HEALTHY WEIGHT 4 LIFE is a self-paced weight-loss program that concentrates on four specific areas that are essential to weight loss and weight maintenance for a lifetime:
Physical activity is one of the strongest predictors of long-term weight loss.
Daily exercise burns calories and those calories are then no longer available to be stored as excess weight. Exercise is also strong “medicine.” Active people have less risk of chronic disease at any weight, improved body image and self-esteem, increased energy and greater life satisfaction. Best of all, physical activity is fun. Just witness the joy on any child’s face as they engage in active play. Healthy Weight 4 Life provides the information, tools, motivational tips, and support needed to create an active lifestyle and reclaim the energy and exuberance of a child at play.
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How does nutrition influence health? In every way possible!
Nutrition – the calories, vitamins, minerals, water and other nutrients you consume on a daily basis – provides the building blocks for your body, and influences everything from your mood to your basic bodily functions. Indeed, ‘you are what you eat’ in every sense. Therefore, the quality and quantity of the food you choose to eat on a regular basis has the potential to greatly impact your health and your life.
In America, we are both lucky and unlucky to be surrounded by so much food.
Lucky in that we have food security (enough to eat), and that we have an enormous variety of foods to choose from. We are unlucky for the very same reasons! Inundated by endless streams of food advertising, surrounded by tempting snacks, sweets, and savories, and served enormous portions when dining out, it is not surprising that so many Americans are losing the struggle with their weight. In fact, losing or maintaining a healthy weight in today’s food environment is one of the major public health challenges we face. At the same time, all the nutrition knowledge we could ever ask for is only a mouse click away. Unfortunately, separating nutrition fact from fiction and putting this knowledge into practice is not as simple.
The nutrition portion of this course strives to present information in a way that is both easy to understand and useful. We will review the basics of nutritional science in the early lessons to provide you with the fundamental knowledge you need in order to improve or optimize your eating habits. In later lessons, we will help you to evaluate your own eating habits, and make specific changes to help you to reach your weight-loss goal.
The unique Mind/Body component of this course creates an opportunity to understand how thoughts and emotions affect eating and exercise behaviors.
Assessing the personal assets and attributes that have helped a person be successful in the past in other areas of life will be explored and utilized to help them be successful in this weight-loss program. We show you how to attain the motivation needed to change behaviors and live a happy and healthy life.
Developing skills to change negative self-talk into positive supportive self-talk is crucial for enjoying the process of changing overeating behaviors to ones of health and happiness. The mind is very much connected to the body. We will examine resistances to exercise and learn to reclaim the birthright of loving to move in your own body.
We need to learn to eat based on body hunger and a healthy food plan. Yet often we eat to soothe or numb-out unwanted emotions. In this course you’ll learn how to develop skills to deal with those emotions rather than “eat” them. Sometimes daily life is full of obligations, responsibilities, and pressures. This creates stress. We have provided activities to help you examine life and your priorities and how to make room for you and your new healthy life behaviors. Learning how to handle stress in constructive supportive ways is a valuable part of these lessons.
Conditioning from environment, family, and childhood will be examined in order to help define values, needs, and SELF, and be free to change behaviors to claim personal health and happiness .
The Mind-Body connection is one of the unique aspects of this course. It will provide the opportunity needed to be successful now and for life!
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Developing social support in a weight-loss program provides valuable modeling for positive lifestyle health behavior.
The social groups from which you draw your identity (family, neighborhood, community, work associates, and informal social networks) strongly influence behavior patterns. Social networks provide important resources for changing behaviors and dealing with life stress.
An important aspect of the HW4L program is to create new social support opportunities based on healthy habits, positive role models, and the development of a supportive environment in which one can expand a health-conscious network.
Our strategy for developing on-going support involves building both intrapersonal (sense of self and how you relate to your environment) and interpersonal (how you relate to others) skills. The intrapersonal objective is to provide the motivation, values, knowledge, and skills needed to create and maintain healthy relationships and a positive outlook on life. Social support is also a valuable resource for coping with problems and stressful situations as they arise.
We will address personal wellness by focusing on the total person. We introduce the wellness model SPECIES that involves seven dimensions of health: Social, Physical, Emotional, Intellectual, Career, Environment, and Spiritual.
Positive body image and how to develop self-esteem skills are key issues examined in this course. We explore mastery living concepts … lapse, relapse strategies, mentorship training, goal-setting, and the support-group process. Awareness of how social support and cultural experience affect thought process and how you feel about yourself and your behaviors will create the opportunity to explore new thoughts, actions, and behaviors to reinforce positive change. Building social support for healthy living will empower you to live their best life.
By acquiring social support and personal wellness skills, you will acquire and maintain positive behaviors.
Valuing personal strengths while reaching out to others to improve weaknesses will help persuade one another to effect change. This also will provide social support for sustaining change for long-term weight loss and management.
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The Healthy Weight 4 Life course is based on an NIH-funded weight-loss research study conducted by The University of Arizona Departments of Nutritional Sciences and Physiology, where the majority of participants successfully lost weight and maintained that weight loss for over one year.
The wealth of information on this site will prove invaluable to professionals who wish to lead their clients on this positive weight-loss journey. Registration fee for the course is $125.
