If you are like most people you could lose a few pounds or if you are really honest with yourself 30 plus pounds. Aging well requires you to have a healthy relationship with food and exercise and to maintain a healthy weight. You have to be able to move and those extra pounds make that more difficult. So the plan to shed those pounds is to diet. The dieting world is a nightmare and all the fad diets that exist are really only short term solutions. Yes, you may lose some weight in the short term but in most cases that lost weight will find it way back home again over time. So what is the long term solution for maintaining a healthy weight? The solution is to balance the energy consumption with the energy used. In other words eat only enough to fuel the amount of energy your body burns through exercise and rest for the day. Consume more and you gain weight consume less and you lose weight. Until you have a firm grasp on what foods contain in calories you can use an online food tracker such as https://www.choosemyplate.gov/tools-supertracker
This free government tracker will shortly be shut down but there are many others available. Measuring helps you to understand what is going on and to gain more control and to make informed choices. Once you understand that to lose weight you need to burn more calories than you consume and what that means it will help to keep you moving. NEAT counts, N.E.A.T. stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. You don’t have to do to the gym to burn calories. Moving more in all ways helps so upping your NEAT will also help to balance those calories. Another reason to stop vegetating in front of the TV, but if you do, get up and move around at the commercials and no I don’t mean walk to the fridge.
For long term success exercise should be considered in the mix. Exercise is an important component in long term weight loss and keeping the excess weight off. Studies have shown that people that lose weight by diet alone will put the weight back on over 90% of the time. The weight has a better chance of remaining off if exercise is added to the regime. Additionally exercise reduces the chances of long term chronic illness such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer with or without exercise. You are healthier with exercise so find a way to include it in your weight loss plan. Measure your energy consumption against energy used and add some NEAT and exercise for long term weight loss success.