for your diet plan and initiate them over five weeks. Then gauge your weight loss and decide what needs to be done at that time.
5 Principles in Your Diet Plan
Here's a list of the five principles and when the best time to initiate them is:
1. Stop the Soft Drinks
Evaluate your diet. How many soda pop drinks are you consuming daily? Include the diet drinks in that number.
If you are consuming any at all, you can bet that they are interfering with your weight loss efforts and most likely contributing to weight gain.
Soft drinks contain no nutrients – and when you consume foods with no nutrients, they end up taking nutrients from your body for their metabolism. That means you end up with a deficit. Give up these nutrient freeloaders in your diet!
Soft drinks also alter your taste buds because of the chemical ingredients they contain that are specifically designed to affect your food choices.
Think about it – do you want the food companies to determine what you eat and drink all day long? Or are you your own person, an individual in your own right who has control over what you do?
Give up the soft drinks. Take the first week of your diet plan to do this.
3. Alter the Restaurant Eating Habit
How many meals are you eating out each week? Some people tell themselves they are too busy to prepare their own meals and end up racking up an extra 4500 calories a week from three meals.
It's so easy to do this! One wheat-free brownie ice cream dessert at the Outback Steakhouse tastes great, but it's over 1500 calories. That's more than the number of calories needed for the day.
Gaining weight from restaurant food is a sure way to add to the back pain problem.
Restaurant meals have to make you believe you're getting enough for your money, so they'll pack on the calories. The food is generally made with extra fat to make it taste palatable.
Your best bet for dealing with restaurant food is to eat only half the meal or stop going to restaurants. Both will require a bit of discipline. During Week 2 of your diet plan, make this change.
4. Know When to Exercise
After you eat any meal, your blood sugar level rises. Your goal is to get that blood sugar out of the blood and into the muscles where it's used and burned up.
If you leave the sugar in the blood and eat far too many carbohydrates in your meal, you'll store fat for the next 18 hours. That means that even eating lettuce will make you fat because you can't burn the calories.
What's the easy solution? It's to move around and exercise within 30 minutes of eating a meal. This could be a walk, bike ride, pumping iron or jumping jacks. You'll most likely find that your back pain improves, as well.
This week, do some sort of exercise after your biggest meals.
5. Sugar Kills
Sugar is another killer food in your diet. It's another nutrient freeloader that uses up vital B vitamins and minerals you need to think right and feel right. It takes about four days for your body to adjust to lowered levels of sweetness in your diet, so do realize the first four days are the most difficult. After that, it's easier.
The best way to reduce sugar is to select a few groups of foods that you tend to eat that contain high amounts of sugar. This could be breakfast cereals, sweetened beverages or candies/cookies/cakes/sweet rolls.
You may want to take a few weeks to eliminate the sugar from your diet. But do remember this: removing the sugar from your diet is an automatic way to decrease your weight. The weight falls off when you don't have excess sugar in your diet.
Take Week 4 (and possibly 5) to stop eating high-sugar foods by reading the labels. Anything with high fructose corn syrup, sugar, cane sugar, dextrose, malt sugar, and other sugars must go.
6. Eat Great-Tasting Foods
To stay healthy, you'll have to have some new recipes to create at home. Many good cookbooks will give you great-tasting, healthy recipes that will help you lose weight. Their primary key is to use herbs and spices so your food has flavor, along with wholesome ingredients such as meat, poultry, fish, vegetables, and legumes.
For Week 5, put it on your schedule to get a few cookbooks from the library and select only five new recipes to start. Have fun with them!
You may not need a diet to lose weight that is causing your back pain; you may need a diet plan. This diet plan has worked with hundreds of patients over the years and can work with you, too. Make a decision and get started today.