The weight loss industry in the United States is a 71 billion dollar business that reaps in huge profits with promises to help you lose large amounts of weight. While you can lose weight on any calorie-restricted diet, it’s easy to gain it all (and more) back once you return to your normal diet.
Our team at the Low Testosterone & Weight Loss Center knows that one element of weight loss that most diet plans don’t directly address is the importance of sound nutrition for achieving and maintaining a healthy weight. At our Allen, Texas, office, our expert providers help you learn how to nourish your body while you reach a weight loss goal.
Nutrient-poor foods cause inflammation
Although most diet plans concentrate on calorie-counting, it doesn’t really matter how many calories a given food has if it has no nutritional value. Similarly, a high-calorie, nutrient-dense food may help you lose weight rather than gain it.
As part of our medical weight loss program, you learn to identify foods good for your body and avoid those that trigger troublesome side effects, such as inflammation. Nutrient-poor and processed foods are among the most inflammatory.
Inflammation is part of your immune system’s response to healing wounds or fending off invaders, such as bacteria and viruses. When your body is in a chronic state of inflammation, however, you gain weight. And pain. Many diseases start with a body that’s chronically inflamed.
The first step toward providing your body with sufficient nutrients is to eliminate foods that trigger inflammation and those that are full of empty calories. That’s why we recommend you reduce or eliminate:
- Processed foods
- Sugar
- Seed oils and trans fats
- High-fructose corn syrup
- Processed meats
- Fruit juice
We encourage you to shop the perimeter of your supermarket, which is where you find the refrigerated sections full of fresh vegetables, fruits, fish, poultry, and meat. We discourage you from shopping the inner aisles, which brim with enticing packages that hide empty — and inflammatory — calories.
Nutrient-rich foods give your cells energy
You may be in the habit of eating whenever you’re hungry, but your hunger isn’t necessarily an indication that you need food. In fact, nutrient-poor foods and chronic inflammation can upset the balance of hormones that control hunger (i.e., ghrelin) and satiety (i.e., leptin).
As part of your training in a new approach to your diet and life, we teach you how to focus on satisfying your body’s need for vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients. When you eat nutrient-rich foods, you help your cells perform optimally and burn more energy. You also feel less hungry.
You may be used to diets that require you to restrict your calories and count them every meal. With medically supervised weight loss, you concentrate instead on finding and eating nutrient-dense foods that subdue, rather than trigger, inflammation and hunger, such as:
- Sweet potatoes
- High-quality meats and fish
- High-quality fats
- Fresh vegetables
- Fresh fruits
As part of your weight loss consultation, we may also perform blood tests and allergy tests that identify foods that you have sensitivities to and which could cause inflammation.
Your new diet is a diet for life
The diet you adopt to achieve your weight loss goals at Low Testosterone & Weight Loss Center isn’t a quick fix. It’s a permanent change to your lifestyle that helps you attain your initial goal of weight loss and maintain it over the long term.
We may also administer short-term medications, such as LipoSlim or MIC injections to help you lose excess weight without depriving your body of nutrients. These medications briefly accelerate your metabolism so that you can quickly burn off unneeded fat.
A healthy diet alone isn’t enough to have a healthy body, of course. As part of your customized weight loss and stable-weight plan, we devise an exercise routine that evolves as you become slimmer, fitter, and more energized.
To change your life by changing your diet to include more nutrition, call us at 469-912-2113 or use our online form to book a weight loss consultation.