Weight Management
Helping You Attain and Maintain A Healthy Weight
Weight management is the process of adopting long-term lifestyle modifications to maintain healthy body weight on the basis of a person’s age, sex, and height. Methods of weight management include eating a healthy diet and increasing physical activity levels. All of these methods and suggestions are used by our healthcare providers at RWJBarnabas Renaissance to put you on the fast track to a healthier life.
Your diet is ingrained in your lifestyle. To change your weight—whether you want to lose a few pounds or more, and keep them off—or to ensure you don’t succumb to the expanding-waistline syndrome, you must permanently adopt a healthy lifestyle and with our guidance, you will do just that.
Our society, and in particular Americans, are obsessed with both food and dieting. As a nation, we love to eat. We often eat out, where meals are frequently higher in fat and calories than meals eaten at home; we eat larger portions, and we indulge in dozens of delicious “new” food products found on our grocery store shelves every year.
Unfortunately, it’s not just all that tempting food that stands in the way of your efforts to achieve or maintain a healthy weight. Technology has altered Americans’ lifestyles. Most of the time we can be found sitting—in front of a computer or TV, in a car, at a restaurant. About a quarter of adults—and an even greater percentage of women—report they are sedentary and engage in no physical activity during leisure time, and less than half exercise regularly.
Being overweight increases your risk for many diseases. If you are overweight, you are more likely to develop heart disease and stroke, the leading causes of death for both men and women in the United States. Overweight people are also more likely to have high blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke, and high cholesterol, also a risk factor. They’re twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes—a major cause of death, heart disease, kidney disease, stroke, amputation, and blindness—as those not overweight. Our experienced team of doctors at RWJBarnabas Renaissance understands the struggle weight management can be and will work with you to find a lifestyle that works.
The answer to this weight loss/gain cycle lies in how you manage your weight on a day-in, day-out basis. The success of your weight-management efforts should be evaluated not just by the number of pounds you lose, but by improvements in your chronic disease risk factors, such as reduced blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar levels, as well as by new, healthy lifestyle habits. With our assistance, our goal at RWJBarnabas Renaissance is to help you find happiness in your weight management journey.