Dangerous Ways to try weight loss....

Today's post: Monday, 4-21-2008

Last week I saw an article in the Yahoo health news section that said it’s been discovered that unsafe ways to attempt weight loss or fat loss tended to be passed on to people by friends who were doing them. This was particularly true of younger women.

These methods include extremely severe caloric restriction; diet pills; & purging.

Do NOT copy friends or acquaintances who use these methods.

These mehtods tend to produce feeling like hell to the point of inability to function at school, home, & work; poor health; & even death if done too long or too much.

For many people, they are more damaging to self-esteem than the fat they hope to lose.

Worse, any weight lost with such methods tends to be as much lean tissue & muscle as it is fat. And, even worse than that, any fat lost is virtually always regained by the people using these methods who survive the experience.

Translation: As weight loss methods, extremely severe caloric restriction; diet pills; & purging and similar methods, will make you feel worse, make you sick, & may even kill you. And, if you survive using them, even if you do lose some weight, you will be just as fat or fatter soon after you stop using them.

Why not use the methods that keep off excess fat permanently &
IMPROVE your health?

If you have the health habits of the average person in the U.S., you can lose 5 to
15 % of your bodyweight as fat and get dramatically healthier by just a few simple upgrades.:

1. Stop taking in foods & drinks that make you fat but not always less hungry & which harm your health in even small doses.

Most people still drink soft drinks several times a week. Both the high fructose corn syrup in the regular kind & the diet soft drinks have been shown to make you fat and sick. They add calories but do NOT make you less hungry in the case of the regular soft drinks & actually make you MUCH hungrier in the case of the diet soft drinks. Both kinds tend to produce type II diabetes & other illnesses. Recently a study found health indicators got worse with even ONE diet soft drink a day. Since high fructose corn syrup increases triglyceride levels, consuming it regularly in soft drinks tends to produce heart disease & related diseases.

Partially or fully hydrogenated vegetable oils tend to be in many foods. The transfats & other unnatural fats they contain tend to make you fat; & they directly contribute to heart & related diseases. They also apparently help cause type II diabetes.

In addition, they often are found in foods made with refined grains or in packaged foods that also contain things like high fructose corn syrup.

Refined grains are totally common in most people’s diets. They have virtually no fiber & very little nutrition, so they tend to spike blood sugar & not keep you from getting hungry. Just like soft drinks that tends to make you fat & sick.

Unfortunately, a really large percentage of foods in most grocery stores have artificial sweeteners, high fructose corn syrup, refined grains, &/or partially saturated oils (transfats).

To avoid this list of fattening foods that make you sick & do not turn off your hunger very well, you have to do two things.

You have to read labels – every time. Foods you wouldn’t believe have these things do in fact have them.

And, you have to eat mostly real, un-packaged foods. Fresh vegetables, lean & properly raised or caught animal protein foods, health Ok fats such as nuts, avocadoes, & extra virgin olive oil -- & fresh fruit and whole grains in moderation do tend to make you less hungry. They provide real nutrition; & eating them tends to keep you healthy.

2. Do get regular exercise every week.

Skinny people who don’t exercise are fat inside & tend to get sick. And, people who are still a bit too fat but who exercise regularly tend to stay well even if they have only been exercising for a few weeks. Even better, they are more muscular underneath the fat & much LESS fat inside. With regular exercise, you tend to lose more pounds of fat than pounds of weight on the scale.

Regular exercise also IMPROVES self-esteem in the people who do it. And, studies have found that regular exercise reliably improves the sex lives of people who do it for BOTH men & women.

Even better, the kind of exercise that peels off fat best tends to also work best for improving self esteem & sex.

Progressive strength training & “interval” cardio build muscle & increase metabolism even for hours after you exercise. And, the more muscle you have the more calories you burn, so you can avoid starving & burn more calories & still take off fat with these 2 kinds of exercises. (“Interval” cardio is where you warm up a bit & then work really hard for a bit & then go back to moderate or easy for a bit -- & you repeat these “intervals” a few times each session. This can be effective in even 10 minute total sessions for both fitness & fat loss.)

For progressive strength training, you aim for 6 to 12 repetitions for each exercise. And, you try to do as close to 12 as you can each time. Then when you can do 12 each time, you increase the weight & start the process over. Even two sessions of half an hour each every week can work wonders. It is important to take a day off between strength training sessions. Those days off work well for doing cardio instead of weights.

Or, if it works better for you, you can work out long enough to do both strength training & cardio the same days, three days a week, & simply take the other four days off.

Six days of exercise alternating strength training with interval cardio tends to get the best results for fat loss.

But even two days a week with a bit of strength training & a bit of interval cardio each time will lose some fat & make you MUCH healthier than no exercise at all.

These few life style upgrades will lose a LOT of fat weight for the average person. They do work. They are sustainable. And, they tend to make you much healthier.