Managing your weight doesn’t have to be a challenge. A healthy diet and an active lifestyle are the best tools to keep your weight in check, which also helps you live a healthy lifestyle.
It’s also possible to get life insurance if you are overweight, but staying healthy is important for your overall health and wellness. You can get life insurance for overweight individuals, but it may cost more. How much does life insurance cost for overweight individuals? It can vary depending on other health issues you may have.
We will discuss why weight management is important, tips to help you manage your weight and keep your health in tip-top shape, and how life insurance and health are related.
Why is weight management important to your health?
Managing your weight is an important factor in your physical health and wellness. Being overweight and obesity are risk factors for health conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and some cancers. Being overweight or obese can also make it more challenging to stay active, lead to a shorter life span, and affect your mental health.
The Basics of Managing Your Weight
Weight management may seem like a difficult concept, but it can be easy to understand. To lose weight, you have to create a caloric deficit. This means you must expend more calories or eat fewer calories than your daily calorie recommendation.
If you want to lose one pound of fat per week, you must create a caloric deficit of 500 calories per day. If you multiply 500 calories times seven days, that totals 3,500 or one pound of fat. The ideal situation is for this to come from a combination of diet and exercise.
Three factors affect calorie expenditure. The first is your basal metabolic rate, or metabolism, which involves body processes like breathing and heart rate to maintain homeostasis.
Many uncontrollable factors affect metabolisms like age, gender, and genetics. One controllable factor that affects our metabolic rate is muscle mass. Muscle expends more calories than fat.
The second is the thermic effect of feeding, which is the calories expended to digest and absorb food. Protein has a higher thermic effect than carbohydrates or fat, so you can slightly increase this by eating more protein foods.
Physical activity is the third factor and the one we have the most control over when it comes to caloric expenditure. A longer duration or higher intensity workout will burn more calories than a short duration or lower intensity workout.
Eating a healthy diet is a way to eat fewer calories. While diet and exercise both contribute to creating a calorie deficit, diet is the more important factor. You make decisions about what you eat all day, while exercise is only a short portion of your day.
7 Tips to Manage Your Weight
Here are some tips and strategies that can help you either eat fewer calories or expend more calories on managing weight and improving health.
- Watch Your Portion Sizes. Smaller portion sizes mean fewer calories. You can use measuring cups or a food scale to help keep your portions in check.
- Track Your Foods and Beverages. A diet tracker will give you the specific number of daily calories you need to maintain, lose, or gain weight. You can track your daily foods and beverages to compare to this amount. It’s also eye-opening to see how the foods you eat contribute to your daily calorie intake and make adjustments as needed.
- Avoid Fad Diets. Fad diets are a temporary weight loss measure and rarely result in long-term success. If you don’t see yourself maintaining a diet for the long term, skip it. The key is to find strategies that you can fit into your healthy lifestyle.
- Limit Processed Foods. Processed and packaged foods have more added sugar and saturated fat. This adds extra calories without adding nutrients. Focusing on whole, unprocessed foods gives you plenty of healthy nutrients while keeping your calories in check.
- Don’t Drink Your Calories. The calories from alcohol, soda, and sugary coffee beverages can add up quickly. They also don’t contribute to fullness, so focus on getting your calories from foods and not beverages.
- Make Physical Activity a Priority. To maintain or lose weight, physical activity has to be a priority in your lifestyle. Make it part of your daily routine or schedule exercise as an appointment on your calendar. The more active you are, the more calories you will expend.
- Build Muscle. Muscle mass requires more calories to maintain than fat mass. Therefore, the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism. Weight training and resistance training are effective ways to build muscle.
The Connection Between Life Insurance and Health
Life insurance is needed to help protect your family’s finances in case something unexpected happens to you because it can help cover end-of-life or burial expenses. Life insurance rates are based on age, gender, health status, medical history, and occupation. You will get the cheapest rates when you are young and healthy.
You should compare rates online to find the best deals for life insurance. To keep life insurance rates low, it’s important to manage your weight by eating a healthy diet and being physically active.
Melissa Morris writes and researches for the life insurance comparison site, Clearsurance.com. She is a university professor of nutrition, a certified exercise physiologist, and a certified sports nutritionist.