A new book by York Professor Emeritus Roger Kelton explains the relationship between weight control (body fat reduction), diet and physical activity in an easily understood manner.
THinsight: How To Make Dieting Work explores the links between increased physical activity and health, fitness and disease prevention, with special emphasis on obesity health risks, particularly diabetes. It is available in print or digital format from Amazon Books.
“The book is designed to provide concise ‘insight’ into why body weight reduction and dieting is so difficult and mostly results in failure; and how a slow, progressive and common sense approach will result in positive outcomes,” said Kelton. “I see the book helpful for individuals frustrated for years with attempts at body fat reduction, and for health professionals such as doctors, chiropractors, physiotherapists, personal trainers and kinesiologists as a resource for patients and clients.”
Dieting, said Kelton, is the most effective means to reduce body fat, yet dieting has an abysmal weight loss success rate. Body fat accumulates slowly, yet the expectation is weight can be lost quickly.
A person’s body physiology, and mind, will resist efforts at fast weight loss, he says, and the focus should be upon reducing body fat, not weight in at a moderate rate.
Physical activity, which may or may not include exercise, is the body energy output which off-sets food energy input; it must be part of the solution.
Kelton joined York University in 1970 to help develop a physical education program designed for and taken by approximately 100 undergraduate students. Over the decades, the program changed to Kinesiology and Health Science with more than 2,700 undergraduate, and 150 graduate students enrolled.
Kelton also developed human anatomy and human nutrition courses, and an outdoor education practicum program. He served several times as undergraduate director, and during his last 10 years as Chair. He retired in 2008, but came back in post-retirement to teach human anatomy and serve as undergraduate director for a year.