Tuesday, February 10, 2009

10 Dynamite tips for losing body fat fast

By Lyle Neander

Successful weight loss without a good weight loss program is nearly impossible. To lose body fat fast you need a good weight loss program with a balance of diet, exercise and good advice. To help you I have put together 10 tips which will maximize your success.

Your body weight reflects your lifestyle. It's that simple. The food you eat, the amount of exercise you get, your eating habits and your metabolic rate all contribute to build the body you have today. Without doubt the amount and type of food you eat is the single most impoirtant factor so here are some tips to help you reach your weight loss goals.

Reduce your carbohydrates. It is almost impossible to lose weight and keep it off without eating substantially fewer carbohydrates and particularly those high on the GIycemic index chart. The more processed the carbohydrate the higher the GI. White bread, cakes, candy, chocolate, biscuits, soda are all high GI. And the bad news is that eating high GI carbohydrates stimulates that appetite for more of the same. Eating a low-carbohydrate, low-GI diet will help you control your appetite and decrease cravings.

Now when we eat low GI foods like brown rice, wholemeal pasta, full grain breads your body can't digest it quickly and the insulin response is delayed or even halted. The sugars enter the bloodstream slowly and are consumed as energy. Your energy levels stay constant, your blood levels of sugar stay steady and you don't feel perpetually hungry and put on loads of weight as a result. Try to keep your carbohydrate intake under one-sixth of your overall calories and increase the number of low GI foods you eat and eliminate the high GI foods. Candy, cakes, biscuits, sugar in coffee and soda drinks are out.

Try to reduce the amount of saturated fats you eat but don't get paranoid about it. Saturate fats such as animal fats are implicated in heart disease and especially stay away from trans fats, the type used to cook fries, chips, and fast foods. They will kill you, clog up your arteries and predispose you to cancers such as bowel cancer. On the fat issue, there has been a campaign for years to reduce our fat intake in the belief we will get thin if we do. This philosophy has been a spectacular failure. One gram of fat contains 10 calories and 1 gram of carbohydrate or protien contains 4 calories, but fat and carbohydrates are metabolised by the body differently and fat doesn't make you fat. Carbs do! Low fat processed foods are full of sugar.

Eat vegetables. Really focus on foods that have low caloric density (that is, low in calories but high in weight). The ideal category: low-starch vegetables, which have a low GIycemic index and are rich in valuable nutrients of all kinds, high in fiber, and filling.

The more fiber the better. Most people do not consume enough fiber in their diet. Soluble fiber protects your heart and insoluble fiber protects your digestive tract. Fiber makes you feel fuller sooner and reduces the tendency to overeat. The recommended amount of fiber is 25 grams a day but in undeveloped countries people eat three and four times this amount and diseases such as bowel cancer are rare. Fiber is king.

Make the changes to your diet and lifestyle steady rather than radical. Too much too soon will lead to a sense of dislocation and the diet will go long before the fat! Your goal is a steady shift to a new and better lifestyle which incorporates a new diet, exercise program and a new attitude to yourself and life. Radical is just too difficult to sustain.

Aim for a healthy lifestyle and a healthy you, in which losing weight is one of the components, not the only one. Thin and flabby isn't much more attractive than fat and flabby. Make health, not weight loss, your goal. If you set a healthy lifestyle as your goal, you are more likely to succeed in both improving your health and attaining permanent weight loss. Build steadily to a healthy lifestyle and the excess weight will drop away. Losing body fat is a long term goal, not a short term one.

Don't get desperate. I understand that when you make the decision to lose weight you want it yesterday, but it isn't going to happen. There is some hard work ahead of you after you make the vital decision to lose weight, so make sure you enjoy the journey. You are going to be on it for a while, so don't loathe the process. Embrace it. Every day is a victory. Every step along the path a milestone. Otherwise you will crash and burn and this weight loss program will just be another lost opportunity.

Expect some ups and downs in the weight loss process. There will be weeks when the scales seem to mock you and others where the weight seems to have just fallen off. Remember that if you are a woman there are hormonal issues here as the monthly cycle affects fluid retention. Also as the exercise program develops your weight may stay stagnant but your waist line starts to shrink. Muscle weighs more than fat so the scales aren't the only measure of success. What matters is that you are traveling in the right direction and that you don't get off the train.

Don't starve yourself. The human body has an amazing built-in mechanism which detects a dramatic reduction in food intake and reads it as a stressor indicating a famine. Your body then goes into self-preservation mode and desperately holds on to every bit of nutrition you eat. The result is that losing body fat becomes impossible. The body guards itself starvation and you stay fat.

And eating breakfast is the best meal to start the day with! A high GI breakfast of porridge and whole grain toast, protein like an egg and bacon and tea or coffee and not fruit juice sets you up for the day. Fruit juice has too much sugar in it and is a bad start to the day. A good breakfast will sustain you until lunch and you will be protected against the mid-morning snack attack that you are prone to when you start the day without breakfast. No breakfast and I promise you will fall off the diet by 11 AM that day.

Any effective weight loss program must include a good exercise program. Without exercise you are doomed to failure. Exercise both tones the body and burns the fat, plus it helps moderate the appetite. Fit people eat less than fat people because their physiology is changed by exercise. They stay slim because they exercise, not just because of a few calories they burn. I also like a program that includes a meal planner because it removes so much guess work from preparing healthy meals.

Find the program that works for you and then work it. One day the mirror will reflect the power of that decision. The most powerful action you can take is to make a decision today that there is no option for you but success. Fail to make a decision and ... well look in the mirror and see what not making a decision has done for you so far.

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