Walking your way to weight loss

The Five Principles of the Step Diet
In the Step Diet, we bring the latest scientific knowledge about weight loss and maintenance of weight loss to you. Much of this research has been done with people who have successfully lost weight and kept it off long term. From this research, we have developed five principles for successful weight management:

Maintain the proper energy balance. Your weight is a direct consequence of the relationship between your energy intake and your energy expenditure. If you take in more energy than you burn (regardless of what kind of food

you eat), you will gain weight. If you burn more energy than you take in, you will lose weight. Maintaining a constant weight, no matter what that weight is, requires you to balance the energy in the food you eat with the energy you burn. The Step Diet provides you with the simple tools you need to manage your personal energy balance.

Small changes drive success. You have probably tried to make big lifestyle changes before — no carbs, no sugar, all liquids, whatever — and you have probably discovered that what is possible for weeks or even months becomes impossible over time. Consequently, you have lost and gained, lost and gained. With the Step Diet, you can break that devastating (and unhealthy) cycle by learning to make small, sustainable changes in how much energy your body burns and how much energy you take in.

Start with physical activity. A major focus of the Step Diet is on physical activity. This is because your body is designed to work best when you are physically active. A key reason why people cannot keep weight off is that they are not prepared to increase their physical activity permanently. Once you go off your diet, it stands to reason that you will put pounds back on if you start taking in more energy in the food you eat without increasing your physical activity. The good news is that you don’t have to sign up for the New York City Marathon to burn more energy — with the Step Diet, all you have to do is walk more each day.

Anticipate success, but not instantly. It will take time for you to see the results of the Step Diet, but it will be time well spent. By starting with small, incremental changes in how you eat and how much you move — and accepting that your goal is long-term weight management rather than a quick fix — you’ll find yourself building the confidence you need to stay on course to your weight-loss goal.

The maintenance of weight loss is more important than the speed or amount of weight loss. Most people want to lose weight as quickly as possible, which isn’t that hard to do. The hard part is keeping the weight off.

The Step Diet shows you how to lose weight and keep it off—without feeling constantly deprived of food. With the Step Diet, you will learn

to keep some weight off before you lose more. It may take longer than

some other diets to work, but the results will last.

The Six Stages of Weight Control
The best way to approach a big project is to break it down into small, manageable pieces. Permanent weight management is a very big project, so we have broken it down into six stages:

(seven days): Prepare for permanent weight management. You need to know what you are eating and how much physical activity you are currently getting in order to know what to change. Taking time at the beginning to determine this will pay off later.

(two weeks): Stop gaining weight. You need to complete this stage even if you are not actively gaining weight now. Why? Because before you can learn to lose weight, you have to learn what makes you gain it. And it isn’t just eating too much that keeps adding the pounds. The changes you make to stop gaining weight will lay the foundation both for losing weight and for keeping it off.

(time it takes you to read Chapter 4): Set your personal weight-management goals. Here you’ll learn to give yourself a personal weight-management target to shoot for that is realistic and sound for you. You’ll also learn how to track your progress toward that goal. Equipped with only your bathroom scale, your step counter, and a food record, you will be well on your way to weight management.

(twelve weeks maximum): Make small changes to lose weight. This is the core weight loss period during which you will make small changes in how much you eat and how many steps you take each day. You can expect to lose 1 to 2 pounds each week—exactly the rate that maximizes your chances of keeping the weight off.

(four weeks minimum): Find your personal energy balance point. This crucial stage is where you learn how to keep your weight off. It calls for a different approach than you used when losing weight. During this stage, you devise a personal strategy for balancing the energy you eat with the energy your body burns—a strategy that fits comfortably into your lifestyle. You will learn how to use steps, not calories, to maintain energy balance. Even if you want to lose more weight, you must first believe that you can maintain your previous weight loss.

(as long as it takes): Plan for lifelong success. Think of this stage as your graduate seminar. Here you’ll learn some simple, fun ways to refine your energy balance skills. Most important, you’ll learn how to make weight management a habit in your life, something you no longer have to think about all the time—you’ll just do it!

When you’ve finished Stages 5 and 6, you may be ready to lose even more weight. Simply reset your goal (Stage 3) and repeat Stages 4 through 6. You can do this as many times as you like before you decide that you cannot make and sustain any further behavior changes. Notice that you are in charge. You decide on a weight loss you can maintain. You build in success up front. And you avoid the frustration that comes with losing more weight than you can comfortably keep off.

Whether you want to lose and keep off 10 pounds or 50, it is important to complete all six stages of the Step Diet. Obviously, a person who wants to lose and keep off 50 pounds will have to make greater lifestyle changes. Likewise, the time and effort required to accomplish each of the six stages will also vary from person to person. None of that matters now. Just start from where you are at this moment and get ready to make small but meaningful changes in your diet and physical activity patterns. These changes may be so small as to be hardly noticeable. But the difference they’ll make in the end will be enormous.

Excerpted from “The Step Diet Book,” by Drs. James O. Hill and John C. Peters, Copyright 2004 Drs. James O. Hill and John C. Peters. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from Workman Publishing.

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