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health advisory Diet Diet 2007-11-11 21:04:39

I was born w/ Spina Bifida. It is a birth defect that causes my spinal column to not be fully formed. As a result of this everything past my waist does not work. Most exercises require the use of your legs, what can I do?

Answer:

I do not know if you are into sports but I helped out with a Wheelchair basketball team this past year. Mostly all the players has spina bifida or some disability. It was the most amazing thing to watch. Most of the players were not able use there legs and actually it is a rule in the wheelchair basketball legs can not be used. This helped with upper body movement and some of the team had no movement in one of there arms...which forces them to work more the other part of their body. Maybe try basketball. It is a lot of fun.

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Work mostly on your upper body but you can also lose weight with mostly diet improvements. You'll just need to cut calories more drastically if you can't increase the amount of calories you burn.

Losing weight is a simple equation: if you burn more calories than you eat, the weight will come off. Start off by estimating how many calories you burn each day using the calorie calculator http://straighthealth.com/pages/tools/ca... This will give you an idea of how many calories to eat. Healthy weight loss is 1-2 pounds per week. To lose 1 pound per week you need to create a calorie deficit (burn more than you eat) of 500 calories per day. To lose 2 pounds a week, you have to double the deficit to 1000 calories per day. You can achieve this by eating less, exercising more or a combination of both. For more information on diet, weight loss and exercise, visit http://straighthealth.com