4 Ways Weight Loss Improves Hip Health
Overview
Maintaining a healthy weight is essential for overall well-being. Strong, pain-free hips allow you to move freely and enjoy daily activities without discomfort. Here are four ways weight loss will improve your hip health, along with steps to achieve and maintain a healthy weight.
1. Reduces Pressure on Hips
Carrying extra weight will put additional stress right on your hips. This increased pressure will lead to pain and accelerate the wear and tear of the hip joints. Over time, this stress may contribute to conditions like osteoarthritis, a joint disease that causes the cartilage in your hips to break down.
How Weight Loss Helps:
Losing weight helps directly lighten the load on your hips. By supporting less weight, the hips experience less strain, relieving any potential joint damage while making all the movements more manageable and comfortable. By relieving pressure off these joints, weight loss also contributes to maintaining overall joint health for easier and more enjoyable movement.
2. Improves Mobility
Excess weight makes movement more challenging. Activities such as walking, climbing stairs, or even standing for extended periods will be difficult. Limited mobility will affect your quality of life and lead to a more sedentary lifestyle, which further impacts your health.
How Weight Loss Helps:
Excess of anything is always bad, and because losing weight improves mobility means you are now free to engage in daily activities with absolutely no discomfort and also are free to enjoy life.
3. Strengthen Your Muscles
Weight loss requires adopting a healthier lifestyle, including regular physical activity. Strengthening the muscles surrounding your hips is vital for protecting the joint of the hip.
How Weight Loss Helps:
By engaging in regular exercise and losing weight, your hip muscles become stronger. Strengthened muscle supports your hip joints more effectively, decreasing strains and injuries more frequently. In addition, strong muscles provide better posture and balance for overall hip health as well as to prevent falls.
4. Lowers Inflammation
Excess adipose (fat) tissue can produce inflammatory substances called cytokines and adipokines, which promote a state of low-grade, chronic inflammation in the body. Conditions like bursitis and tendonitis involve inflammation of the hip tissues, which are common with excess weight. This does not mean everyone with extra body fat will experience obvious inflammatory symptoms, but it does raise overall systemic inflammation levels.
How Weight Loss Helps:
Losing excess weight can help reduce inflammation in the body because fat cells produce substances that contribute to chronic inflammation. As inflammation goes down, people often experience less pain and stiffness, especially in weight-bearing joints like the hips and knees.
Weight Loss Tips
Achieving and maintaining a healthy weight through diet, exercise, and lifestyle modifications is not always straightforward, here are some steps that may help you reach your weight loss goals and enhance hip health:
Eat a Balanced Diet
Overeating is not good, specially in the middle when improving hip health is the priority. So, take a balanced diet to improve hip health.
Stay Active
Engage in regular physical activities such as walking, swimming, or cycling. Begin your day with some light yoga. Aim for at least 30 minutes of exercise most days of the week. Include both cardiovascular exercises and strength training to build muscle and burn calories.
Monitor Portions
Creating a full diet plan is essential to lose weight. Check out our recent blog about nutrition to create a diet plan.
Stay Hydrated
Drink plenty of water throughout your day and switch out sugary drinks for water, herbal teas, or other zero-cal beverages to stay hydrated and control hunger while supporting body functions. Staying hydrated will also help improve memory retention!
Get Enough Sleep
Aim for 7-9 hours of quality sleep each night. Establish a regular sleep schedule by going to bed and waking up at the same time each day. Good sleep supports weight loss by regulating hormones that control hunger and metabolism.
Set Realistic Goals
Aiming for shorter and more realistic goals and then breaking them into smaller steps will let you celebrate your progress toward a positive mindset.
Seek Support
Share your weight loss goals with friends or family members for encouragement. Consider joining a weight loss group or working with a dietitian or personal trainer. Having support will help you stay accountable and overcome challenges.
Takeaways
Weight loss will significantly improve your hip health by relieving pressure off of the joints, increasing mobility, strengthening muscles, and decreasing inflammation. Make sure to also follow the above tips to improve your overall body weight and health.