Final Health Systems, Essay Example

Summary

The journal article is based on the weight management of obese people as well as focuses on the efforts made by healthy people to maintain their health. The main objective of this study is 2to find adequate and reliable weight loss strategies. Motivation plays a big role in determining the patience level of the participants. As described earlier, there were 4000 participants, between the age of 44 and 49 who were mostly white women, and some men. One of the purposes of Dr Rena Wing 2003, a behavioral psychologist at Brown University was to obtain data from self-reports of participants, observe their mood swings and behavioral changes and its effects on the participants lifestyle.

Overall, 89% of the registry participants used both diet and physical activity to lose weight, 10% used diet only, and 1% used exercise alone. Questionnaire forms were used to determine correct amount of food intake, which provided data collection of usual diet, which was approximately eating four to five times a day, 1300 to 1500 calories per day, of which 23% to 24% come from fat. Following their healthy diet, exercise brought the mean energy to 2500kcal/week for women and 3300kcal/week for men, with the time limit of 60 to 90 minutes of intense physical activity (Hill and Wing 5). Physical activity like aerobics, swimming, biking, walking contributed to a substantial weight loss, almost 1100 to 1200 steps per day in quantity however, only 9% of the participants reported normal weight loss without the physical activity. The overall results clearly reported that 95% of the participants had improved their lifestyle after weight loss (Hill and Wing 6).

Article Critique

The topic here is healthy weight management. The author states that most of the participants lose and maintained long term weight loss using both diet and physical activity, and the group of people who were observed had different past experiences with weight loss attempts.

As the title suggests that weight management is of significant importance in today’s world, and to follow a healthy diet requires good physical activity. In my viewpoint, this is a very interesting topic because it opens up avenues for obese and overweight people to peek thru their lifestyles and convert them into healthy and positive ones. Obesity is harmful for people as it contributes to heart disease, blood pressure, cholesterol and so on. My uncle had an obesity problem, which also led to high cholesterol levels. His routine was skipping breakfast meals everyday and eating late night, and eating out most of the time. My dad advised him to start having proper breakfast and start working out at least 30 minutes every day. At first, he hesitated, but after having several visits to the doctor, he finally joined the gym and started having his breakfast. Within a few months, my uncle’s health has improved dramatically.

The questionnaire forms were a good idea suggested by the NWCR (2003), which improved the data collection for helping future obese people. The study of the weight loss management here could have been improved by providing more detailed diet plans, staying on track with different workouts like cardio, running and brisk walking, which I think were missing from the research content.  The quantitative analysis are fabulous as they indicate numeric values in the database as to how many people actually performed well with or without the workout, and how many people took high calorie food, as well as what is the approximate time to perform physical activity. I agree with the author’s determination to introduce such a good strategy to us.

References

Hill and Wing. “Health Systems”. The National Weight Control Registry 7. 3 (2003): 7. Web. 23^rd April, 2012  http://xnet.kp.org/permanentejournal/sum03/registry.html