Weight Management for Lasting Health

Weight management helps service members, retirees, and their family members live their healthiest lives. Finding and maintaining a healthy weight can be challenging, but it's worth the effort.

Quality of Life

Losing even a little weight can immediately improve your health and quality of life. Being overweight or obese contributes to many serious health conditions.

• Losing just 10 pounds of weight can relieve 40 pounds of pressure on your knees.
• Obesity is often associated with other serious health conditions. 

Your healthy weight isn’t the same as everyone else. Work with your healthcare provider to set a diet and exercise plan to manage your weight.

Wellness and Weight Management

Maintaining a healthy weight takes a balance of diet and exercise. Eat a balanced diet of fruits and vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains. Limit your intake of refined foods, foods that are high in unhealthy (saturated) fats, as well as those that are high in sugar and sodium.

• A good diet isn’t just healthy and nutritious, it must be sustainable.
• Trendy or gimmicky diets can offer short-term success. You may not be able to sustain these diets, leading to long-term weight gain.
• Before you start a diet, discuss and make a plan with your healthcare provider.
• Help yourself make good food choices. Fill your grocery cart with healthy foods. If your workplace only offers junk food for snacks, bring your own nutritious snacks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends healthy adults get at least 150 minutes a week of moderate activity and at least two days a week of muscle-strengthening activity.

• Achieving an active lifestyle is more than just working out or exercising.
• Finding activities you enjoy and keeping moving throughout the day help you maintain and sustain sufficient activity levels.
• The CDC estimates that 1 in 10 premature deaths could be prevented through getting enough physical activity.

Service Member Readiness

Achieving a healthy weight enhances your mission performance and readiness. Each military service also has requirements for body mass index or body composition.

• Being over, or under, weight can make you more vulnerable to illness and result in loss of duty days due to sickness.
• All service members must be physically able and healthy enough to perform their duties.
• Effective weight management allows service members to optimize their physical, mental, and technical job performance.
• Defense Health Agency data finds that 1 in 4 service member diagnoses of obesity share a diagnosis of sleep disorders like sleep apnea or snoring.
• DHA data finds that almost 1 in 5 service member diagnoses of obesity share a diagnosis of lower back pain.
• DHA data finds that nearly half of service member diagnoses of obesity are also diagnosed with hypertension (high blood pressure), a common risk factor for stroke and heart attack. 

Finding and maintaining your healthy weight enhances your mission capability and performance.

Additional Resources for Weight Management:

• CDC About Healthy Weight and Growth page
• Department of Veterans Affairs MOVE! Weight Management Program
• U.S. Department of Agriculture Daily Nutrition Calculator Tool
• Human Performance Resources by CHAMP Warfighter Nutrition Guide
• Navy Medicine Weight Management page
• Air Force Personnel Management Center Fitness Program page