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Interview with Dr. Alexandra Sowa

Dr. Alexandra Sowa is a board-certified physician of internal medicine and obesity medicine specialist.  She is the founder of SoWell Health, a membership weight-loss and metabolic wellness practice in NYC.  She is also a clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health.

After years of helping patients manage complex diseases like diabetes and coronary artery disease, Dr. Sowa started to envision a practice that provided a proactive, holistic, and multi-disciplinary approach to weight-loss and health.  SoWell Health uniquely combines medicine, nutrition, lifestyle and accountability to help patients achieve their health goals safely and sustainably.

You can learn more about Dr. Alexandra Sowa and SoWell Health at www.getsowell.com and on Instagram or Facebook @AlexandraSowaMD.

Why Weight Regain isn’t Your Fault

Weight regain can happen so quickly it feels like your head spins. You spent so much time and effort getting the weight off, so why does it come back so easily? There are many reasons why this happens and to truly understand it, we have to look at what our body does when we lose weight.

Losing weight results in your metabolism lowering so you use less energy in your normal activities. Some of this is in response to eating less and your body adjusting but some is also just normal physics of your body carrying less weight through your normal activities.

Well that’s not fair. What do we do about it?

The good news is that all is not lost!

There are some tools you can use to help with weight maintenance.

Be Nice

First things first… If you have lost weight and have regained some, all or more than you lost, the very first thing you need to do is stop beating yourself up about the weight gain. I am going to repeat that because it is so important. Stop beating yourself up about weight regain. It never ever helps you lose more weight. In fact, carrying a lot of shame and guilt about regaining weight will result in it being harder to get back on track and stabilize the weight regain.

What You Eat Might Matter

There is some evidence that losing weight using a lower carb approach may lower your metabolism less than losing it with a lower fat way of eating. So eating a lower carb approach may make it easier to maintain your weight loss.

Record Your Food

Keeping a food diary is a tool that many people who have lost weight and successfully maintain it use. Writing down what you eat helps bring awareness to your eating and gives you data to evaluate what is working and what isn’t. If you start regaining weight but don’t know exactly what you have been eating, it can be harder to problem solve what is causing the weight gain.

Let’s pause for a moment and talk about what food diaries are good for and what they don’t do. This is important because a lot of people make food journalling mean so much more than it actually does and it ends up making them not continue.

Food diaries are a great source of data about what you have been doing and what results those actions are creating in that specific moment of time.

Food diaries are NOT a mode of judging success or failure. They do not measure self worth. All they do is collect objective data about what you have eaten on a particular day.

Weigh Yourself Regularly

Keeping an eye on your weight on a regular basis is an important tool too. However, it is important that the scale is viewed as data just like the food journal. All a scale tells you is your gravitational pull on earth at a specific moment in time.

All that stuff I just said about food journals? Applies to stepping on the scale too. The scale does not define you. If you let it have that power, it will almost certainly create road blocks in your weight loss journey.

Move Your Body

Exercise as a weight loss tool does not have a lot of evidence behind it. It really isn’t that great at getting us to lose weight more quickly. However, there is more evidence for exercise helping with weight maintenance. It can help counteract some of the metabolism changes that occur with a weight loss.

Plus, it feels good and is good for so many other aspects of your health!

Find a form of moving your body that feels good and works for your life and prioritize it.

 

 

Train Your Biggest Tool

Your brain is your biggest tool for lasting weight loss. Weight Solutions for Physicians private coaching takes you from struggling with the Yo-Yo to being able to stick to a plan and managing your weight without depending on willpower.

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