This Is the Crazy Amount of Money You Can Save by Losing Weight

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If you’re overweight or obese, losing a few pounds may save you some serious cash. A new study has shown that weight loss at any age resulted in significant financial perks, with people around age 50 saving the most—an average of $36,278(!) over the course of their lifetimes.

The new research, published in Obesity, is the first to take into account not only the medical costs associated with obesity and its related diseases, but also losses in productivity at work that could be attributed to weight. This helps paint a more complete picture of the real price tag of extra pounds, according to the authors.

“People often think of obesity as an insurance issue, and they know that expensive health care problems are associated with it,” says lead author says Bruce Y. Lee, MD, executive director of the Global Obesity Prevention Center at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “But they rarely think about the full magnitude of its societal and workplace costs.”

To find these numbers, Dr. Lee and his colleagues developed a computer model to represent the U.S. adult population, and estimated lifetime health effects for people who were obese, overweight, or healthy weight at ages 20 through 80. The model simulated the health status of these three groups year by year, and tracked medical costs (to the insurer or health-care facility), productivity losses, and sick time they would likely sustain as a result of their weight.

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They found that, at every age between 20 and 80, going from one weight category to another resulted in significant cost differences. A 20-year-old who goes from obese to overweight, for example, would save an average of $17,655 over his or her lifetime. If that same person went from obese to a healthy weight, those savings would grow to about $28,020.

Middle-age adults had even more to gain: The model suggested that an obese 40-year-old could save between $18,000 and $32,000 over their lifetime by losing enough to be simply overweight or a healthy weight. Cost savings peaked at age 50, with an average total savings of more than $36,000.

The cost gap between being obese versus overweight narrowed as people aged, so that people between 50 and 80 benefited much more from moving to the healthy weight category, rather than simply moving from obese to overweight. “This emphasizes the importance of weight loss as people get older,” the study authors wrote in their paper, “for both individuals with obesity and individuals with overweight.”

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Dr. Lee says it was a bit surprising that these cost savings remained significant throughout every decade of a person’s life. “Someone might think that if they’re 80 years old and they’ve lived their entire life without losing weight, then maybe it’s not worth trying at that point,” he says. “Our study suggests that if you really want to focus on reducing costs, then it is actually still important.”

Dr. Lee points out that the productivity losses in the study were based on median wage—and that if a person makes a higher-than-average salary, they’re likely to lose even more because of obesity-related problems. “You’re essentially forfeiting potential salary, you’re going to the hospital and the doctor’s office, you’re getting too sick to work, or your life is getting cut short,” he says.

Dr. Lee hopes the research helps employers realize the importance of prioritizing their workers’ health and wellbeing. He also hopes it serves as an incentive for people who know they need to lose weight but haven’t been motivated to do so for their health alone. “Everyone is interested in trying to save money and maximize what they can do with their salary,” he says, “and this study suggests one way they can do that.”

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This Woman Dropped 175 Lbs. and Gained Confidence Along the Way: 'I'm a Completely Different Person'

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I Eat the Same Healthy Breakfast and Lunch Every Day—and Maybe You Should Too

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I’ll never be someone who loves to cook. All of my cookware comes from Goodwill, and I find the prospect of creating meals in the kitchen more annoying than exciting. Because of this, I’ve attempted to simplify my meal-planning as much as possible. For a while, that meant a lot of packaged foods—like entire meals of tortilla chips and salsa.

Over the past two months however, I’ve developed a routine that is healthy, easy, and delicious. I consume the same exact thing for breakfast and lunch every day. Yes, I can almost see all the foodies weeping at that statement. But let me explain what I eat, and why it works.

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Breakfast is a cup of black coffee and a bowl of Kashi Go Lean cereal with soy milk. For lunch, I eat one piece of whole wheat toast with avocado, hemp seed hearts, and tomato slices, topped with a fried egg. Sometimes on the weekends I switch up my lunch for something else, particularly if I’m eating out of over a friend's house. But for the most part, this is what you'll find me fueling up on twice a day.

I’m a freelance writer who works from home. As a freelancer, if I’m not working, then I’m not making money. My time is precious, and since I dislike cooking, having a go-to meal saves me time that I can dedicate to working. I always know how much time I need to spend cooking, eating, and cleaning up every day.

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This means I can plan my days a little easier. It also means I don’t have to worry about scrounging up a meal each day I work from home. There’s no time wasted or temptation to procrastinate by making a more time-intensive dish.

Eating the same thing during the workday also means that I can control my budget and my nutrition. When I do my grocery shopping, I know that I need eggs, soy milk, cereal, avocados, tomatoes, bread, and hemp seeds. I can account for that in my spending and keep myself on budget. By keeping these foods on hand, I also cut down on the temptation to eat out. I know I can whip up a healthy and delicious meal quickly, and I save the cash I might otherwise spend on eating out. 

I'm someone who can easily overeat or spend time snacking; I tend to be a grazer. But my meal routine lets me meet my caloric and nutritional needs while keeping me satiated until dinner. I know that I’m getting protein from the cereal and eggs, vitamin C and K from the tomato, omega-3’s from the hemp seeds, and fiber from the whole wheat bread. No matter what I eat for dinner, I’ve introduced these vitamins and nutrients into my diet through breakfast and lunch.

It's not just what I eat every day that helps me stay healthy—having a set time to sit down for a food break keeps my metabolism steady. I eat breakfast around 9 a.m. each day; lunch happens four hours later. By the time 1 p.m. rolls around,  I’m genuinely hungry for lunch, which in turn keeps me full until I eat dinner between 6-8 p.m.

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However, I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist. So I asked someone with a health background if it was okay to eat the same two meals every day, and why this meal-planning has worked so well for me.

Stacey Mattinson, a registered dietitian in Austin, Texas, told me that the basis of my meal plan is fine, but variety never hurts. “Nutritionally speaking, we always recommend variety,” says Mattinson. "Different foods offer different nutrition profiles. Leafy greens offer vitamin K while red or orange foods are high in beta-carotene.”

She clarified further. “Is it wrong or hurtful to eat the same thing? No, I wouldn’t say that it’s detrimental, particularly because you’re eating a different dinner and have some variety on the weekends. If you have a different source of protein for dinner—like beans or tofu—keeping the base of your breakfast and lunch the same is not a problem. You can certainly increase your nutritional quality with variety, but there’s no problem with keeping the base the same.”

She recommended adding a few different types of fruit to my breakfast for variety, or switching the vegetables I put on my toast at lunch for an extra nutritional punch. I'm open to the idea of switching in other vegetables like spinach to my egg and toast, or having a banana with my cereal. But since I don't feel the itch to change things up, I'm sticking to what works, for now.

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This Rare but Deadly Complication of Liposuction Almost Killed a Woman. Here's What Doctors Want You to Know

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Liposuction is big business: A recent study found that it was 2016’s second most popular type of plastic surgery in the United States (after breast augmentation), with an average cost per procedure of $3,200. Overall, about 235,000 fat-sucking operations were performed last year.

And while the procedure is generally safe, a new article in BMJ Case Reports highlights a complication that nearly cost one 45-year-old woman her life. The paper details doctors’ experience diagnosing and treating a patient who developed a rare but serious condition called fat embolization syndrome shortly after a routine nip and tuck.

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Fat embolization occurs when globules of fat break free from surrounding tissue and travel through the body, becoming lodged in blood vessels or the lungs and blocking the flow of blood or oxygen. It’s common after bone fractures or major trauma, but it has also been documented—at least two other times in medical literature—after liposuction.

Unfortunately, the doctors wrote in their report, the condition is “notoriously difficult to diagnose,” and many plastic surgeons don’t know that they should be on the lookout for symptoms.

In their paper, the doctors recall the case of an obese British woman who had undergone lower leg and knee liposuction two days earlier at a local hospital. “The surgery had been planned to remove some of the bulk of her lower legs to help her mobilize and subsequently begin the weight loss process,” they wrote.

The procedure itself was uneventful, and about 10 liters of fat were removed from the woman’s lower body. About 36 hours after the operation, however, the woman became drowsy and confused, and doctors noticed her heart rate was unusually high.

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The woman’s condition worsened, and she was transferred to the intensive care unit, where doctors determined she had dangerously low oxygen levels in her body. After further tests, doctors realized that her symptoms were caused by fat embolization.

Once a diagnosis was made, the woman was treated with oxygen and drugs to help restore her oxygen levels, heart rate, and breathing to normal. She recovered fully and was released from the hospital after two weeks. But if not for her doctors’ quick thinking, things could have been much worse.

Fat embolization is not only hard to recognize, say the report’s authors, but there is no standardized set of criteria to help physicians make an official diagnosis. Although liposuction is not usually considered a high-risk procedure, people who are morbidly obese, who have fluid retention, or who have large volumes of fat removed are more likely to suffer from complications, they say.

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Anyone considering liposuction or any other type of cosmetic surgery should talk with their doctor about the potential benefits and risks; it’s also important to interview surgeons carefully and choose one who’s certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery. Make sure he or she operates in an accredited hospital or medical facility. Don’t fall for non-licensed “pros” who tout cosmetic surgery on social media.

If you do choose to go under the knife, following your surgeon’s post-op instructions can help reduce your risk of dangerous complications. But as with any medical procedure, always speak up if something doesn’t feel right.

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This Woman Hit the Beach with Loose Skin After Losing 350 Pounds. Here's Her Message to the Haters

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Chrissy Metz Wishes People Would Stop Asking If She's Getting Weight-Loss Surgery: 'I'm Good'

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This article originally appeared on People.com.

Dear Dr. Google: Chrissy Metz does not need your opinion on her weight.

The This Is Us star says that the one question she wishes people would stop asking her is if she’s going to get weight loss surgery.

“Some people do feel like they’re my doctors, and they have tried to diagnose me on the internets,” Metz tells Today. “So that’s … that’s weird. Cause like, I’m good. I’m good, boo. But thanks. But I’m good [laughs].”

Metz, who plays Kate Pearson, a woman struggling with her size, on the hit show, recently explained that she is contractually obligated to lose weight for the role, but she doesn’t have a goal she has to hit.

And Metz is happier with her body than Pearson. The actress says her favorite body part is her calves.“People are like, ‘Enough. Don’t do anymore calf raises.’ But I don’t!” she says. “But I’ve come to love them and realize, like, they carry my body around. And I could probably kick some ass.”

Metz’s confident attitude extends to clothing, and she says her style heroes “are anyone who wears what they want to wear, when they want to wear it, to where they want to wear it to.”

Metz also talked to Today about her favorite emoji (all of the hearts) and her favorite purchase of late (Josie Maran's Argan Oil).

“You can use it for your legs and all your skin parts,” she explains. “And it’s delicious.”

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Part-Time Dieting Might Be the Trick to Losing Weight Successfully

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One of the first rules of dieting is that to lose weight, you have to burn off more calories than you take in. But cut back on calorie intake too much or for too long, and the body responds by going into energy-conservation mode—slowing down the rate at which those calories burn, which can counteract those good intentions.

Now, Australian researchers say they may have a way to make dieting more efficient and to keep the body’s metabolism humming along at its normal clip—which means more pounds lost (and kept off) in the long run. The secret, they say, is taking a break from dieting every few weeks.

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In their new study, published in the International Journal for Obesity, researchers from the University of Tasmania found that obese men who dieted continuously for 16 weeks lost less weight overall—20 pounds versus 31—than those whose diets followed a 2-weeks-on/2-weeks-off cycle for 30 weeks. The continuous dieters also lost less body fat than those in the intermittent group.

The intermittent dieters kept more of their weight off for the long-term, too. Six months after their diets had ended, the on-and-off group had maintained the most total weight loss since the start of the study—about 24 pounds versus only about 7.

So why did the on-again, off-again diet work so much better? The researchers think it has to do with something called adaptive thermogenesis—a process by which a person’s resting metabolism decreases when calorie intake is slashed. It’s a survival mechanism that’s helped humans stay alive during lean times (it’s sometimes called the “famine reaction”). But when an overweight person tries to lose weight, it can also work against them.

By limiting periods of calorie restriction to two weeks at a time, the authors believe they kept the famine reaction at bay—which allowed the study participants to burn more calories during those dieting periods.

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To conduct the study, the researchers provided meals during the study period. Overall, each group was assigned to 16 weeks of dieting, during which the men reduced their daily weight-maintenance calorie requirements by 33%. (On average, participants ate about 900 to 1,000 fewer calories per day during diet weeks.)

But while men in the continuous diet group stuck with their plan for 16 weeks straight, those in the intermittent group cycled on and off their diet every two weeks. During their off weeks, they ate their full caloric requirement—the number of calories required for weight to stay the same day-to-day, based on resting metabolic rate and self-reported physical activity levels.

Because of that, weight loss (or gain) during those off weeks was minimal. “Therefore, the greater weight loss in the [intermittent] group can be attributed to a higher rate of weight loss during the 8 x 2-week [energy-restriction] blocks, and not simply continual eight loss over a longer (30-week) intervention period,” the authors wrote in their paper.

Before you try the two-weeks on, two-weeks off diet strategy, though, know this: The authors were quick to point out that strict calorie-counting was also important during the non-diet weeks. Participants didn’t just eat whatever they wanted; they ate only what they needed to maintain a stable weight.

And that may be why the back-and-forth approach worked so well in this study, the authors say. In real life, taking a break from dieting could lead to an abnormally large appetite and overeating, “which may compromise weight loss,” they wrote.

They also point out that intermittent-fasting diets—programs that alternate no-holds-barred eating with several days very little or no food at all—don’t seem to work any better than continuous, steady dieting. “As such, incorporating periods of controlled energy balance, not simply variations in energy intake, may be necessary to realize the beneficial effects” of on-again, off-again dieting, they wrote.

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The study was small (32 participants completed it), and it could not determine whether two weeks on, two weeks off is an optimal pattern—just that it worked better than continuous calorie-cutting. And because the study only included men, it's unclear whether the same would be true for women. More studies are needed, the authors say, to see if this plan would still be effective outside of a tightly controlled lab setting.

Still, the authors concluded, their findings provide preliminary support for an on-and-off calorie restriction, and suggest that it may be a “superior alternative” to continuous diet plans.

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