If you’re fat, then you must be sick too, right? After all, countless studies have found associations between higher body mass index (BMI) and risk of disease (death too!) In fact, obesity has been linked to at least 20 diseases including diabetes, hypertension cardiovascular disease and even cancer. But why is it that some people are obese but not unhealthy? How do we explain this seeming paradox? Can you improve your health while you’re still overweight? And if you’re fat but healthy, should you bother losing weight at all? Hmmm… interesting questions… and I have answers!

After you succeed at burning off the fat, what then? How are you going to maintain your new body? What does your next set of 12 week, 6 month and 12 month goals look like? What’s your next fitness challenge? What’s going to keep you interested in training? How do you plan to stay motivated? What will prevent you from slipping back into old patterns?

Guest Blog by Jamie Hale. The late Robert C. Atkins is the author of Atkins’ New Diet Revolution.  Atkins is also the founder and former director of the Atkins Complimentary Medicine in New York City.  The diet is a low carbohydrate high fat diet with no restrictions on fat intake.  The diet begins with

Numerous studies, many conducted just in the past year, have provided convincing evidence that lack of sleep is a risk factor for fat gain and obesity. A new study from Finland published in the International Journal of Obesity revealed that various types of sleep problems such as difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, were also associated with obesity. In a new development, this effect appeared in women, but not in men. More on that in a minute, but first a recap of what the research has told us so far…

At the rate we’re going this year, it doesn’t matter whether Punxsatawney Phil saw his shadow or not… this winter has been like something out of “The Day After Tomorrow” and shows no signs of letting up… A December Blizzard with over a foot and a half of snow, a January Nor’easter that dumped another foot, several lesser storms in between, bitter cold temperatures, and this morning In February, we woke up to an ice storm, with sidewalks of slush and streets as slick as skating rinks. Anyway, I was reading a news story this morning about the Famous Pennsylvania groundhog, and that got me thinking… For most people, weight loss is a lot like groundhog day…

Fat loss plateaus and lack of progress are always frustrating. What makes it utterly maddening is when you feel like you’re putting in a superhuman effort in the gym and reducing calories, but still making no progress. At this point, I usually see two unfortunate things happen: The first is a knee-jerk “blame the fat on something else” reaction. Usually, bad genetics or a thyroid problem… but whatever it is, it’s definitely “not your fault.” The second is the tendency to deny the calories in versus calories out equation. “I’m hardly eating anything and I’m not losing weight, so it CAN’T be calories, it MUST be something else!” Carbs are the usual scapegoat.

Since this is the first Burn the Fat Blog post of the year, I sat down today with the intention of writing a list of the top 10 fat loss tips for 2011, based on everything that we’ve learned from the accumulated experience and new research from the past few years. But as I started writing about tip number one, it dawned on me that this one point was so important that it deserved to be highlighted in a post of its own. (I’ll come back to the rest of the tips later). This is the one absolute requirement for weight loss, and it’s something you’ve heard of before. However, there’s one critical distinction about this familiar advice that you might not have considered – and this 1 thing makes all the difference in the world…

The most controversial weight loss story on the web this week: Mark Haub, a nutrition professor from Kansas State University, lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks on a “convenience store diet” with at least two-thirds of his food consisting of Twinkies, Little Debbie Snacks, Doritos, Sugary Cereals and Oreos. The rest of his intake included some vegetables, protein drinks and a multi-vitamin. The weight loss wasn’t surprising, since he limited himself to 1800 calories per day on his “Twinkie diet,” which was part of a class experiment. What surprised most people was that his health indicators (HDL cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, triglyceride) got better, not worse. What now? Should we trade in our fruits and veggies for ding dongs?

You’ve heard of the “See-Food” diet haven’t you? No, that’s not the diet where you load up on fish, lobster, crab and mussels. The See-Food Diet is the one that so many of us crack jokes about – it’s the diet where you eat everything in sight! But don’t laugh too hard. Scientists at Cornell University and other research institutions have proven that you actually WILL eat more food if you see food more. In fact, if you can see it and it’s within arm’s reach, you could eat yourself obese within a few years and not even know what hit you because the eating happens unconsciously.

Have you ever had a weight loss expert tell you to “throw away your scale”?… or maybe you heard that too much focus on scale weight can turn you into an obsessive-compulsive (sound familiar?) Well… body composition is more important than body weight – you won’t get any argument from me about THAT. But… what if I told you that research supports a strong correlation between daily weigh-ins and long term weight loss success? Yes, I said DAILY weigh-ins. Do you think that’s crazy, or could this habit be something that might help you increase your fat loss success? This week’s Burn the Fat Blog Q & A column answers…