Controlling weight involves balancing calories and eating the right amount to fuel your body. This includes avoiding yo-yo dieting and finding ways to manage cravings.

Psychologists often work with individuals struggling to maintain a healthy weight. This may be as part of their private practice or in a hospital or other health care setting.

Exercise

Exercise is an important part of a healthy lifestyle, regardless of your weight. Whether you participate in team sports, take a jog or dance, all physical activity helps you burn calories. Exercising can also reduce your risk for certain diseases, improve your mood and increase strength and flexibility. However, it is important to know what types of exercises are best for your body. A doctor can recommend specific exercises that will work well for you. Regular exercise also requires consistency. Trying to exercise once or twice a week won’t give you the comprehensive results you need to control your weight.

Reduce Screen Time

The time you spend watching TV, using computers or playing video games is often time that could be better spent being physically active. Studies show that excessive screen time is associated with sedentary behaviors, unfavorable dietary habits and disrupted sleep.

Children who watch TV and play video games have less time for physical activities and are more likely to be overweight. Exposure to media violence may also desensitize children to the seriousness of violent behavior and teach them that it is a normal way to solve problems.

Limiting screen time is important for everyone, but it’s especially important for kids and teens. Start by monitoring your family’s total screen time (TV, DVD, computer and handheld electronic devices) and setting a goal to reduce it.

Watch Portion Sizes

Portion sizes are an important element of a healthy diet, as they help people stay within their daily energy needs and avoid overeating. While there are many tools available to measure portions, such as food scales or measuring cups, people can also learn portion sizes by comparing them to everyday objects like their hand. The palm of one’s hand can be used to measure servings of protein, while a fist can be used to determine the size of carbohydrate servings. A thumb and fingers can be used to measure servings of salad dressing, oil or nut butter.

Increasing awareness about how much they are eating can help people tune into their internal hunger and fullness cues, which in turn can reduce overeating and support weight loss.

Manage Stress

Stress may be one of the most significant barriers to healthy eating and exercise. It raises the hormone cortisol, which makes your body store fat for energy and changes your immune system. It also messes with the endocrine system, raising adrenaline and decreasing the hormone leptin (which signals satiety). Stress can increase cravings for fatty, sugary foods and reduce your appetite for nutrient-rich ones.

Learning to manage stress, whether through meditation, yoga or even a quick walk in the park, can help you control your weight. Similarly, if your stress comes from taking on too much at home or work, try to learn how to say no and ask for help. Seeing a counselor or psychologist could be helpful as well, depending on the source of your stress.

Some researchers use existing scales that fit their construct and domain, some modify a published scale for a new study, and others develop their own. When utilizing an existing scale, it is important to identify the type of scale used (see Table 3), validate the scale with appropriate procedures (see Table 5), and report exactly how it was deployed.

Definition

In math, scale is a ratio that compares corresponding sides of two figures. This concept is also applied to models, maps, blueprints and the scale you weigh yourself on. Ratios are all around us, but some are more obvious than others, such as the scale on a map or blueprint or the ratio of ingredients when making cement.

Scale is also the set of tones that forms a musical mode. The most common scale is the diatonic scale, but there are many different scales used in music throughout the world. Each scale has a characteristic interval pattern and a specific starting point (or tonic) note.

The term “scale” can also refer to any thin, platelike piece or lamina that peels away from a surface, as from the skin. It can also mean the flat, horny plates that form the covering of some animals, as snakes or lizards. Finally, it can be used to describe a system of compensation, such as pay scales for actors or musicians.

Origin

Historically, scales have been developed in order to improve the accuracy of measurement. They were largely developed through trial and error, with inventors such as Leonardo da Vinci lending their hand to the development.

Scales also play an important role in the analysis of music from nonliterate cultures and folk music. However, their function as theoretical concepts is more prominent in the music of highly sophisticated cultures (variously described as art music, classical music, cultivated music or high culture music).

Musical scales are often taught to students as part of their formal instruction. They may be learned intuitively through experience or taught explicitly using written music theory. Some scales can be identified by their constituent intervals, such as being hemitonic or cohemitonic. Alternatively, they can be recognized by the repetition of characteristic melodic motives, such as the tumbling strains described by Curt Sachs in the singing of Australian Aboriginal peoples. This can help distinguish different types of scales even when they are sung at the same pitch level.

Types

There are four different types of scale: nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio. These classifications describe the level of information recorded within a variable and influence what kind of statistical analyses you can perform on your data.

A nominal scale has categories that you can name and doesn’t have a natural order, such as gender, college major or blood type. It’s the simplest form of measurement and can be used to categorize or label observations. You can either leave these labels as they are or you can code them to identify the groups you want to compare.

An interval scale is a step up from nominal. It allows you to rank your observations in an ordered way and also lets you add or subtract them. You can think of intervals like the temperature in Celsius and Fahrenheit, credit scores and SAT test results. It’s also possible to use ratios on an interval scale, such as when rating someone’s response time, like Amar took 2.3 seconds longer than Becky did.

Applications

Scalable apps provide a high-quality user experience and prevent performance issues that can degrade brand trust. They also ensure that applications can accommodate growth without sacrificing performance or adding complexity.

A scale drawing can make it easier to interpret complex objects and structures, such as blueprints or machinery. It can also help architects, machine-makers and designers work with models of objects that are too large to hold. A map scale shows the relative size of geographic features, such as mountains and rivers, by using a ratio. Many maps include both verbal and representative fraction (RF) scales.

There are several ways to make an application more scalable, such as adding more CPUs or increasing memory limits. However, these methods increase the overall speed of the application but don’t address problems that arise from complex interactions between different parts of the software. A better approach is horizontal scaling, which involves distributing workloads across multiple machines in the same cluster.