Losing weight at its most basic involves balancing your calorie intake with your exercise level. Determining your BMI, or body mass index, serves as a useful approximate measure to determine your starting point--whether you are overweight or actually obese, for example. You can then set a goal weight that falls in the healthy BMI range for your height, notes New York University's Langone Medical Center.
Expert Insight
As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates, you can use BMI as a screening tool, but it is not a diagnostic of body fat or your health. Your BMI serves mainly as a preliminary indication of a possible need to lose weight. A health care professional or fitness trainer can perform additional assessments to check your health status. If you are a muscular athlete, for example, your BMI may fall between 25 and 30, and yet your body fat percentage, which can be approximated via bioimpedance scales and skin-fold tests, may be in a safe range.
Time Frame
If you are a man 5 foot 9, or a woman 5 foot 4, which places you at the national average, a weight of 169 lbs. or more for a man or 145 lbs. or more for a woman will put your BMI in the overweight category. If you want to attain a healthy weight, you can set yourself a gradual goal of steadily losing 1 to 2 lbs. per week.
Benefits
If you are obese, which means a weight of 174 lbs. or more for a 5 foot 4 woman or 203 lbs. or more for a man, you can still begin the task of losing weight by setting a gradual goal of an overall weight loss of 5 to 10 percent. For example, a 200-lb. man who loses 5 percent of body weight, just 10 lbs., will see health benefits. Even a modest weight loss can provide you with health improvements, the CDC notes, including lower blood pressure and levels of bad cholesterol.
Considerations
The CDC recommends looking at losing weight not as part of a diet or program but as an ongoing lifestyle style including changes in eating and exercise. Reduce your daily caloric intake by 500 to 1,000 calories to achieve the goal weight loss of 1 to 2 lbs. a week. Aim for 60 to 90 minutes of moderately vigorous exercise daily, ideally alternating cardio and weight-training sessions daily, or even a bit of both, focusing on different muscle groups.
Warning
Take an especially close look at your family history or weight-related health problems if your BMI is between 25 and 30, recommends the Weight-control Information Network, or WIN, an information service of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. If you have a family history of heart disease or diabetes or you have type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, irregular menstrual periods or liver or gall bladder disease, talk to your heath care provider about ways to get your weight into a lower, healthier range. If your waist measures above 40 inches and you are male, or 35 inches and you are female, your distribution of body fat also puts you in a riskier category that indicates it's time to look closely at ways to lose fat.
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