Losing weight can be pretty darn hard and if you keep trying and not losing as much as you’d like, just know that losing even a small amount will reap benefits. Even a 5% loss of your total body weight can improve all kinds of health issues and you'll feel better as well. "The magic number is 5% of your total body weight; that's when we see clinically significant physiological changes," says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician with Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

How much is 5%? Easiest way to work out a 5% body weight loss, is to take 10% of your body weight and divide by two, for example if you weigh 68 kg, 10% = 6,8 kg, half that 3,4 kg, you can see it wouldn't take all that long to lose 5%.

In this months article were getting to the “heart” of the matter, with the benefits of weight loss. Lets take a look at some…

• Reduce inflammation– Big belly fat cells are the most dangerous, and create inflammation (this is where chemicals in your body, over time, damage your own tissue) this can often result in arthritis, strokes, heart disease and heart attack. A 5% weight loss can reduce your chances of having a serious disease - imagine what a 10% reduction could do.

• Reduce joint pressure – it only takes for example 5 extra kilos, to add 18 kilos of pressure onto our joints, (knees in particular), this creates heavier wear and tear and impacts the lower body joints. Further to that, the extra fatty weight causes inflammation and wreaks havoc in the joints, so if you keep the weight off, you could ward off the possibility of arthritis later on in life.

• Lower your blood pressure – the more weight the body is carrying the harder the heart has to work, pushing blood harder against the artery walls. By losing 5% of body weight your blood pressure will drop by about 5 points, do the maths, as you can see a bigger weight loss will have a profound positive impact on your blood pressure.

• Cholesterol - Reduce LDL and improve HDL – Its easy to lower LDL (bad cholesterol) by good food choices, but not so easy to improve levels of HDL (good cholesterol) and we need HDL’s to be higher as they are the LDL cleaners and remove them from the blood, so the more HDL we have, the better. Weight loss and exercise can nudge you up into the safe range, ideally HDL needs to be above 60 mg/dl, which significantly reduces your odds of having heart disease.

• Reduce triglycerides – These are particles that transport fat for energy and storage; too many of them (high levels more than 200 mg/dl) means you're potentially heading towards a stroke or a heart attack. Primary objective here is to get closer to the 150 mg/dl mark, which can be done for every kilo lost.

• Lose the Weight - Swapping “this for that” and learning to identify the foods that are medicine and the foods that are making us fat, sick and nearly dead. Whatever we do, it needs to be sustainable.

I’m also not fan of FADS, they DON'T work. Nutritional medicine is not easy, because if it was, we’d all be lithe, lean and super fit. Getting the weight off is one thing, keeping it off is another.

There isn't a perfect food solution for everyone as we are all different, however we can start by simply reducing portion sizes and using a smaller plate, but be sure to load it up with over half fresh stuff (veggies & fruit) and drink water; lots of it, not so much that your kidneys float out of you, but keep hydrated.

This is part one of a two part story, we’ll cover the remaining benefits in the following article.

If you want to lose weight or just feel better, we can help. Pop into VaVa Health, lets chat over a cuppa or give us call.

Namaste, Ashlí

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