Successful Weight Loss

Of course everyone knows, eat less, exercise more, but research can now help us with more specific instructions.

1. * DON’T DIET
   If you think of a diet as something you’ll be stopping after you’ve lost weight, then you are almost guaranteed to gain it all back.

2. * Eat more FIBER
   Foods that are high in fiber are also generally low in calories, so a high fiber diet often means a lower calorie diet. A recent discovery is that fiber slows down the body’s absorption of sugar. The slower the body absorbs sugar, the less of the heavyweight hormone insulin your body makes. So fiber can promote weight loss by helping to maintain lower insulin levels. Aim for at least 30 grams of dietary fiber daily.

3. * Pass on SUGAR
   Well, it’s certainly not news that sweets can make you fat. We all know that too many desserts, cakes, cookies, candies and the like will pack on extra weight like nothing else. But what is news are the hidden sources of sugar in our diets – those foods that our bodies immediately turn into sugar, as if we had eaten sugar itself. One common example is alcohol – our bodies can turn alcohol into sugar in one easy step. This is the reason, of course, that a drink often serves as an “appetizer” to stimulate appetite. The same is true of refined grains and starchy carbohydrates, such as found in bread, pasta, rice, potatoes and cereals. Our bodies can convert these foods to sugar very quickly. As a result, our bodies make even more of the storage hormone insulin, which slows our metabolism and helps pack on the weight. It’s no surprise that restaurants often serve bread and wine before a meal to boost appetite and make the meal more enticing. By reducing our intake of foods containing or converted quickly to sugar, we can keep our insulin levels low and supercharge our metabolism.

4. * Boost your metabolism.
   There is only one proven and safe way to make this happen – exercise! A combination of aerobic and strengthening exercises works best to increase your body’ metabolic rate. Aim for 5 days of aerobic exercise and 2 days of strength training weekly.

5. * Don’t eat fast food or food fast
   Besides being extremely high in fat (and the wrong kind of fat), fast food is just what it’s billed as – fast. Our bodies require the full benefit of time to digest and absorb the necessary nutrients. If time is an issue, instead of grabbing fast food for lunch, try going to a restaurant that has a high quality salad bar, and you’ll have the extra time needed to adequately digest your food without leading to weight gain.

6. * Move around more during the day.
   Of course, we all know that exercise promotes weight loss by burning more calories. But what’s new is that even activities that are not considered “exercise” can also burn significant calories. Recent studies have shown that such simple “non-exercise” activities such as “fidgeting” or chewing gum (unsweetened) can produce sustained and meaningful weight loss. Increasing physical activities in other ways such as using the stairs instead of elevators, parking farther away from the office, or using a bathroom farther away from your desk will also help to burn additional calories during the day and will further enhance weight loss.

7. * Don’t eat late at night.
   We recommend refraining from eating after dinnertime, and shifting your intake of calories to earlier in the day, while spreading out your calories over the day more evenly, to avoid large surges of blood sugar and insulin late in the day. This improves both metabolism and insulin sensitivity.

8. * Include protein at breakfast.
   Most American breakfast foods are simply sources of sugar – sugar-added breakfast cereals, refined grains, muffins, bagels, toast, donuts, waffles, pancakes, croissants – these foods will produce a large early morning surge in insulin that sets us up for weight gain the rest of the day. Eating protein for breakfast is more satisfying and you will eat less the rest of the day.

9. * Don’t eat under stress
   Yes, stress can make you fat! When we are under stress, our adrenal glands boost their output of cortisol, our natural “stress hormone” that allows our bodies to adapt to stress. Too much cortisol can interfere with our bodies’ metabolism. Chronic stress will therefore lead to weight gain through the overactivity of the adrenal glands. Stress reduction techniques such as exercise, meditation, yoga and breathing exercises will help to reduce the levels of cortisol and will help promote weight loss.

10. * Before eating, ask yourself if you are hungry
    If we just ate when we were hungry, a lot fewer of us would be overweight. Unfortunately, we tend to eat not just when we’re hungry, but when we’re nervous, anxious, under stress, angry, to soothe ourselves, or when we see something that we can’t resist. By being mindful of the motivations behind our eating, we will discover the many reasons other than hunger that lead us to overeat. By identifying these non-hunger motivations, we may be able to make choices that satisfy our needs and desires other than eating.

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The book is a must read for your health: Ultra Prevention

KATHI