 Although exercising and eating less are important, activity and calorie consumption are only two factors which could contribute towards weight problems. To lose weight successfully and keep it off long term, all the factors need to be addressed. Taking the time to address all the following diet and lifestyle issues in your weight loss program, ensures that there will be less holding you back from your exercise program and your diet.
The following points should be considered when planning to lose weight, as many of these factors will not only help you lose weight directly but many of these will also give you more energy so you can follow through on your exercise program and will reduce many of the cravings which cause you to overeat.
You will never achieve results with your exercise program if you don't believe you can do it. Your mind is a powerful thing and the thoughts in your head will begin to work into your subconscious mind and influence your behaviour. When you focus on being overweight you will live your life on autopilot like someone who is overweight, you will make bad food and lifestyle choices and live with the bad feelings that being overweight often causes.
Instead of focusing on the things you don't like about yourself, begin to imagine yourself when you lose the weight. Close your eyes and think about what you will look like and how you will feel. This way your subconscious mind has something to work towards.
To be successful we need to believe that we are capable of achieving what we want. Then we will be free from the sabotage our own mind will always bring.
 Stress has the potential to be good for us. It gives us something to adapt to and helps us grow; becoming stronger, smarter, and healthier people. But in our modern lives we seem to be under constant stress from too many different areas and unfortunately our bodies are becoming unhealthy, older and fatter.
Stress from many different sources can affect our bodies. We usually think of stress as what we feel at work or when our personal lives are not going as smoothly as they should, but this is not the only stress that affects our system. Stress from the sun, eating certain foods or too little food, lack of water, toxins, inappropriate physical activity, a lack of sleep or stress caused when our bodies aren't functioning properly are only some of the potential stressors we could be under the influence of.
Your body responds to any stress in the same way, with what's called a fight or flight response. When stress affects your system it begins to prepare you with enough immediate energy to either fight the problem or run from it. This effect is facilitated by the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol sends out the signal to the rest of your body to stop storing energy so that any energy it has can be used to overcome the stressor. Cortisol stops your body from storing energy by making your cells less responsive to the storage hormone insulin. When cells stop responding to insulin they switch from a tissue building mode to a tissue breakdown mode which allows the stored energy in your liver, fat cells and muscles to become available for use. 5
This effect is fine for short periods but when your body is under frequent stress, you will remain in tissue breakdown mode, you will lose muscle, store more of the energy you eat as fat, your metabolic rate (how fast you burn energy) will slow, and your appetite will increase to replace the energy your body thinks it's using dealing with the stress.
Overall stress will make you burn fewer calories and eat more, which is the exact opposite of what most people are tying to do on a diet and exercise program. Instead of decreasing the stress on your system, by going on a low calorie diet you are causing low blood sugar which causes stress, and then by adding exercise, we are only adding extra stress we have no hope of recovering from because we aren't eating enough to cover our body's basic needs. Although this type of program often works short term, in the long term appetite will keep increasing to help repair the body from all the stress, and when you finally give in to the cravings your body will have a lower metabolic rate and more of that food will be stored because you're now operating using less energy. If you find yourself adding more and more exercise into your schedule just to keep seeing results, you are just adding more stress to your life and making losing weight harder.
To be successful with your weight loss you need to reduce as much of the damaging stress on your system as possible and help your body cope better with the remaining stress so your system can recover, build more muscle, give you more energy to use and become healthier.
 Your body heavily relies on water to complete many of its functions; digestion of food, removing waste, transporting blood and other nutrients around the body and fueling your brain. When you drink less water than your body needs it becomes stressed and any systems which need water will have to limit their function until water intake increases. 6
Not drinking enough clean pure water is a major issue for your health and can be linked to problems such as increased body fat. Your system is designed to drink only pure water and not the juices, coffee, teas, alcoholic beverages and soft drinks we often replace it with. When we use these drinks instead of the water our bodies crave, we do get some water into our system. However we also get a large amount of energy which is absorbed quickly and if you're not active at that time or under stress it will be stored away as fat. By drinking these drinks instead of water you are taking in far more calories than you were ever meant to drink.
Another body function that works against you when trying to lose weight is the mechanism for letting you know when you need to drink and eat. Both hunger pains and thirst pains often feel alike and when this pain is felt by most people they associate it with a need to eat and satisfy that urge, when most of the time your body is informing you that it is dehydrated. When you feel these pains it is more likely that what you are feeling is a need to drink water and this should be tried first before you eat. If you still feel the pain, you then know that food is what your body needs to solve the problem. 3
When you eat your body assumes you will be eating naturally occurring foods which contain the macronutrients- proteins, carbohydrates and fats. These components of our food when broken down also contain a variety of micronutrients including vitamins, minerals, coenzymes, and enzymes which all help your body operate at its best 3. It is these smaller components of our food which our bodies are hungry for and crave, not necessarily the calories, as energy can often be taken from storage when needed but micronutrients are in short supply in the body so they must be supplied in your food regularly.
These nutrients are absorbed into the body through the wall of your intestine, but before they can be absorbed, they need to be broken down into their individual components. This all starts in your mouth when you mix your saliva into your food and chew.
When your food gets to your stomach it is broken down by the stomach acids but if the food particles are not small enough the stomach may not be able to break down the food enough for the nutrients to be absorbed into your system. For most of us, on average we chew each mouthful of food about 4 times, when we should be chewing each bite as much as it takes to turn the food into a liquid so that it can be broken down into its microscopic components in the stomach and absorbed with ease in the intestine.
Chewing each bite this way may take longer, but this also has its advantages. It takes on average about 20 minutes for the brain to get the signal from your body that you have eaten enough for your body to function properly. Assuming that you are eating food full of nutrients and making sure it is broken down and absorbed properly when your body gets enough will send a satisfied feeling to your brain telling you to stop eating. As we all know how much food we could eat in 20 minutes, it is important to make sure we eat slowly getting all we can from our food and leave food on the plate when our bodies let us know we've had enough. 2
 As I explained in the last section, when your body gets enough nutrients it will let you know when to stop eating and stop your cravings to eat. But if your food isn't properly absorbed or the food doesn't contain enough of what your body needs you may begin to get uncontrollable cravings to eat the foods high in any nutrient your body currently needs.
The food you eat should give you life, energy and all the tools your body needs to function at its peak but through modern farming and food processing, the quality of our food is decreasing. Our food ultimately gets its nutrients from the soil. The plants grow in the soil, animals eat them for the nutrients in their meat, and we eat them both, so it is important that we eat plants that have been grown from nutrient rich soil and that we eat animals that live and eat as they should do naturally. 1
Modern farming doesn't allow for this. Our plants are grown with the use of fertilizers and pesticides which kill organisms in the soil responsible for the breakdown of nutrients in your body and other living organisms vital for your body to function properly. Commercially raised meat is also not healthy for your system as they are raised as quickly as possible often using hormones, feeding them food not naturally eaten by them to fatten them up quickly, and they are not given enough exercise.
This is not only cruel but it also makes the animals sick. It seems stupid that we would be eating sick, overweight animals, but in reality this is what sits on our supermarket shelves. How can we be expected to be healthy and thin if we eat the flesh from sick and fat animals?
To make sure that your meat and produce is going to give your body the vitality you need, make sure you eat mostly fresh certified organic produce and meat and if possible bio-dynamic food which gives us more nutrients than organic or conventional food because of the use of the best soil available. Doing this will help you avoid the cravings and health problems that cause obesity.
We should be avoiding any food which has been processed, changing it from its natural form. Changing a food involves heating, mixing and treatment which in most cases kill the living nutrients and organisms left in our food. Although our systems, when they are running properly, can withstand processed foods occasionally, these foods take more nutrients from the body to process the food that they actually bring into the body. Processed foods actually take life from your body instead of giving it like it should.
To lose weight successfully you need to make sure that you eat the highest quality food you can afford, and make sure to eat mostly foods which would have been naturally occurring 2000 years ago and grown or raised naturally to make sure your food gives you life, and doesn't just make you old and fat. 1
We are often told to eat healthy foods but what is a healthy food? In reality foods that are healthy for some are very bad for others, and it is up to you to work out which foods make you feel good and which ones make you feel bad. 3
As I mentioned earlier when you eat, food is broken down in your mouth and then your stomach. It then makes its way to your intestine where the smaller useful parts of the food are absorbed into the blood stream. When your digestive system is working properly any toxins, bad bacteria, or undigested food particles shouldn't be able to get through the small holes in the intestine's wall. But when you eat a diet high in processed foods and drinks, drink alcohol, take medical or recreational drugs, or when you're under stress, the wall of your intestine often becomes inflamed and food particles which are not digested yet can make their way into the blood. 2
Complete food particles should not be in the blood so your immune system then goes to work to break down the food particles and neutralize any toxins. When this happens your body remembers the food that caused the problem so that next time you eat it your immune system can be ready to fight it.
This is a major source of stress for most people. Most of us drink alcohol, are under stress, have taken medicinal drugs at some stage or have eaten processed foods. As a result, most of us are suffering stress from some very common foods.
To make sure your food isn't giving you more stress and making you fat, avoid all processed foods and drinks (as your body can develop a reaction to food additives quickly), don't take drugs where possible, avoid unnecessary stress, and you should also eat a variety of foods so that your immune system doesn't get exposed to any particular substance on a regular basis. Any food which makes you feel bad should be eliminated from your diet completely for at least 3 months before you try to eat it again, to ensure that the healthy food you're eating is not contributing to your weight problem. 3
 When we sleep our body begins to repair any damaged parts of our body and that's when it will build new muscle. When we exercise, we cause stress on our body so that it will begin to adapt to that stress and become stronger so it can handle more stress. When your body adapts to exercise it builds new tissue and increases the capacity of many of the systems in your body. All this happens when you shut your eyes!
When the sun goes down, our bodies change from tissue breakdown mode, useful during the day to give us energy, into tissue building mode, necessary for the repair and building of new muscle when we fall asleep. From about 10.30pm until 2am your body does its entire physical repair using its stored energy. Then from 2am till when the sun comes up your body will focus on the mental repair. When you miss out on sleep during these periods you create more stress for your body, but you also limit the time your body can spend repairing your body and converting the benefits of the activity you did the previous day. 1
Keeping more active muscle tissue is a critical component of a successful weight loss program. A lack of sleep has also been attributed to the development of obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, accelerated aging, hormonal and metabolism problems, type 2 diabetes, and memory loss among other problems. So making sure you sleep well is important to your overall program success and health. 7
As you can see there are many reasons that can cause us to gain weight, and these are just the more common reasons. When we only look at the well known causes of weight gain and don't address these other problems you are making your job much harder. By considering all the major causes of weight gain, your body will begin to work with you instead of against you to lose body fat.
Complete Fitness is now offering a new program to identify any potential barriers to achieving results with your training program. This program looks at your lifestyle, diet and addresses any problems stopping you from getting the results you want, giving you the tools to take back control of your weight. View the program here: Nutrition & Lifestyle Optimisation Program
If you are serious about losing weight, this program is a must, helping your body to work at its peak and experience the results you will achieve when you exercise with nothing holding you back.
Contact us now for more information or to book your place in the program.
1. Paul Chek, Chek Holistic Lifestyle Coach Level 1 Manual, Chek Institute, 2003 2. Dr Clifford Oliver, Check Holistic Lifestyle Coach Level 1 Course, Check Institute, 2006 3. Rudy Rivera MD, Roger Davis Deutsch, Your Hidden Food Allergies are Making You Fat, Second Edition, Random House, 2003 4. Dr Joseph Mercola, Dr Mercola's Total Health Program, Mercola.com, 2003-2005 5. Shawn Talbott Ph.D., The Cortisol Connection, Hunter House inc, 2002 6. F. Batmanghelidj MD, Your Body's Many Cries for Water, Global Health Solutions, 1997 7. James L Wilson ND DC Ph.D., Adrenal Fatigue- The 21st Century Stress Syndrome, Smart Publications, 2000
To find out more about fat loss, losing weight, weight loss, or your individual nutritional needs contact us!
|
|
