Slimming Down - Fast!

The Metabolic difference between a pound of muscle and a pound of fat is quite different.  Muscle burn can burn up to four times more calories. If you weighs 11 stone and have a healthy 20 percent body fat you will burn about 200 more calories per day than a someone who weighs 11 stone with about 35 percent body fat. So you should look to tone up and increase your metabolism. Your Metabolism decreases as you age so it is important to stay active in anyway you can. 


Avoid 2-3 week diets. Make long-term lifestyle adjustments! 2 week diets send your body into starvation mode which may temporarily Lose weight but it will eventually slow down and stop. Lifestyle adjustments to your diet means that you may lose weight at a slower rate but the weight you lose will be more long lasting. 

To Your Greater Health 

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Dominic 

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

This is the time of year where traditionally you look forward to the coming year and imagine a better version for yourself.

There is nothing wrong with this per se, but as I see it there really is only one thing you should commit to this year and that is “Staying Healthy” and the easiest way to do that is by Slimming Down – losing weight 

Your health underpins everything you do. Without it, all is lost. There are plenty of sick wealthy people wishing that their money could buy them health. For the majority of you it should be your number one priority. You may not have thought much about it but your hopes, your dreams and your aspirations really are tied solidly to your health.

Slimming Down - Getting Started: Assuming you are sedentary, (for most people the only exercise they do is breathing) what do you need to do to get started? Just do a bit more than you are doing now. For example, if you live in town, walk everywhere (whenever you can).

Do more than you do now. Set aside the time and walk any distance that is less than 1 mile or so. That’s about 30 minutes there and back –It is, in the scheme of things, no time at all, but can make a big difference to your health.

Slimming Down – Teenager: If you are a teenager, leave the computer games, FaceBook et al, indoors and play some sport instead somewhere other than inside your home. Why not try dancing – salsa or zumba or some other sport like tennis, table-tennis or football? However, you need to commit to it – by that I mean join a club and play in one of the local leagues so that you have to commit. 

50’s Slimming Down –If you are in your fifties, looking ahead, there is one
big piece of advice I’d make. “Make sure to work your joints to their extreme
limit, daily”. It is from this point onwards, (in your fifties) that in the next
20 years or so, your joints will begin to function less if you let them. They do
this primarily because we accept that “we’re getting on in age” and we work to avoid any pain in moving our joints. Don’t succumb to reducing your joint movement! That acceptance is the fast-track path to old age and to immobility. 

Do not readily accept any walking aid when prescribed unless it will actually prevent you from physically falling over. Don’t accept one of those devices used to pick things up from the floor – they save you from bending – and you do not want to stop bending - ever. Beware your doctor, who however well-meaning will probably try to persuade you, but try your hardest to resist. Remember that mobility equals independence.

Commit to remaining mobile - Probably the most important thing you should commit to doing this year is to reducing your body weight if indeed you are overweight. This is a big battle for everyone. For some, not today, but surely for most tomorrow.

Without weight control, your weight just grows and grows and with it come all sorts of ailments that affect your joints, ability to breathe and move. Commit now to reducing it. Sure, it requires a paradigm shift but it just requires that you get started. Consider getting yourself a personal trainer – someone that can understand your goals and continue to motivate you as you move forward.

Second to money management, weight management, especially as food is cheap, abundant and convenient, you need to grab this particular obesity bull by the horns and wrestle it to the ground this year.

One thing to note is that as you get older, being over-weight, your inclinations towards slimming down do reduce, and you tell yourself that you can’t do it or that it is too late. Beware of this.

So commit to getting fitter by slimming down now while you can.

Happy New Year

To your greater weight loss

Dominic


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New years weight loss | Weight Loss for The New Year

In the last month my father lost 13.5lbs without one stroke of exercise, without starving himself while still eating out occasionally!

I mention this to prove to you that, while there are numerous benefits to exercising in the immediate, medium and long term, with respect to losing weight, exercise is not particularly necessary. It’s what goes into your mouth (or doesn’t as the case may be) that will likely have an immediate impact.

In his case, he reduced his sugar and starch intake and focused instead on eating vegetables, protein and fats. He told me he got tired of "being here rather than there". He did it while watching his friends tuck into foods that made his mouth water. But he stuck to his plan.

He took his hot soup to lunch in a bulging Thermos flask. He was brutal in not drinking his usual fruit juice and ever drinking only cold water and green tea. He made up his mind to pay the weight loss price now and in next to no time, he had lost half of the weight he wanted.

So many of us put off paying that price but it is observable that the universe favours no one. It makes no exceptions. He reasoned that you will pay the price one way or another and, there being no time like the present, he decided to lose his extras now rather than putting if off for a future date.

Now, he’d be the first to accept that while the fat disappears from where ever it can disappear from, losing weight like this does little to give you a particularly healthy look. Neither does it offer you any particular level of fitness or extra aerobic capacity or strength.

So he considers initial weight loss to be a necessary step towards being healthier– it does, after all, gives great feedback and a whiff of success – but for a toned, slender, streamlined, strengthened body with great aerobic capacity and strength, exercise is what you need. There really is no substitute for exercise, and if you live a mostly sedentary existence, doing something recreational that involves movement.

Looking good so that you feel good, however, requires a bit of planning, commitment and motivation and the majority of those that succeed do so with a buddy or with a personal trainer. Getting someone to bounce ideas from, to give ideas and to provide you with the motivation and the knowledge you need, and in some cases the equipment to make your goals a reality, is the biggest benefit of getting yourself a personal trainer.

Exactly how a personal trainer can help you by slimming down though is the subject of another post.

To your greater weight loss

Dominic

If Your Looking To Lose Weight Check This Out 

How to lose weight the healthy way | Start Losing weight 

I’m willing to bet that most of you walk around with 2 huge misconceptions – er. Misconceptions that can make a big difference to your understanding of how weight loss works!

Why am I willing to make this bet? Because even though I studied the topic at Uni I too thought the same. Before I tell you the first one, here’s what I want you to do.

When I tell you the first big misconception I want you imagine me giving you £5 if I am right. Similarly, I want you to imagine receiving £10 from me if I am right. What is my claim? My claim is that I’m betting that you thought that “All Calories Are the Same” or put another way “calories are calories are calories”.

That is my claim but it is not true Not All Calories Are the Same!

To be fair I could have framed this better and asked you “Do you think that your body responds in the same way to all calories?” It is another way of asking you if you consider all calories to be the same. But now that you’ve thought of it for more than a second, I’m certain you can see that if you ate 100 calories of say potato mash (carbs) or 100 calories of prime Angus Steak (protein) or 100 calories of ice-cream that your body would deal each of them differently.

Naturally, things become more complex with real meals when you combine carbs, fats and protein together. What matters in real life is the ratio between the three types of calories, (the portion size of each kind), when you eat your meals, the efficiency of your digestive system, the extent to which you chew your food and how your body allocates those calories towards fat loss and muscle gain.

So what’s my point? For slimming down, losing weight or gaining weight it’s useful to understand some of the common misconceptions (in this case that all calories are the same) and how if not properly understood, they can lead you to sabotage your own goals.

To your greater weight loss

Dominic

Click Here If your Looking To Burn More calories 

 What is a calorie | Empty calories  

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


Click Here If Your Looking To Reduce Belly Fat

Welcome to my first ever blog post.

You’ve probably guessed that my interest is about Health, Fitness, Nutrition and Well-being. That’s what this new blog is about.

For quite some time people in western countries have long had their basic needs met. We certainly have adequate warmth, shelter and food, plenty of food - so much food that we throw lots of it away. With our huge resources, until recently, food has become cheap and abundant.  Just think, McDonalds – you can get a Happy Meal for £2.00 or so.

At the same time, a large number of us have grown fatter as our job roles have made less physical demands on us, as we have successfully transitioned to a more service economy where we do less physical work. As a result of being more sedentary, (it’s not the only reason) obesity is fast becoming a big problem and many of us stand to not fulfil our destinies if we continue on as before – in other words, if we don't fix ourselves we’re gonna die prematurely because of our failing organs and over-fat bodies!

During the coming blog posts, I’ll share with you my experiences and encounters with Health, Fitness and Nutrition. That might be in the form of reviews of product that I consider useful or beneficial, it might be of food that I consider to worth of a mention, it might be an exercise program for those of you that might be short of time or it might be of books that I find of value or even of ideas I come across that I disagree with. Anything that I think is likely to help or be of value to you I’ll pass on from wherever I find it so that you don’t have to bother.

Additionally, I'll add information about things I discover that might affect your overall wellbeing - for example, I recently stumbled across some fantastic pillows that have changed my life - I'll mention those in another post.

So in this blog, I’ll do my best to tell you what works and what does not as best I can.

When you get a free moment why not drop me a comment letting me know what you think. Let me know if you agree or disagree with my views and have any views or recommendations of your own. Let me know if there is any information you’d like to see here.

Kindest regards

Dominic