Lifestyle: Shortcut to weight loss

Health experts have recommended weight loss as one of the ways to stay healthy so the favoured body size is now the slim, slender, thin and super modelly. What does this mean for the 21st century Ghanaian? To stay healthy, doctors have accepted a slim body as key, even though it does not necessarily mean one is optimally well.

However, in Africa, a plump figure represents success and prosperity, the opposite signifies ill health and poverty.

The entertainment world has added to the perception that staying slim is glorious. Movies, magazines, musical video clips and other modern day beauty pageants have glorified slimness and made the old concept of big look awful and unfashionable.

More people with cute and slim figures are seen on streets confident and glamourous than people who are overweight beyond what medical authorities agree as safe. In fact some people make mockery of them. The Career women in Ghana seem to have embraced the concept of slim and sleek to a worrying degree.

They are compelled to get their bodies in slimmer figures at every cost and sometimes at the risk of damaging the body. Anyways through which the modern Ghanaian woman will lose weight has become acceptable and is good news. Some women claim, their husbands continue to threaten them with divorce and girl friends with breakups if they fail to reduce their weight to a more sassy small size.

This they say is also common among women, who have just delivered and are under the effects post natal bodily changes, these women become sluggish and fat with protruding tummies. This sends most women hunting for any magic formula to shed weight.

People employ different means and strategies to lose weight, some have resorted to taking pills and food supplements, starving and drinking lime water and juice.

Others consume large quantities of coconut drink, undergo surgery and drink herbal concoctions to stay slimmer, and cute for another group vinegar, slimming tablets and any bitter substance that can burn fat is easily welcome and a relief to staying slim and cute.

Surveys by health officials have suggested weight loss is a common desire on many people’s heart, but for several others putting on weight is a sign of good living and will go all out to stay plumpy despite health authorities’ advice on being overweight.

The desire to lose weight should however not send you into the wrong hands of people who only seek to make money out of your situation. Often, they promise magical results, like you can lose 20-50kg of weight in one week or month. Quite often, women have achieved little or no results in this ambitious quest.

These therapies only land them in more serious problems. You may lose the weight, gain it back quickly because it was not done through the right way; one may even develop other medical complications as a result of the quick weight loss.

Health experts have recommended ways of losing weight with very little or no complications at all. A dietitian should be involved in getting the right amount of energy and nutrients that the body needs.

Frema Owusu Amaniampong, a medical and public health nutritionist, believes living a healthy lifestyle, eating healthy diet and replacing fizzy drinks with water and regular exercise remains one of the most effective means of losing weight.

Some are smart about the approach in choosing a healthy lifestyle. Health experts have recommended that weight loss plans should be done as and when necessary.

From all indications there is no shortcut in losing weight. You need to be committed to a cause by exercising regularly and checking your diet.