For people who are overweight or obese and trying to lose weight, often the focus on losing kilos and inches obviates their focus on keeping healthy. Let me elaborate: while it is of course best to get back to healthy weight, it takes time and more often than not, you can not achieve the normal body weight range. But the risk factors that obesity adds to your life can be controlled to a great extent by making changes in your lifestyle. These changes are not all directed towards weight loss!

Find below the things that you can do, besides trying to lose weight, to make sure you stay healthy (or as close as possible), even with obesity

Managing your lifestyle

The principles of managing your lifestyle for whole spectrum of obesity and insulin resistance syndrome are fortunately the same, namely:

• Eat a healthy diet
• Do adequate exercise
• Keep an active lifestyle/avoid sedentary behavior
• Give up smoking
• Keep alcohol consumption moderate

Check-out how FHI tools can help you in managing your diet and exercise!

Monitoring your health parameters regularly

Your annual routine health check up should cover all assessments and tests which help in getting well rounded information about our lifestyle related risks.

Often, the health check ups are incomplete; they cover the laboratory tests (often more tests than needed) but miss out on important assessments such as blood pressure, BMI, waist circumference etc. These are very important considerations in lifestyle disease risk management

FHI health check-up list cover ALL these parameters and are available for different groups of people,  check out: FHI health check-up 

Obesity is especially bad for heart health and increases your risk of heart diseases , which can lead to heart attack and stroke. Therefore, getting a  ‘heart risk assessment‘ done is very important.

This score will not only describe your risk of heart attack and stroke in next ten years, but also show how getting your risk factors (such as smoking, blood cholesterol ) will reduce this risk.

Additionally, you should use the health check results and the heart risk assessment score, to discuss with your doctor, whether you need drugs for control of prediabetes, blood cholesterol level etc.

Getting medical help, if required

Often, people who incidentally get health risk factors detected in routine check ups are loathe to go for drug therapy.

But more and more research shows that EARLY aggressive control of risk factors can help you delay or prevent frank disease or their complications, therefore, you must seek medical help, where indicated.

To know about target levels of control for BP, cholesterol and all other risk factors, go to ‘Target levels for heart risk management’

The steps described above will not only help you get healthy, but also will push you towards a sustainable weight loss. Find out more about ‘how to reduce weight‘