How much weight do you actually need to lose? It might be a lot less than you think
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
If you’re one of the one in three Australians whose New Year’s resolution involved losing weight, it’s likely you’re now contemplating what weight-loss goal you should actually be working towards.
But type “setting a weight loss goal” into any online search engine and you’ll likely be left with more questions than answers.
Sure, the many weight-loss apps and calculators available will make setting this goal seem easy. They’ll typically use a body mass index (BMI) calculator to confirm a “healthy” weight and provide a goal weight based on this range.
Your screen will fill with trim-looking influencers touting diets that will help you drop ten kilos in a month, or ads for diets, pills and exercise regimens promising to help you effortlessly and rapidly lose weight.
Most sales pitches will suggest you need to lose substantial amounts of weight to be healthy – making weight loss seem an impossible task. But the research shows you don’t need to lose a lot of weight to achieve health benefits.
Using BMI to define our target weight is flawed
We’re a society fixated on numbers. So it’s no surprise we use measurements and equations to score our weight. The most popular is BMI, a measure of our body weight-to-height ratio.
BMI classifies bodies as underweight, normal (healthy) weight, overweight or obese and can be a useful tool for weight and health screening.
But it shouldn’t be used as the single measure of what it means to be a healthy weight when we set our weight-loss goals. This is because it:
- fails to consider two critical factors related to body weight and health – body fat percentage and distribution
- does not account for significant differences in body composition based on gender, ethnicity and age.
How does losing weight benefit our health?
Losing just 5–10% of our body weight – between 6 and 12kg for someone weighing 120kg – can significantly improve our health in four key ways.
1. Reducing cholesterol
Obesity increases the chances of having too much low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol – also known as bad cholesterol – because carrying excess weight changes how our bodies produce and manage lipoproteins and triglycerides, another fat molecule we use for energy.
Having too much bad cholesterol and high triglyceride levels is not good, narrowing our arteries and limiting blood flow, which increases the risk of heart disease, heart attack and stroke.
But research shows improvements in total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and triglyceride levels are evident with just 5% weight loss.
2. Lowering blood pressure
Our blood pressure is considered high if it reads more than 140/90 on at least two occasions.
Excess weight is linked to high blood pressure in several ways, including changing how our sympathetic nervous system, blood vessels and hormones regulate our blood pressure.
Essentially, high blood pressure makes our heart and blood vessels work harder and less efficiently, damaging our arteries over time and increasing our risk of heart disease, heart attack and stroke.
Prostock-studio/Shutterstock
Like the improvements in cholesterol, a 5% weight loss improves both systolic blood pressure (the first number in the reading) and diastolic blood pressure (the second number).
A meta-analysis of 25 trials on the influence of weight reduction on blood pressure also found every kilo of weight loss improved blood pressure by one point.
3. Reducing risk for type 2 diabetes
Excess body weight is the primary manageable risk factor for type 2 diabetes, particularly for people carrying a lot of visceral fat around the abdomen (belly fat).
Carrying this excess weight can cause fat cells to release pro-inflammatory chemicals that disrupt how our bodies regulate and use the insulin produced by our pancreas, leading to high blood sugar levels.
Type 2 diabetes can lead to serious medical conditions if it’s not carefully managed, including damaging our heart, blood vessels, major organs, eyes and nervous system.
Research shows just 7% weight loss reduces risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 58%.
4. Reducing joint pain and the risk of osteoarthritis
Carrying excess weight can cause our joints to become inflamed and damaged, making us more prone to osteoarthritis.
Observational studies show being overweight doubles a person’s risk of developing osteoarthritis, while obesity increases the risk fourfold.
Small amounts of weight loss alleviate this stress on our joints. In one study each kilogram of weight loss resulted in a fourfold decrease in the load exerted on the knee in each step taken during daily activities.
Shutterstock/Rostislav_Sedlacek
Focus on long-term habits
If you’ve ever tried to lose weight but found the kilos return almost as quickly as they left, you’re not alone.
An analysis of 29 long-term weight-loss studies found participants regained more than half of the weight lost within two years. Within five years, they regained more than 80%.
When we lose weight, we take our body out of its comfort zone and trigger its survival response. It then counteracts weight loss, triggering several physiological responses to defend our body weight and “survive” starvation.
Just as the problem is evolutionary, the solution is evolutionary too. Successfully losing weight long-term comes down to:
losing weight in small manageable chunks you can sustain, specifically periods of weight loss, followed by periods of weight maintenance, and so on, until you achieve your goal weight
making gradual changes to your lifestyle to ensure you form habits that last a lifetime.
Setting a goal to reach a healthy weight can feel daunting. But it doesn’t have to be a pre-defined weight according to a “healthy” BMI range. Losing 5–10% of our body weight will result in immediate health benefits.
At the Boden Group, Charles Perkins Centre, we are studying the science of obesity and running clinical trials for weight loss. You can register here to express your interest.
Nick Fuller, Charles Perkins Centre Research Program Leader, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
7 Principles of Becoming a Leader – by Riku Vuorenmaa
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
We urge you to overlook the cliché cover art (we don’t know what they were thinking, going for the headless suited torso) because…
This one could be the best investment you make in your career this year! You may be wondering what the titular 7 principles are. We won’t keep you guessing; they are:
- Professional development: personal excellence, productivity, and time management
- Leadership development: mindset and essential leadership skills
- Personal development: your motivation, character, and confidence as a leader
- Career management: plan your career, get promoted and paid well
- Social skills & networking: work and connect with the right people
- Business- & company-understanding: the big picture
- Commitment: make the decision and commit to becoming a great leader
A lot of leadership books repeat the same old fluff that we’ve all read many times before… padded with a lot of lengthy personal anecdotes and generally editorializing fluff. Not so here!
While yes, this book does also cover some foundational things first, it’d be remiss not to. It also covers a whole (much deeper) range of related skills, with down-to-earth, brass tacks advice on putting them into practice.
This is the kind of book you will want to set as a recurring reminder in your phone, to re-read once a year, or whatever schedule seems sensible to you.
There aren’t many books we’d put in that category!
Pick Up Your Copy of the “7 Principles of Becoming a Leader” on Amazon Today!
Share This Post
-
Tartar Removal At Home & How To Prevent Tartar
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Three things to bear in mind:
- Tartar is hardened plaque.
- Plaque is an infected biofilm that expands the natural thin film on teeth.
- Healthy biofilm resists plaque and tartar formation.
Therefore, the recommended approach is a multistep program:
The Complete Mouth Care System
Dr. Phillips recommends to use these five products in this order twice daily:
- Zellie’s Mints & Gum: having 6–10 grams of xylitol daily will help to loosen plaque on teeth so that the following program is more effective. Xylitol protects from mouth acidity and help to remineralize teeth.
- CloSYS Prerinse: CloSYS will prepare your teeth for brushing. This pH neutral rinse ensures that brushing teeth does not occur in an acidic mouth and therefore easily damage teeth.
- Crest Cavity Protection Regular Paste: has an active ingredient of sodium fluoride at optimal concentration (not stannous fluoride). This paste has the proper abrasion and no glycerine.
- Listerine: is an effective rinse that targets the bacteria that cause plaque build up and gingivitis with three active ingredients: eucalyptus essential oil, menthol essential oil, and thymol essential oil. As such, unlike many mouthwashes, listerine does not harm the mouth’s diversity of good bacteria or the mouth’s production of nitric oxide.
- ACT Anticavity Rinse: ACT is a very dilute but extremely effective sodium fluoride solution. It helps prevent and reverse cavities, strengthen teeth, reduce sensitivity, and leaves your breath fresh.
She advises us that by doing this twice-daily over 6 months, we can expect significant tartar reduction, and indeed, that dental appointments may reveal minimal or no need for tartar removal.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read our own three-part series:
- Toothpastes & Mouthwashes: Which Help And Which Harm?
- Flossing Without Flossing?
- Less Common Oral Hygiene Options ← we recommend the miswak! Not only does it clean the teeth as well as or better than traditional brushing, but also it changes the composition of saliva to improve the oral microbiome, effectively turning your saliva into a biological mouthwash that kills unwanted microbes and is comfortable for the ones that should be there.
Take care!
Share This Post
-
AI: The Doctor That Never Tires?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
AI: The Doctor That Never Tires?
We asked you for your opinion on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare, and got the above-depicted, below-described set of results:
- A little over half of respondents to the poll voted for “It speeds up research, and is more methodical about diagnosis, so it’s at least a good extra tool”
- A quarter of respondents voted for “I’m on the fence—it seems to make no more nor less mistakes than human doctors do”
- A little under a fifth of respondents voted for “AI is less prone to fatigue/bias than human doctors, making it an essential new tech”
- Three respondents voted for “AI is a step too far in medical technology, and we’re not ready for it”
Writer’s note: I’m a professional writer (you’d never have guessed, right?) and, apparently, I really did write “no more nor less mistakes”, despite the correct grammar being “no more nor fewer mistakes”. Now, I know this, and in fact, people getting less/fewer wrong is a pet hate of mine. Nevertheless, I erred.
Yet, now that I’m writing this out in my usual software, and not directly into the poll-generation software, my (AI!) grammar/style-checker is highlighting the error for me.
Now, an AI could not do my job. ChatGPT would try, and fail miserably. But can technology help me do mine better? Absolutely!
And still, I dismiss a lot of the AI’s suggestions, because I know my field and can make informed choices. I don’t follow it blindly, and I think that’s key.
AI is less prone to fatigue/bias than human doctors, making it an essential new tech: True or False?
True—with one caveat.
First, a quick anecdote from a subscriber who selected this option in the poll:
❝As long as it receives the same data inputs as my doctor (ie my entire medical history), I can see it providing a much more personalised service than my human doctor who is always forgetting what I have told him. I’m also concerned that my doctor may be depressed – not an ailment that ought to affect AI! I recently asked my newly qualified doctor goddaughter whether she would prefer to be treated by a human or AI doctor. No contest, she said – she’d go with AI. Her argument was that human doctors leap to conclusions, rather than properly weighing all the evidence – meaning AI, as long as it receives the same inputs, will be much more reliable❞
Now, an anecdote is not data, so what does the science say?
Well… It says the same:
❝Of 6695 responding physicians in active practice, 6586 provided information on the areas of interest: 3574 (54.3%) reported symptoms of burnout, 2163 (32.8%) reported excessive fatigue, and 427 (6.5%) reported recent suicidal ideation, with 255 of 6563 (3.9%) reporting a poor or failing patient safety grade in their primary work area and 691 of 6586 (10.5%) reporting a major medical error in the prior 3 months. Physicians reporting errors were more likely to have symptoms of burnout (77.6% vs 51.5%; P<.001), fatigue (46.6% vs 31.2%; P<.001), and recent suicidal ideation (12.7% vs 5.8%; P<.001).❞
See the damning report for yourself: Physician Burnout, Well-being, and Work Unit Safety Grades in Relationship to Reported Medical Errors
AI, of course, does not suffer from burnout, fatigue, or suicidal ideation.
So, what was the caveat?
The caveat is about bias. Humans are biased, and that goes for medical practitioners just the same. AI’s machine learning is based on source data, and the source data comes from humans, who are biased.
See: Bias and Discrimination in AI: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective
So, AI can perpetuate human biases and doesn’t have a special extra strength in this regard.
The lack of burnout, fatigue, and suicidal ideation, however, make a big difference.
AI speeds up research, and is more methodical about diagnosis: True or False?
True! AI is getting more and more efficient at this, and as has been pointed out, doesn’t make errors due to fatigue, and often comes to accurate conclusions near-instantaneously. To give just one example:
❝Deep learning algorithms achieved better diagnostic performance than a panel of 11 pathologists participating in a simulation exercise designed to mimic routine pathology workflow; algorithm performance was comparable with an expert pathologist interpreting whole-slide images without time constraints. The area under the curve was 0.994 (best algorithm) vs 0.884 (best pathologist).❞
About that “getting more and more efficient at this”; it’s in the nature of machine learning that every new piece of data improves the neural net being used. So long as it is getting fed new data, which it can process at rate far exceeding humans’ abilities, it will always be constantly improving.
AI makes no more nor
lessfewer mistakes than humans do: True or False?False! AI makes fewer, now. This study is from 2021, and it’s only improved since then:
❝Professionals only came to the same conclusions [as each other] approximately 75 per cent of the time. More importantly, machine learning produced fewer decision-making errors than did all the professionals❞
See: AI can make better clinical decisions than humans: study
All that said, we’re not quite at Star Trek levels of “AI can do a human’s job entirely” just yet:
BMJ | Artificial intelligence versus clinicians: pros and cons
To summarize: medical AI is a powerful tool that:
- Makes healthcare more accessible
- Speeds up diagnosis
- Reduces human error
…and yet, for now at least, still requires human oversights, checks and balances.
Essentially: it’s not really about humans vs machines at all. It’s about humans and machines giving each other information, and catching any mistakes made by the other. That way, humans can make more informed decisions, and still keep a “hand on the wheel”.
Share This Post
Related Posts
-
Early Dementia Screening From Your Blood & More
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Dementia is, statistically speaking, the most feared disease in the US. Notwithstanding…
- heart disease killing more
- COVID being more of a lottery
- cancer being the “yes you can modify risk factors but it can come for anyone” life-changing (and often life-ending) disease,
…it’s still dementia that Americans report fearing the most.
And yet… Early dementia screening is seriously underused
It may be a case of a head-in-sand approach to avoid unwanted news, or it could be a case of not knowing what’s available.
So, with that in mind…
How to watch out: first line warning signs
You walk into a room of your house, and suddenly stop: “what did I come in here for?”, you wonder.
A moment later, you’re worrying whether this is a sign of age-related cognitive decline.
The good news: it usually isn’t. In fact, you did that when you were younger, too, you just didn’t pay enough attention at the time to remember it now.
Dementia-related memory loss is less “where did I put my car keys?”, and more “what is this thing for?” (it’s your car keys). Or at a less advanced stage: “whose are these car keys?” (they are yours).
You can read about some of the nuances here:
Is It Dementia? Spot The Signs (Because None Of Us Are Immune) ← If you’d like an objective test of memory and other cognitive impairments, this article also has a link to the industry’s gold standard test (it’s free)
(The Self-Administered Gerocognitive Exam (SAGE) is designed to detect early signs of cognitive, memory or thinking impairments)
Tests you can’t do at home
We wrote a little while back about how one kind of blood testing for Alzheimer’s disease works:
The Brain Alarm Signs That Warn Of Dementia
Why “Brain Alarm Signs” if it’s a blood test? Because the blood gets (in very lay terms) bits of broken brain in it. Or more specifically, they tested the blood for density of cerebrovascular endothelial extracellular vesicles (CEEVs), which are bits of the cells from the lining of blood vessels in the brain. These cerebrovascular endothelial extracellular vesicles should not, ideally, be falling off and riding around your bloodstream, and the greater the density of them, the greater likelihood of mild cognitive impairment now, and by extension, dementia later.
It’s not the only blood test available though, see:
Highly accurate blood test for Alzheimer’s disease is similar or superior to clinical cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) tests ← this one checks the ratio of phosporylated-tau217 to non-phosphorylated tau (which is a protein antibody), which equalled or outperformed FDA-approved CSF tests in classifying amyloid-β positron emission topography (PET, as in a PET scan) status, with a confidence interval as high as, or better than, industry standards.
If you don’t like having your blood taken, trust us that you’d find having your cerebrospinal fluid taken even less enjoyable, so this is a very welcome improvement!
In case you’re curious about how the CSF test works, here you go: NPTX2 in Cerebrospinal Fluid Predicts the Progression From Normal Cognition to Mild Cognitive Impairment ← NPTX2 is a protein biomarker of Alzheimer’s risk
…but again, we really think the blood test is preferable.
Tests beyond the physiological
There are, of course, psychological tests that can be done, including a linguistic analysis of your conversation, compared with a vast database of other people’s conversations, with and without various degrees of cognitive impairment
As Dr. Ioannis Paschalidis explains:
❝We wanted to predict what would happen in the next six years—and we found we can reasonably make that prediction with relatively good confidence and accuracy.
Rather than using acoustic features of speech, like enunciation or speed, the model is just pulling from the content of the interview—the words spoken, how they’re structured.
You can think of the score as the likelihood, the probability, that someone will remain stable or transition to dementia. It had significant predictive ability.
Digital is the new blood. You can collect it, analyze it for what is known today, store it, and reanalyze it for whatever new emerges tomorrow.❞
You can read the full paper here: Prediction of Alzheimer’s disease progression within 6 years using speech: A novel approach leveraging language models
See also: AI: The Doctor That Never Tires?
What if the news isn’t good?
While bad news is never welcome per se, it is preferable to not knowing, insofar as we can then take steps to manage the situation.
You may be wondering: what can be done that I wouldn’t already be doing to minimize my dementia risk in the first place?
And the answer is: yes, do continue those things of course, but there is more to do:
See: Beyond Guarding Against Dementia: When Age’s Brain-Changes Come Knocking
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
6 Signs Of Stroke (One Month In Advance)
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Most people can recognise the signs of a stroke when it’s just happened, but knowing the signs that appear a month beforehand would be very useful. That’s what this video’s about!
The Warning Signs
- Persistently elevated blood pressure: one more reason to have an at-home testing kit and use it regularly! Or a smartwatch or similar that’ll do it for you. The reason this is relevant is because high blood pressure can lead to damaging blood vessels, causing a stroke.
- Excessive fatigue: of course, this one can have many possible causes, but one of them is a “transient ischemic attack” (TIA), which is essentially a micro-stroke, and can be a precursor to a more severe stroke. So, we’re not doing the Google MD thing here of saying “if this, then that”, but we are saying: paying attention to the overall patterns can be very useful. Rather than fretting unduly about a symptom in isolation, see how it fits into the big picture.
- Vision problems: especially if sudden-onset with no obvious alternative cause can be a sign of neural damage, and may indicate a stroke on the way.
- Speech problems: if there’s not an obvious alternative explanation (e.g. you’ve just finished your third martini, or was this the fourth?), then speech problems (e.g. slurred speech, trouble forming sentences, etc) are a very worrying indicator and should be treated as a medical emergency.
- Neurological problems: a bit of a catch-all category, but memory issues, loss of balance, nausea without an obvious alternative cause, are all things that should get checked out immediately just in case.
- Numbness or weakness in the extremities: especially if on one side of the body only, is often caused by the TIA we mentioned earlier. If it’s both sides, then peripheral neuropathy may be the culprit, but having a neurologist take a look at it is a good idea either way.
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Two Things You Can Do To Improve Stroke Survival Chances
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Woman Petitions Health Insurer After Company Approves — Then Rejects — Her Infusions
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
When KFF Health News published an article in August about the “prior authorization hell” Sally Nix said she went through to secure approval from her insurance company for the expensive monthly infusions she needs, we thought her story had a happy ending.
That’s because, after KFF Health News sent questions to Nix’s insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, it retroactively approved $36,000 worth of treatments she thought she owed. Even better, she also learned she would qualify for the infusions moving forward.
Good news all around — except it didn’t last for long. After all, this is the U.S. health care system, where even patients with good insurance aren’t guaranteed affordable care.
To recap: For more than a decade, Nix, of Statesville, North Carolina, has suffered from autoimmune diseases, chronic pain, and fatigue, as well as a condition called trigeminal neuralgia, which is marked by bouts of electric shock-like pain that’s so intense it’s commonly known as the “suicide disease.”
“It is a pain that sends me to my knees,” Nix said in October. “My entire family’s life is controlled by the betrayal of my body. We haven’t lived normally in 10 years.”
Late in 2022, Nix started receiving intravenous immunoglobulin infusions to treat her diseases. She started walking two miles a day with her service dog. She could picture herself celebrating, free from pain, at her daughter’s summer 2024 wedding.
“I was so hopeful,” she said.
But a few months after starting those infusions, she found out that her insurance company wouldn’t cover their cost anymore. That’s when she started “raising Cain about it” on Instagram and Facebook.
You probably know someone like Sally Nix — someone with a chronic or life-threatening illness whose doctor says they need a drug, procedure, or scan, and whose insurance company has replied: No.
Prior authorization was conceived decades ago to rein in health care costs by eliminating duplicative and ineffective treatment. Not only does overtreatment waste billions of dollars every year, but doctors acknowledge it also potentially harms patients.
However, critics worry that prior authorization has now become a way for health insurance companies to save money, sometimes at the expense of patients’ lives. KFF Health News has heard from hundreds of people in the past year relating their prior authorization horror stories.
When we first met Nix, she was battling her insurance company to regain authorization for her infusions. She’d been forced to pause her treatments, unable to afford $13,000 out-of-pocket for each infusion.
Finally, it seemed like months of her hard work had paid off. In July, Nix was told by staff at both her doctor’s office and her hospital that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois would allow her to restart treatment. Her balance was marked “paid” and disappeared from the insurer’s online portal.
But the day after the KFF Health News story was published, Nix said, she learned the message had changed. After restarting treatment, she received a letter from the insurer saying her diagnoses didn’t actually qualify her for the infusions. It felt like health insurance whiplash.
“They’re robbing me of my life,” she said. “They’re robbing me of so much, all because of profit.”
Dave Van de Walle, a spokesperson for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, said the company would not discuss individual patients’ cases.
“Prior authorization is often a requirement for certain treatments,” Van de Walle said in a written statement, “and BCBSIL administers benefits according to medical policy and the employer’s benefit.”
But Nix is a Southern woman of the “Steel Magnolia” variety. In other words, she’s not going down without a fight.
In September, she called out her insurance company’s tactics in a http://change.org/ campaign that has garnered more than 21,000 signatures. She has also filed complaints against her insurance company with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Labor, Illinois Department of Insurance, and Illinois attorney general.
Even so, Nix said, she feels defeated.
Not only is she still waiting for prior authorization to restart her immunoglobulin infusions, but her insurance company recently required Nix to secure preapproval for another treatment — routine numbing injections she has received for nearly 10 years to treat the nerve pain caused by trigeminal neuralgia.
“It is reprehensible what they’re doing. But they’re not only doing it to me,” said Nix, who is now reluctantly taking prescription opioids to ease her pain. “They’re doing it to other patients. And it’s got to stop.”
Do you have an experience with prior authorization you’d like to share? Click here to tell your story.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails: