The real story about weight management and obesity

The phrase 'You are what you eat' is much used today but it only tells us part of the story when it comes to weight management. Your weight is a balancing act between your diet, your exercise and your metabolism.

Optima–life using Firstbeat HEALTH produces easy to understand and highly visual reports that demonstrate how your exercise and your diet can influence your weight.

The weight management report will show you how your exercise has burnt off energy. This is broken down into energy utilised by burning fats and that which is produced by burning off carbohydrates. In simple terms we are looking to exercise at a level that ensures we achieve the goal of burning off fat.

If you keep a food diary the report will show you how you are shaping up when looking at the amount of calories you have eaten compared with the calories you have burned off.

Finally Firstbeat HEALTH can produce a highly motivational tool that will show you how your weight is likely to change if you continue to exercise and eat at the level recorded in the test. It also demonstrates what will happen if you change your diet.

Benefits to the practitioner

• Receive objective and very exact data on energy consumption
• Clearly see the effects of everyday activities on energy consumption
• Compare and contrast differing activities and how they match up to the energy the patient has consumed during the test time
• Explore with the patient the relationship between different training intensities and the burning of fats and carbohydrates
• Shows the patient a visual representation, in graph format, of fat burning exercise and carbohydrate burning exercise
• Develop goal orientated weight management programmes
• Use weight prediction diagnostics as a motivational tool
• Assess calorie intake and current energy expenditure to predict long term weight change

Benefits to the patient

• See for yourself in a highly visual and motivational format the real truth about the energy you are expending during 24 hours
• Understand the effect that physical activity has on energy consumption
• See visual representation of your activity and whether it is burning fat or carbohydrates
• Receive objective data about the balance between your energy intake and energy consumption
• Plot your predicted weight if you continue either as you are or if you change your diet
• Work on a long term goal orientated weight management programme based on energy intake and predicted energy expenditure

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