A NYC Chiropractor Explains The Basics of Weight Loss

Maintaining an ideal body weight and a healthy body fat composition is essential to the restoration and maintenance of efficient bodily function and overall health. Excessive weight load, especially around the midsection, has been correlated with an increased risk of certain disease later in life. Our sedentary lifestyles, coupled with our overindulgence in highly processed and refined foods, have created an obesity epidemic in this country. Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity are rampant. Obesity, Now more then ever, is affecting our children at a far greater rate then ever before. With that being said it is often the aesthetic component of weight loss that attracts us to ‘fad’ diets, which promise a quick fix to a longstanding problem.

On that note, I would like to start off with a brief definition of a common English word. Insanity: continuing to do the same thing, over and over again, yet expecting a different outcome. Hence, it stands to reason that the only effective solution to health and weight loss, long-term weight loss, is to begin to make longstanding lifestyle changes that are conducive to your goals. Otherwise you are just choosing to get onto a roller coaster ride that will never end. You don’t want to be constantly struggling with your weight as it goes up and then down, up and then down, just like a roller coaster, do you?

Fad diets feed on your emotions and your desire to be thin or look a certain way. Don’t be fooled by these emotionally driven ads that mislead you.

Losing weight, and keeping it off, is not accomplished through quick fix or ‘fad’ diets and usually creates what we like to call ‘yo-yo’ dieters. Yo-yo dieters are people who are constantly dieting yet never seem to lose, or keep the weight off. One of the main problems with yo-yo dieting is that it generally causes a steady and gradual increase in the individuals’ body fat percentage. The reason this happens is because when we diet we usually lose a combination of both lean muscle and body fat but when we gain the weight back we usually only gain back fat because muscle is much harder to gain, and maintain.

Not only is this practice detrimental to your body weight but it also begins to ad undue stress on your organ systems as a result of the volatile changes in weight. With that being said it’s also not uncommon to see these people also feeling depressed or unhappy. With so much volatility of body weight, and physiological function, it stands to reason that the average individual will begin to be affected by the emotional frustration this type of scenario creates. If your body is not well how can the mind be? It can’t.

It goes without saying that the most efficient form of weight loss is one where we are able to conserve all, or almost all, of our lean muscle tissue while achieving a steady reduction in body fat, and body fat percentage over all. This is best accomplished through a balanced combination of guided and sensible nutrition and exercise.


Dr. Noam Sadovnik is a Clinical Nutritionist and Chiropractor in New York City and practices Integrative Chiropractic. Dr. Sadovnik gives New York City resident’s a holistic approach to health and wellness and integrates nutrition as a compliment to his pain management services for back, neck and other forms of body pains.