USA Today has reviewed the new book written by Dr. George L. Blackburn, associate director of the division of nutrition at Harvard Medical School, titled Break Through Your Set Point: How to Finally Lose the Weight You Want and Keep it Off", written with Julie Corliss (Collins Publisher) on p. 8D April 3 2008. In the USA Today article, titled "Set yourself up for diet success," Nanci Hellmich tells us that Dr. Blackburn suggests that if we want to lose weight, we should follow the "10% rule." According to this rule, we should lose 10% of our body weight and then just stop for awhile and keep our weight at our new level. This process, Dr. Blackburn tells us, allows our body to adjust to its new "set point", which
"is the weight that the body has established as normal, and the body has mechanisms that fight to return to that weight."
Even a weight drop of 10% helps blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes risk, improves sleep, helps breathing, adds energy, reduces fatigue, reduces need for medications--all benefits of a modest weight loss I have read about before in other sources but which Dr. Blackborn reinforces here. An obesity expert at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Thomas Wadden, endorses Dr. Blackburn's advice indicating that such advice "is as good as it gets," and "the first 10% is the most important weight you can lose."
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