Slimming Down - Fast!

While you’re busy wishing that your body was more like Brad Pitt’s or Beyonce’s and less like it really is, don’t lose sight of how fantastic you already are. 

If the majority of the consumer fashion magazines are to be believed, we all want to be like somebody else, wishing to lose fat, get slimmer or even gain weight, and we simply overlook how great we truly are.

Consider the following examples. Here’s something about the body I find fascinating.

To follow me, try to determine what’s common in the scenarios I describe below.

1. You’re fairly healthy and one day you decide to laze around the house having a slovenly weekend. (I’m ignoring what you might eat under these circumstances!)
   
2. You sit for 7 hours at your work desk all day doing mostly cerebral stuff
   
3. You race against your friend, about 100 metres race, as fast as you can, that lasts about 15 seconds.
   
4. You’re a little late for work today and you run really fast for the bus for a full 60 seconds.
   
5. At the weekend you go trekking in the hills for several hours with a full ruck sack on your back.
   
6. Tomorrow you will play your regular 5-a side game of football for about 90 minutes
   
7. Last summer you ran a half-marathon that lasted about 3-4 hours.
   
8. A keen lover of cricket you play cricket match over 5 days
   
9. Being a bit of a lunatic (in the nicest possible way, of course) you decide to do the IronMan Triathlon challenge where you swim 2.4 miles (3.86 km), ride 112 miles (180.25km) and run 26 miles (42km) in that order without a break and within a 17 hour period. As you can imagine this is truly gruelling and harsh.
   
10. Or you may choose to do something as insane as partaking in a bike race that cover 2000 miles (3200 km) across 21 days with just 2 days of rest (as riders are transported from the finish in one town to the start in another town). This is the Tour de France.
    

Did you see the common theme? I knew you would!

The above list describes activities, of different durations, each with its own energy demands. The first energy system handles your energy needs while sedentary, i.e. while doing nothing (your brain consumes about 30% of your bodily energy needs at rest) while the last example details an extremely gruelling activity, as any cycling fan can attest to, all the way from seconds through minutes, on to hours then days. These activities require varying degrees of pain to be successful at them.

Now where am I going with this? Your body, fantastic as it is, has been designed to deal with and handle all these kinds of activities. None of the items above are unfamiliar. How does it do it? Have you ever wondered?
I’ll tell you how in another post, but from the above you can see that your design is way more complicated and sophisticated than you realise. Understand that you’re special already whatever choices you make about your weight. You have in-built ways to lose weight and body fat. Losing weight is straightforward, easy, actually, if you know how.

To your Healthy Existence

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Dominic

It is now well understood that our bodies have designed to handle and digest carbohydrates, proteins and fat.

But have you ever wondered about the part that each of those three kinds of food play in your meal?

Food has at least four distinct roles to play in keeping us alive.

1.Food should be nutritious - to sustain us
2.It should satisfy our hunger and help is to know when we’ve eaten enough.
3.It should regulate our bodies – sugar levels etc
4.It should satisfy our energy requirements

But how does this relate to carbohydrates, proteins and fats?

- White carbs (bread, pasta, sugar, potatoes, cakes, etc) provide more immediate energy than proteins.

- Protein (meat, fish, eggs, etc) , among other things (like forming amino acids that helps form muscle), takes longer to get broken down by the body to glucose (as is carbs) but in a longer time than say potato mash.

- Fats (oils, butter, fatty foods, etc) take even longer to break down. The effort required by the body to break down the different kinds of foods varies according to the particular foods.

If your meal consisted of solely carbs, the digestive process would be relatively short and you would be hungry again soon afterwards. The length of time it would take to become hungry would decrease by introducing proteins – protein helps you to know when you should stop eating. The effort in breaking down a steak, for example, would be greater than just eating mashed potato.

However, fat takes even longer to break down. And as it takes even more effort, than protein it helps to curb your cravings and despite what the supermarkets say with their low fat foods – this has morphed into a huge industry - you do need fat for the reason that it is energy that takes greatest effort to break down and takes the longest time to be converted to glucose.

The more effort to break down results in you expending more calories. Eat a small packet of pork scratchings (the kind you get in pubs) and notice that you’ll not be hungry for quite some time.

So what can be said about the three foods? I’d say that white carbs help with immediate energy but does little to satisfy you. Proteins help to satisfy your hunger but do little for your immediate energy needs but take longer to become energy. Fat helps with your longer term energy needs and help with keeping you full longer and stops your cravings.

What does this all mean? That the perfect each meal should contain carbs, proteins and fats in varying amounts based on factors like 1) the time of day, 2) your kind of lifestyle and 3) what your plans and hopes for your body are.

So maybe have less white high carbs/starch (white bread, rice, mash, sugar, potatoes) in the evening more so than in the morning. (Note that vegetables are carbs too but they deserve their own post and I’ve pretty much ignored them so far focussing mostly on white high carbs). Indeed, a good meal (in my humble opinion) should contain about 50-60% of low carb vegetables.

Note, also, that not all carbs are the same. They can be considered as simple or complex and play an important part in our diet. They affect the rate at which sugar enters the bloodstream and can therefore be categorised by their gylcemic index and their insulin index (the amount of insulin that gets released by each food) – Simple carbs (sugar) have almost immediate release capabilities while complex carbs release their energy over a longer period (pasta, brown bread) - this is what you're aiming for.

So, to ensure that each meal plays its part to the maximum you should aim to include all three kinds of foods in each meal that deal with immediate energy, satiety and cravings – i.e. the perfect meal - make sure to control the quantities.

As I alluded to in an earlier post Ian Marber the author of a great easy-to-read book named How Not To Get Fat is far more qualified than I to explain here in our Amazon convenience store 
 
To your greater weight loss
 
Dominic


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I want to tell you a quick story.

A few months ago I was reading a book by Ian Marber about food entitled How Not to get Fat. I turned to a page that to this day has remained with me. On the left page was a list of things that the author described as being ok to eat. There were so many items in this list of foods that the font of the text had to be reduced to fit them all onto the page.

On the page on the right was a list of things you shouldn’t eat, that you should therefore avoid. In fact, it was one thing. Just one thing! Do you know what that one thing was? Yes, you guessed it right – Sugar.

Sugar is possibly one of the most addictive substances ever. It is everywhere and appear in many forms of lovely looking, sweet tasting, fantastic smelling cakes and pastries. We love it- we tell ourselves that we deserve it. The fact that sugar is all pervasive (everywhere) is a measure of the extent that we love it and crave it and shops stock it in abundance because we continue demand it.

Finding lunch around London can be difficult if you favour a protein-based lunch because all around are all kinds of carb-based sandwiches, pastas and sweet pastries.

What’s less obvious about sugar is that it’s close to the kind of energy that the body expects to use.  It is easily convert to glucose to use as energy. In the form of sugar it does not take much energy to convert for a process that is already very efficient in converting intake to glucose. Sugar in all its forms, is one of the easiest to convert as opposed to something like steak for example.

While like most people I love sweet things, the thing to note about sugar is that unless you intend to use that immediate energy by exerting yourself regularly you’re likely to store that energy as fat automatically and in all the wrong places – then you spend the rest of your life trying to get rid of it. Sugar and carbs are useful for those outdoor workers that require energy often – builders and sportspeople spring to mind, but much less useful for those of us who sit in front of computer screens all day long.

My advice to you is to be strong- resist sugar in all its forms. Think medium to long term. Living a long life requires that you be tough, mentally strong and resilient. The sooner you can liberate yourself from the tyranny of sugar, the healthier you will be over the long term. Not only that, but you will be ruling out the possibility of all kinds of sugar-related diseases like diabetes mellitus where you may end up having to have a limb or two removed. That is not the life your mother intended for you at birth now, is it? 

According to Wikipedia, diabetes is also linked Alzheimer Disease, not to mention tooth decay and potential loss of teeth. Say this now to yourself “No dentures for me, ever”. Imagine your dentures in a glass of water. Not a pretty sight is it?

So, have sugar only occasionally, if at all. Don’t try to replace the sugar taste with sweeteners (there are already links to brain disease for some sweeteners on the market)– go the whole distance and change your tastes – remember that you learned those tastes and so they can be unlearned. You will definitely be liberated.

So be tough, be strong, get started today. Take your power back. You are at the end of a long line of survivors so don’t become the wrong kind of statistic. Dump the sweet stuff today.

Time will show that this is one of the most useful pieces of information that it is possible for you to receive – all because of that book I stumbled across.

Education is key – read about it and learn for yourself How Not to Get Fat

To your greater weight loss

Dominic

Fats and Sugar| Limit Fat and Sugar