How To Lose Weight

• With New Years just around the corner, I know that something on a lot of peoples minds will be weight loss –  ”How do I get those Christmas pounds off?” Often it’s, “How to I get ALL those pounds off that have built up over the whole of the past year?”

  Well either way it’s the same process to lose weight, and shed body-fat. There are lots of quick fix diets and methods out there for losing weight quickly, and with the simple plan I will outline here you may lose lots of weight very quickly as many of my clients do, but what I am looking for more is a life-long commitment to changing lifestyle, nutrition and exercise habits in order to be a much healthier, leaner and happier person.

  To start, we need to look at dietary habits. Food and good quality nutrition is by far the most important of all factors when it comes to weight loss. To prove this just look around your local gym at the people who claim to eat whatever they like, but spend hours and hours exercising with no body shape. You won’t have to look hard to find these people.

  1. Start by eliminating all the foods you are likely to be intolerant to. An intolerance is a sensitivity to a certain food that will aggravate the walls of your guts, cause inflammation and totally inhibit digestion and therefore weight loss, and healthy. You can take very expensive lab tests to find out your intolerances, but I suggest starting with cutting our four foods as a trial. I must say I’ve never found anyone who does not feel better cutting these foods out, so please comment to let me know!

  Cut out:

  • Salt -> Replace with a good quality sea salt (should be grey in colour) available from your local health food store.
  • Pasteurised Dairy -> Pasteurisation destroys all of the beneficial enzymes in milk leaving it nutritionally void. Eat organic, unpasteurised cheeses, or if you would like leave a comment and I will put you on to the farm where I get my raw milk from.
  • Wheat / Gluten containing grains -> Technically wheat is a glutinous grain, so generally you should be cutting out just gluten. The reason is that these grains (whilst being very cheap and actually a relatively new invention since the dawn of the agricultural age) are highly inflammatory to the gut. Replace gluten with as many fruits and vegetables as you would like, because more than likely you will be craving and will find this one hard to cut out completely – but the benefits truly are there!!! You can also have grains containing rice, millet, and buckwheat as replacements as these do not contain gluten.
  • Sugar -> When you see the word sugar cut it out. This also means sucrose, fructose, and anything ending with ‘-ose’ basically! It also means sweeteners like aspartame and sacharrine as these are potentially neurotoxins as they are basically chemicals mixed together to create a sweet taste. Swap your sugar for high quality organic honey, or Stevia. This means you will need to avoid almost all packaged foods (not a bad thing!) as sugar is hidden in everything because it is highly addictive and cheap for manufacturers – it keeps you coming back, and makes them lots of money! I suggest you choose your health over the food manufacturers car/house payments!

  2. Eat regularly. Most people who are overweight are generally not eating enough food. Typically people become overweight and then think that the logical thing to do is to eat less. This is definitely not the case. When you eat you kick your metabolism into gear, which is the vital system for actually burning fat – your body’s furnace if you will. When you don’t eat, your metabolism stops. I would suggest, taking the above eating habits into consideration, that you eat every 3 hours. For example, 7am/10am/1pm/4pm/7pm. If you are already doing this, then point 1 is more important for you.

  3. Eat more fat. That’s right, you heard me correctly. The one consistent thing I find in all of my clients is that they do not eat enough high quality fats. As a population we are generally getting fatter and moving towards 1 in 3 to 1 in 2 people being obese. Typically the Western diet is very high in bad fats, and low in the quality fats that we all need to eat. I suggest that every time you eat, you eat some fats. Try organic extra virgin olive oil, organic sesame oils, organic butter, organic coconut oil, avocado’s, or even increase your intake of quality meats. And remember: Fat does not make you fat! It will make you healthy, and if you need to lose weight to be healthy, it will help you do that – trust me!

  4. When it comes to exercising, it is rather difficult to prescribe something specific for every person reading.  However, I would suggest you build up to 4 days of training per week, use primarily free weight, cables and Swiss Balls in your workout, and always stretch before you start.

  5. The missing link to healthy weight loss in most people comes down to lifestyle. I suggest first and foremost that you start getting to bed on time, and sleeping well. Aim for 8 hours per night, and get to sleep at 10pm. The reason for this is that you do your physical repair between the hours of 10 and 2, and your mental repair between 2 and 6.

  Whilst there is an awful lot more I can tell you, these 5 points should get you started on a healthy new year plan. However, I would always suggest that taking action NOW is the best way to go.

  My New Years plans have definitely started. Good luck.

  P.S.

  Please comment and let me know what your New Years Resolutions are. Maybe I can help???

  
  
  December 28th, 2008 | Brett Sanders | 8 Comments | Tags: Blog Posts, Exercise, Happiness, health, Nutrition, personal training, Weight Loss

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