Figure Out Where You Stand

Do you want to lose weight or just avoid putting on more? A good way to figure this out is to check your body mass index, or BMI. (Go to www.realsimple.com/bmi for an easy calculator.) If your BMI is 25 or more, you are overweight, which means you stand an increased chance of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, arthritis, colon and breast cancer, and sleep apnea. If it's over 30, you are obese, and your risk of diabetes and high blood pressure is significant.

Those who have weight to lose must face another reality: Dropping pounds may take a while. "If you think it's going to be easy, then you're setting yourself up to fail," says Bonnie T. Jortberg, a dietitian at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, in Denver, which helps run the National Weight Control Registry. This is an ongoing study of some 4,000 people who have successfully lost at least 30 pounds and maintained their weight for at least a year. (The average registry subject has lost 68 pounds and kept it off for six years.) What these people have in common, says Jortberg, is that they have all made a commitment both to watch the amount they eat and to exercise. It's difficult for people to avoid gaining weight, let alone lose it, if they don't exercise. "Our subjects have found that you have to do both," Jortberg says.

No matter how much you have to lose, avoid the trap of longing to shrink down to fashion-model size. "Many people internalize this ideal and feel defective. It chips away at their confidence that they can control their eating," says Kelly D. Brownell, Ph.D., a psychologist who directs the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, in New Haven, Connecticut. Those successful people in the National Weight Control Registry are not all that skinny. "When you see them," says Jortberg, "you might think they have 5 or 10 pounds left to lose."