Putting Weight Loss on Your Plate
For some, the solution to obesity may be as simple as a specially painted plate.
June 28, 2007 — -- My mother used to say, "Clean your plate before you have dessert." She grew up during the Depression, and uneaten food seemed immoral.
Unfortunately, members of the clean plate club frequently do not belong to the lean weight club.
Unless the plate you eat from can help you lose weight.
A new study has evaluated the use of a plate and bowl designed to help overweight and obese patients lose weight.
In this study, published in the most recent issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. Sue Pedersen and colleagues from the University of Calgary have become the first to test a "portion-control" plate and bowl as a tool for the treatment for obesity among patients with diabetes.
And though the approach seems simple, it just might work. Patients in the study not only lost weight, but many of them were able to cut down on their diabetes medications.
Overweight-ness and obesity have become major public health problems in the United States, with a nearly threefold increase between 1960 and 2000 in the percentage of American adults who are obese. Currently, one third of American adults are overweight, a problem that is particularly common among minorities, studies indicate. Figures worldwide are also increasing dramatically.
Obesity and overweightness are defined in terms of "body mass index" (BMI), which is a ratio of one's weight to one's height. A BMI of more than 25 defines overweight, while a BMI of more than 30 defines obesity.
As an example, a person who is 5 feet 9 inches tall and weights 169 pounds (BMI=25) to 202 pounds (BMI=29.9) is considered overweight. Weight over 202 pounds for this same individual constitutes obesity.
As noted by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, a study in 2003 estimated that the combined costs of overweightness and obesity accounted for 9.1 percent of total U.S. medical expenditures in 1998 -- $92.6 billion in 2002 dollars.
On the individual level, obesity is related to a number of diseases including hypertension, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, gallbladder disease, arthritis, sleep apnea and other breathing problems.
