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| Global Obesity Battle: What You Eat and How You Think |
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Los Angeles resident Kathleen Mulcahy has been fighting with her weight for 55 years.
"My parents had a baby, a son, and he died at birth.
I was 7, and I think that was the time I started gaining weight.
My mother died when I was 12, and then my weight just escalated."
She is not alone.
A growing number of people are overweight or obese particularly in urban areas worldwide, including developing countries.
"Fast foods, transnational corporations, soft drink companies going into these developing countries are having a very huge influence on the overweight and obesity epidemic, because they are adding calories and processed foods, salt and sugar into the diet that these people have not normally been eating."
People's lifestyles are also changing in developing countries.
"As people urbanize and make more money and have more sedentary lives, they're also putting on weight and following the pattern of the United States."
While fad diets may help with quick weight loss, keeping off the weight is more of a challenge.
"At sustaining that weight loss, the studies overwhelmingly show that plant-based diets are good long term."
Instead of focusing on what you eat, Solomon helps people maintain weight loss by working with the mind to change a person's eating behavior.
She helps her clients like Mulcahy be more self-aware by having them write down everything they eat, before they eat.
"That awareness, that sense of conscientiousness, becomes more powerful than the immediate gratification of food.
But you have to learn it.
It has to become a habit."
It worked for Mulcahy, who has sustained her current weight for almost three years.
Maintaining a healthy weight not only helps for the positive self-image, but it will also fend off health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, and even some forms of cancer.
Elizabeth Lee, VOA News, Los Angeles
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