To lose fat, upgrade your lifestyle....

Today's post: Monday, 2-25-2008

Most people in the United States are too fat.

(I do enough things in this post better than many people that I’m as much as 50 or 60 pounds lighter than I easily could be. But that includes me still. My weight is close to what it should be. But I still eat a bit too many grains; & get too little strength training and total exercise.)

And, as the sedentary lifestyle & United States style eating become more common, this is increasingly true of people in other countries as well. And, there are statistics now to prove it.

But, except for doing sedentary work, you can upgrade your lifestyle in ways that allow you to escape from this problem.

Here are five upgrades that will help most people lose a lot of fat.

None of them are actually too hard to do as none of them force you to go hungry AT ALL. And, if you need to do all five and make the upgrades, you’ll lose fat like it is being peeled off.

1. Soft drinks. The data is in. Drinking soft drinks makes you fat. Drinking diet soft drinks makes you fatter because it apparently acts as an appetite increaser.

So, if you drink soft drinks at all now, if you upgrade your life and stop doing it, you may well lose more than 10 % of your current body weight without any further effort. And, you will NOT feel hungrier than you do now. In fact, the evidence is you may feel LESS hunger given that you keep the other foods you eat about the same. Not bad !!

The upgrade is to switch to water, tea, green tea, or coffee if you drink it without added sugar & either black or with just a bit of milk or lowfat milk. Also, if you keep the total consumption down, wine, beer, & real fruit juice also work. (PS: If coffee is too strong and you dislike black tea, Earl Grey tea is different enough, you might like it better.)

2. Watching TV. The data is in, the more you watch, the fatter you are. You burn less calories watching TV than you do sleeping! And, many people eat the fattening snack foods or respond to ads for them that appear on TV.

So, be more selective & watch less TV but more focused on what you like best. Skip watching TV some nights or week-ends and go to the gym instead. Or, get an aerobic or cardio exerciser at home & watch while you exercise. If you have them, turn off TV some nights and spend time with your kids. (You can record any must see TV broadcast then to watch later.)

3. Eat no fast food or only eat the health OK stuff when it’s available. The data is in. The more often adults or kids eat at fast food places as most of them still are, the fatter they are.

The food fast food places have served has been very high in sugar, transfats, refined carbohydrates, & with little real food. They tend to serve grain fed meat & poultry. Even worse, they specialize in serving soft drinks.

The upgrade is to substitute food from home; eat in a more upscale restaurants, or only eat the health OK things or almost health OK things when you go into a fast food restaurant.

To be fair, MacDonald’s is beginning to make an effort to provide some health OK alternatives. I’ve found that the easiest ones to eat in a health OK way at are Subway Sandwiches & the Mexican chain, Uno Mas.

But it’s not easy if you still like the regular fare. You need to eat the sandwiches Atkins style with no bread -- only. Eat no French Fries or chips. Eat no desserts. And, substitute water, tea, coffee, or orange juice for soft drinks. It also helps to add extra onions & other veggies to the protein part of the sandwiches. If you can do that, you can still eat at fast food places. If not, you are best served by never, ever going into one.

4. Snacks at home.

If you eat commercial baked goods such as cookies, donuts, bagels, cakes; packaged crackers, chips, & other similar snacks several times a week or, worse, a day, the data is in. You will be fat.

One cure is to eat four meals a day always including breakfast, so you never have to go more than 4 hours without real food.

Another, is to realize that you get virtually no nutrition from such snacks; they are much more expensive per month than most people realize; & they tend to be made with refined grains, sugar, salt, trans fats, & very little else.

The upgrade if you need or want snacks is to eat real food that tastes good enough you actually like it & manage your meals enough you need fewer snacks.

Cherries & kiwifruit & strawberries are just three really good tasting superfoods you can snack on. Monosaturated fat-based snacks that actually work well in moderation are guacamole, avocado slices, stuffed olives, & nuts. Raw broccoli florets, cauliflower, carrot sticks, & celery with a tasty extra virgin olive oil based dip also work. Deviled eggs also work in moderation.

These foods provide fiber & real nutrition so they don’t tend to produce type II diabetes. And, they tend to make you less hungry unlike the bad snacks that surge your blood sugar & then produce rebound hunger.

So, you’ll be a LOT healthier & be less fat if you make these upgrades; & lose the junk food snacks entirely.

5. The other thing you can do is to add regular strength training and other exercise into your life each week.

If you make this upgrade, you get fabulous health benefits. Even better, even while you are still fat, you will be healthier than skinny people who don’t exercise.

You’ll gain muscle & lose fat even if the scales don’t show it at first. And, you’ll tend to keep off any fat you lose as long as you keep up your regular exercises.