Weight Control Affects Workers Compensation Costs

Weight Control: Manageable Ideas

1. Give yourself time to adjust to new foods. A preference for familiar foods is a positive survival characteristic; if the red berries didn’t make you sick last week, they probably won’t make you sick this week; but if you’ve never tried the blue berries, you want to be careful. If you try the blue berries a few times without getting sick, you may come to like them.

2. Remember your mother telling you “Don’t eat before dinner. It will spoil your appetite?” If you are very hungry at dinnertime, a light snack in late afternoon may do just that for you and make it easier to eat less at mealtime.

3. One pound is about 3,000 calories. That is, if you take in 3,000 more calories than you burn, you will gain a pound; if you burn 3,000 calories more than you take in, you will lose a pound. Dutch pretzels have about 100 calories. Eat one a day more (workersxzcompxzkit) than calories burned and gain a pound a month; 12 pounds a year; 60 pounds in five years. Try to cut down on the high-calorie foods first, but don’t overlook the little things.

4. Although it is difficult to exercise enough to lose weight without controlling diet, some exercise can add up over time. If you are at a stable weight using diet, increasing exercise by 100 calories per day will yield 10 to 12 pounds per year loss.

5. Keeping a diary of what you eat for about a week is often helpful. Make an entry each time you eat anything — even one peanut. Write down: (1) the date and time, (2) what and about how much you ate. (It doesn’t have to be precise, a rough statement is adequate.) (3) how you felt at the time, (4) what you were doing since the last entry.

a. The time helps us figure out if there are patterns to hunger. Sometimes, for example, a light snack an hour or two before a meal quells hunger so you can eat less at mealtime and still feel comfortable.

b. What and how much helps us (1) to spot foods higher in calories than you realize and alert you to the danger and (2) to assess the overall caloric intake.

c. How you felt at the time gives clues to the reasons for eating. A person who reports waking up frequently at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. with a gnawing hunger relieved by a bowl of ice cream may have an ulcer. Treating the ulcer makes better sense than fussing about the ice cream. A person who reports feeling intense hunger, to the point of shakiness, about 11:00 a.m. or 4:00 p.m. may be experiencing reactive hypoglycemia. That can be managed without increasing caloric intake, but you need to know that’s the problem. A person who reports, “I had a standing rib roast. I wasn’t really hungry, but everybody in the group was eating the same thing,” needs better friends.

d. What you were doing since the last entry helps figure out how fast you are burning calories. As said above, it is harder to control weight effectively by increasing exercise than by limiting intake, but exercise is important to health in other ways and can help if you are also working on intake.

If you keep this type of diary, it may be best for the first week to simply record without allowing the recording to change what you do. A patient several years ago agreed to keep such a diary and she came back several weeks later 15 pounds lighter. She said she would start to eat something, then think “If I eat this, I’m going to have to write it down,” and refrained. One can’t quarrel with how it worked for her, but it can also be useful to know what the baseline is.

Do not use this information without independent verification. All state laws are different so do not implement any cost containment procedures until you have discussed them with your corporate counsel. Your individual doctor must treat medical issues. We are not giving medical advice; this is an overview of wellness topics, not medical advice.

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