Our Gallery
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| Here is what can be happening to you. Since we have just opened our practice in Las Cruces, these are not our patients, but we will replace these photos with our patients as time goes by. |
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| Why Do I Weigh Too Much? |
It really IS a matter of the difference between calories eaten, and calories used.
Every day, we eat. We must eat to survive. Unfortunately, we often eat more than we need to survive and to do our daily activities. This is why we gain weight! Food is plentiful. The food industry is in business to sell food, so they have learned how to prepare it to taste good and to feel good in our mouth. They have added sugar, salt and fat to their processed foods, even disguising the labeling so that we often cannot recognize that we are eating too much sugar, fat and salt. Fast foods are prepared to delight our every sense, to be readily available, and to be inexpensive. They are high in calories, large in portion size and generally lacking in good nutrient value. We are inundated with food advertising, and misleading statements, designed to trigger our desire fore satisfaction by eating! We eat too much!!!!!
Foods high in sugars are quickly satisfying, and quickly absorbed. This leads to the desire to eat something else also high in sugar soon after completing our high sugar meals.
Our appetite for liquid refreshments is no better. Soda pop was introduced last century in 6 ounce bottles. In fast food restaurants today, the small size exceeds 12 ounces, and the large size often is 24 ounces or more. Sweetened by sugar, this supplies over 250 calories in sugar alone!
In recent years, portion size has grown like a cancer! Hamburgers have gone from 1/6 ounce to ¼ ounce and now it is not uncommon to see ½ pound hamburgers. Dinner plates have grown from 7” to 8” and now are 10” plates. All this influences portion size and calories placed before us every day.
It is no wonder that we gain weight.
To add to this, we have reduced our activity. More TV, more computer use and video gaming has reduced us to a population of couch potatoes, devoid of the previous calorie expenditure associated with outdoor activities like bicycling, hiking, camping, and participation sports.
Calorie expenditure can be divided into three segments: calories we burn to stay alive and warm, usually about 65% of daily calorie expenditure; calories we burn to eat and digest our food, about 10%, leaving 25% for our daily activities. It is the latter that can be affected by increasing our exercise and by doing more walking every day. This is the reason that exercise is an essential part of any weight management effort. We cannot alter our metabolism, and when we eat less we need less energy to digest our food. Therefore, it is mandatory that we get off the couch, turn off the TV and become more active, to assist our reduced eating, and to maintain our lost weight.
We MUST become more active to maintain weight loss. |
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