Weight Loss
Losing Weight
26/10/08 07:54
To return to a recent topic, there are several more concepts and procedures to make the process of losing weight successful.
First of all, Frater Mystes recommendation to "reframe" the meaning of the feeling of being hungry into the joyful awareness that you are losing weight - this is pure genius and very correct.
Beyond this, I believe that one can lose weight and maintain a slender figure by following a few basic principles:
1) Burn up more calories than you take in.
2) Drink lots of water
3) Reduce calorie intake, but do not starve yourself!
4) Stop consuming chemicals (artificial sweeteners, MSG, preservatives, medicines)
5) Sweat daily
6) Do some aerobic exercise
7) Build muscle mass
Let's take these one at a time.
1) Burn up more calories than you take in.
This one is pretty obvious. If your activity level is using up more calories than your intake, you should lose weight.
2) Drink lots of water
This is so often overlooked. Many people carry around lots of extra water in their tissues. This looks like fat but is not. Because they do not drink enough pure water, their body holds the water it has to prevent all the salt and other chemicals from becoming so concentrated that it damages the tissues.
Urine can only contain a certain maximal % amount of salts. So, you can't pee out your wastes unless you drink enough water.
Many of my European friends only drink highly sparkling mineral waters. These minerals are not in the best form for the body. These are the kind of minerals that clog your house pipes (and your joints = arthritis or your tissues = rheumatism). Get your minerals from vegetables. The mineral compounds in vegetables are highly soluble and assimilable by the body.
Sparkling water contains lots of carbon dioxide. When you breathe, you take in oxygen and expel the waste product, carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is "exhaust". Drinking sparkling drinks is taking in high levels of exhaust – of what the body is trying to get rid of.
Drink pure water. When you drink only pure water, between meals when your stomach is empty of all food, you body goes into purification mode. It uses the water like an internal shower. How would your hair feel if you washed it in cola! (Unless you have kidney problems or congestive heart failure), drink more pure water!
Many of my friends have started losing weight when they started drinking much more water (without changing anything else in their level of activity or diet).
3) Reduce calorie intake, but do not starve yourself!
If you do not eat enough good food, you body will reduce its metabolism – the rate at which it burns calories. This can be so frustrating. I know of examples amongst my patients and one lady on this list who, for one week, only drank water and herb tea. The result was only a loss of one pound! And subsequently, when eating normally, the body now was far more economic with calories and stored them as more fat.
Most people do not get enough vitamins and minerals in the food they eat. Reducing the amount of food you eat may lead to malnutrition! Eat highly nutritious, excellent quality, yummy foods. You may consider taking a god vitamin, mineral, trace element supplement, too.
4) Stop consuming chemicals (artificial sweeteners, MSG, preservatives, medicines)
These chemicals can actually make you hold more water and build more fat. Particularly insidious is aspartame and other artificial sweeteners. People drink diet soda pop, thinking that they are thereby avoiding the calories of sugar. There is some evidence that artificial sweeteners actually cause the body to put on extra fat. Besides, they are not nutrients and may well be quite poisonous to the body.
Chemicals that the body cannot easily excrete get stored in between the cells and in fatty tissues. One problem with losing fat is that these stored chemicals come out into the blood stream. If you are not drinking enough water and practicing other detoxifying techniques, this high level of rather toxic chemicals in the blood will make you feel awful. And, if not excreted, the presence of these chemicals will force the body to make more fat to store them away again.
5) Sweat daily
If you are really lazy, you can accomplish this by taking a sauna. The skin is the largest eliminative organ of the body. Get those toxins out by sweating them out (and taking a shower to wash them off).
6) Do some aerobic exercise
Better than passive sweating, sweat through moderate, sustained levels of activity. Choose some activity that is fun or you won't likely keep it up regularly. Personally, I do not like running. So many runners get bad knees with time. Yes, good shoes, good posture and a soft track minimize this problem. I just don't like jogging. I prefer dancing, swimming, surfing, floor exercise and the like. Find something you like. Bouncing of a ball or a little trampoline is excellent. Take it easy at first with the trampoline until your body gets used to it. A large rubber gymnastic ball (available from medical supply stores and "healthy back" stores) is very gentle to all the joints and not too strenuous. After returning from India with "post-dysenteric arthritis", I was crippled and extremely weak. I couldn't do one chin up. I couldn't bent my knees and stand back up. Bouncing on the ball was my salvation.
Your cells take in nutrients from blood capilaries. Your cells excrete wastes into the lymph system. The lymph contains all the waste products of all the cells in your body. Bouncing pumps the lymph fluids through the body. Many people look fat because their lymph fluids are not being pumped through and out of their bodies. The have lymphatic congestion. Although there is about twice as much lymph as blood in the body, the lymph system has no heart to pump it around. However, the lymph vessels have one-direction valves. When your muscles contract, the lymph in that area is pumped forward. The one-direction valves prevent it from flowing back. The next contraction pumps it further forward.
Bouncing is, in effect, an excellent lymphatic pump. Any regular sustained activity helps pump the lymph. A brisk, 20 minute walk – just fast enough to make you breathe more deeply than normal – is quite adequate.
Many men exercise far too strenuously. They do exercises that make their hearts race too fast. Moderate exercise burns fat. Fat cannot be metabolized fast enough for very strenuous exercise. For such high levels of exertion, the body burns up its blood sugar. The result is often low blood sugar, consequent extreme hunger, excess eating and greater levels of fat.
A good rule of thumb: To burn fat maximally, do some kind of movement that raises your heart rate near to but not more than 180 minus your age) beats per minute. So, if you are fifty, your maximal aerobic heart rate should be about 180-50=130 beats per minute. Keep your heart rate between 120 and 130 for about 20 minutes and your metabolism will speed up for about 10 hours. This means that if you do some dancing or other fun activity that properly elevates your heart rate, that you will be burning off fat all the rest of the day, even if you are just sitting around doing nothing special.
Get a good heart rate monitor. The one I have allows me to set the target heart beat range. If I go over my chosen maximum, it beeps with a high note. If I go under the target minimum, it makes a low "Blah" sound. This makes it easy to stay in the target range.
7) Build muscle mass
Even if you don't change any other of your habits, this one alone will make you lose weight. Here's the story: Just having muscle dramatically increases your metabolic rate. That means that if you have more muscle, you will burn calories at a greatly increased rate even if you do nothing.
Be aware that muscle is heavier than fat. So, while you are building muscle, you may not lose weight. Be sure to measure yourself. You will be losing inches and getting into shape. Seeing those inches shrink will keep you motivated.
The easiest and safest way to build muscle is also the way that takes the least amount of time. Building muscle mass requires anaerobic, strenuous exercises. This is the opposite of aerobic exercises. Choose some exercises that utilize all the big muscle groups of the body. For example, you might do lunge, squat, push ups (with knees on the floor), chin ups (with feet on a stool). Do a long set of warm ups with the same muscles first to get them ready to exert. Then do each exercise very, very slowly. Take 10 seconds to push up and 10 seconds to go back down. Continue until you cannot do one more repetition. Try anyway with all your might for ten more seconds. After you cannot lift yourself back up, do a few more negative repetitions (just slowly lowering yourself back down).
Doing exercises this way (slowly) puts less stress into the joints and is thus safer. However, the muscles will get really deeply exercised. Done correctly, each muscle fiber will go to exhaustion. After such exercises, wait one week before repeating the program. You can do aerobic movements like brisk walking etc., but do no heavy exercise for one week.
With one-half a hour of this kind of exercise once per week, you will put on lean muscle mass and lose that fat. It works. It's hard work, but for only 1/2 hour per week. I don't know any other way to lose so much fat with such a short amount of time per week of effort. It does require maximal effort. After this level of exertion, you will have some sore tired muscles for a few days.
To avoid the sore muscle effect, take lots of anti-oxidants like vitamin C and E, selenium, zinc. Grape seed extract (proanthocyanadines) is one of the most powerful antioxidants of all. These antioxidants will neutralize the free radicals generated by your strenuous efforts before they make your muscles hurt. Also, exercise generates lactic acid in the muscles. This acid irritates the tissues and causes the feeling of fatigue and soreness. The day or two after heavy exercise, do some gentle easy movements with the same muscles to pump out the lymph and lactic acid out of the well-exercised muscles. Then they won't hurt so much or for so long.
--Dr. Robert Frost