Keys to successful fat & weight loss….

Today's post: Tuesday, 8-19-2008

The wonderful news is if you have taken steps to eat right and exercise & are beginning to do those two steps reasonably well, you are ALREADY less fat than you otherwise would have been. (See yesterday’s post on exercise or our other posts on exercise and our posts on eating right.)

But because of our sedentary lifestyles today, you may well still be fatter than you would like and fatter than it is OK for your health to be even if you already eat well and exercise now.

Here are five of the keys to losing excess fat and keeping it off.

We follow them with a summary of a study that found a way to more than double the results you get from these five steps. Then we add some other information that will help.

These steps allow you to lose fat & keep it off without getting extra hungry. They do take some ongoing effort to maintain. But doing so allows you to keep the extra fat off permanently.

A. Here are the five keys.

1. Never drink regular soft drinks.

For the same reason, read the labels on EVERY packaged food you consider buying & do not buy & do NOT eat any that have any high fructose corn syrup in them. If you haven’t yet done this, you may be astounded at how many foods now contain this junk.

And, the data show you should also never drink DIET soft drinks.

Regular soft drinks, high fructose corn syrup, & diet soft drinks all cause you take in calories but NOT feel less hungry. Even worse, they often make you feel MORE hungry.

So, they quite literally cause you to get fat if you eat or drink them & prevent you from losing fat even if you do many other things that would normally take off fat.

Not surprisingly they also tend to cause type II diabetes & heart disease.

In fact, if you have been drinking several soft drinks a day, by switching to water or tea or green tea or unsweetened cocoa or even coffee without added sugar, you may find that this one change will lose you 5, 10, or even 20 pounds. And, not only will the fat come off, you’ll actually be LESS hungry instead of more.

2. Eat some nonstarchy vegetables at almost every lunch or dinner you eat. They have so few calories & so much fiber Weight Watchers rates them as having ZERO points.

Organic vegetables not only have less pesticides & herbicides, recent studies show they are also dramatically more nutritious.

And, if you eat raw cauliflower, raw broccoli florets, or other raw cruciferous vegetables every week, your risk of all cancers, particularly prostate, breast, & ovarian cancers drops like a stone.

So does eating tomatoes, particularly cooked tomatoes and tomato & pasta sauces. (Pasta, however, is NOT a good idea for fat loss.)

Eating these nonstarchy vegetables makes you MUCH healthier, fills your tummy & turns down hunger with very little net calories.

It’s so effective that, BY ITSELF, it’s one of the secrets of successfully losing fat weight & keeping it off.

3. Do at least two sessions of progressive strength training each week with at least one day off in between.

Do at least three sessions of interval cardio each week that alternates moderate effort & very vigorous effort after you build up to it several times each session.

(Interval cardio & strength training are proven to increase your metabolism and fat burning for HOURS after you stop doing them. Strength training also adds at least some weight to your muscles which then burn more calories than the fat weight they replace even when you are at rest.)


Regular exercise has all kinds of extra health benefits --.including growing new brain cells and improving your sex life, which it does in BOTH men & women.

By doing this you lose fat in three ways: a) When you eat, you begin to feed the newly added muscle weight it develops & stop adding those calories to your fat stores. b) This kind of exercise boosts your metabolism for HOURS after you are done exercising; so for that time you burn a LOT of calories you otherwise would not. c) The weight you lose on the scale will all be fat; otherwise you tend to lose some muscle & less fat when you lose weight.

Each of these effects reduces the amount you have to cut back to lose fat & by continuing to exercise, it allows you to lose fat & keep it off without getting excessively hungry.

4. Eat health OK protein foods every day. This helps lose fat since eating protein turns off hunger better than eating fats & MUCH better than eating carbohydrates.

Stop eating virtually all refined carbohydrate foods; eat only moderate amounts of whole grain foods or less; & cut way back on table sugar and foods that contain it. Carbohydrate foods, particularly those with no fiber, only turn off hunger for a short time and then they turn hunger back on.

These foods tend to cause type II diabetes & sabotage your fat loss efforts by making you hungry when you would not have been if you hadn’t eaten them.

The low carb diets work by using this information. And, if you follow one of them AND eat more nonstarchy vegetables than they recommend AND exercise, they can work very well indeed. The “South Beach Diet” is one of the better and more up to date of these. For more recipes, you can also try the “Sonoma Diet” which is similar but slightly more food and enjoyment oriented. Both books are available at amazon.com & can be bought or ordered at your local bookstore.

Another way that works is to follow the DASH II diet or a Mediterranean diet but with less whole grains or pasta and MORE vegetables and health OK protein foods.

5. Watch less TV. Try NEVER to eat while you watch it. And, never allow a TV into your bedroom.

The more hours people watch TV, the fatter they are according to the many studies done on it.

You burn LESS calories watching TV than you do sleeping.

There are a lot of adds on TV for soft drinks, diet soft drinks, and for snacks and dessert foods that are mostly refined grains, sugar, & high fructose corn syrup. And these foods often contain bad fats too.

And, the more TV you watch, the harder it is to fit the exercise you need into your week.

So, be a LOT more selective in what you watch on TV & watch less or exercise while you watch TV or instead of watching TV some evenings.

If you do a good job on these five things, you will lose a good deal of fat & keep it off. And, you will be a LOT healthier than you might otherwise have been.

B. The very good news is that you can at least double the fat loss you get by following this program by keeping a food diary of everything you eat.

A study done at Kaiser that taught very similar strategies to people – including using the DASH diet -- was reported recently that found that people who kept a food diary each day lost double the weight the people did who did NOT keep the diaries.

And, the people who lost the most weight, also wrote down the exercise they did each week.

The people in the study were told to follow the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet.

And, the points they emphasized were.:

Eat 9 to 12 servings of fruits and vegetables daily.

Eat 2 to3 servings of low-fat dairy foods daily.

Aim for 25% or less of total calories from fat.

Aim for 2,400 milligrams or less of salt each day. (The DASH II diet aims at 1500 mg a day or less.)

And, drink no more than one alcoholic beverage a day for women; & no more than two drinks a day for men. One drink equals 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine or half an ounce of 80-proof liquor.

They also were told to exercise & average about two hours of exercise a week. And they were told to keep daily food and exercise records.

The people in the study who: “kept their food diary six or more days a week lost an average of about 18 pounds in six months, compared with about 9 pounds for those who didn't keep food diaries. “

The people who lost the most weight also attended more of the group meetings and did the most exercise. They also wrote down their exercise each day. So at the end of each week, they could see how much exercise they had done.


It’s significant that the people who lost the most weight also kept a log of all the exercise they did each week and did more exercise.

Note also that keeping a food log each week is one of the key reasons that people lose weight & fat when they attend Weight Watchers meetings. And, it’s one of the reasons studies show that the Weight Watchers meetings are one of the most successful programs for losing weight & excess fat.

In fact, one excellent way to get started with keeping a food log and consistently eating enough less to actually succeed in weight loss is to join a local Weight watchers group.

If you do that, and add the other information here, you not only will lose weight; but because you exercise including strength training also and eat enough protein and restrict sugars and starches, you will lose fat instead of muscle.

That also helps you to keep the fat off after you lose it.

In my case, I simply got the Weight Watchers points system book from my Dad who had gone to the meetings.

I wrote down what I was eating and drinking and the exercise I was doing.

Then I multiplied the points by .90 to see what point total would cause me to lose about 19 of my 186 pounds. I saw that if I added a good bit more unstarchy vegetables to my lunch and dinner every day and cut my number of glasses of wine and beer in half, I’d likely lose about half that much.

That, by the way, is a much less aggressive and hard to stay on goal than Weight Watchers gives people because they want their members to see fast results.

But I realized the goal I set myself was both doable AND that if it worked, I could keep doing it.

It also helped that I was already doing both interval cardio and strength training every week and had long ago given up soft drinks and commercially made snacks and baked goods.

I decided that just losing the 9 to 10 pounds I predicted would be worth it. And, so I did it.

Did it work? It certainly did. And, after a few weeks, I lost the 10 pounds I expected to lose.

But, I got an extremely pleasant surprise after that !! Because it was doable, I was used to my new way of eating, and it wasn’t that hard AND because I surely wanted to keep the 10 pounds off, I kept doing it.

The first surprise was that after a few more weeks, I found I’d lost a SECOND ten pounds.

The really astonishing surprise was that a few weeks after that I lost a THIRD ten pounds.

So I set out to lose 10 pounds and lost 30 pounds. I succeeded in part precisely because I picked a plan I knew was doable enough I could do it consistently every week.

Even better, soon after that I found that even though I ate well at Thanksgiving and Christmas, by eating this way the rest of the time and continuing my regular exercise program, I gained ZERO pounds over the holidays.

Since I would have been about 30 pounds fatter if I still drank soft drinks and ate junky treat foods and didn’t exercise before this, that means that some of you reading this may be able to lose as much as 60 pounds of fat and keep it off by using this information.