10 ways to permanent fat loss....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 7-27-2010

Many people are so overfat, they are too heavy because of the weight of the fat. But it’s not just weight loss they need and will benefit from but fat loss. It can harm you to lose weight from your bones. And, not only will it weaken you to lose weight from your muscles, doing so makes it more likely you will gain the fat back later!

A. So the first meta-rule or eleventh way to lose weight and keep it off is to focus on losing fat.

B. The second meta-rule or twelfth way to lose fat and keep it off is to make permanent changes in what and how you eat and exercise.

It’s as if you were learning a second language. If you take a term at a community college studying it, you will remember just a bit; and if you want to learn it later, it will be easier for you.

But if you want to be able to speak it well and keep doing so, you have to build ways into your life to hear and speak it. Join a club of people that speak that language or who are from that country and speak in it when they get together. Every year or every other year, go on vacation to that country. Read news from that country online every week. It then becomes a normal part of your life.

That said, here are the 10 ways to lose fat and keep it off.

1. Do 3 kinds of exercise every week.

a) Do strength training even if just for a few minutes at least 3 days a week with a day or two of rest in between. This helps to ensure the weight you lose is fat. AND, if you do it well enough to gain muscle, then by also trimming your calories a bit, you will lose more fat in pounds than the muscle you gain in pounds. Also, by doing upper body exercises every other day and leg exercises every other day, you can do quite well with six 15 or 20 minute sessions each week—3 of upper body work and 3 of leg exercises. A very reliable way to do this is at home early in the morning before breakfast every day.

b) Do some kind of interval cardio at least 10 minutes three or four days a week. Just like strength training, you can start with what you can do easily and then work up to more challenging and vigorous exercise very gradually. The key is to start gently for a bit, then go faster or harder until you feel out of breath or a bit tired but just a bit and then either slow way down or simply stop until you feel recovered; but work up to doing this five or six times.

Add something else too. Some people take a 10 or 15 minute walk at lunch time each day. Some people go dancing once a week. Some people do gardening on weekends. Some people take a long hike once a week. Some people begin to take mass transit and do the inevitable walking to connect the parts. One woman added two 20 minute walks each way doing this and lost 50 extra pounds. Some people do step counting and find lots of ways to walk just a bit extra each week until they get to 10,000 steps a day or more. And, if you haven’t a lot of time, it does not have to be a lot. Right now, I only manage three walks of about 15 minutes each most weeks myself.

2. Focus on learning to live a health supporting lifestyle and protecting your health almost more than on being trim and free of excess fat.

Doing that automatically increases the value of what you do and the benefits you realize it has for you. Virtually everything you do that protects your health also tends to help you get and stay free of excess fat; but you may find it easier to do those things to protect your health and to do them just because you may wind up less fat.

And, since few people want to be sick or disabled, the motivation to stay healthy is often more lasting than just being less fat.

Last, but far from least, things like you fasting glucose, HBA1C reading, and HDL, LDL, and triglyceride readings are diagnostic. If those readings are in the danger zone, it means that you aren’t yet doing enough with eating right or exercising in some way, and you need to figure out how to do more.

3. Stop eating foods and drinking drinks that harm you or make you fat and do very little else for your body. Refined grain foods, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, oils high in omega 6 all tend to harm your health yet for most people in the United States, they make up over half the calories they take in.

Similarly, don’t drink soft drinks at all if you can possibly manage it. The regular soft drinks with some kind of sugar: add calories; don’t make you less hungry when you drink them; and then make you MORE hungry later from the blood sugar drop from the high sugar content. So you get calories in PLUS an extra fattening effect from the hunger boost. Diet soft drinks are just as bad because they turn out to act as double strength appetite increasers – worse, they make you extra hungry for sugary foods. Stop both and your food cravings will be far less and much more controllable.

4. Cut way back on even real sugar. Foods containing real sugar do taste good. And, if you get enough exercise and eat right otherwise, you can get away with eating some foods with sugar. But the average person in the United States takes in 11 Tablespoons a day of sugar! Two Tablespoons of sugar a WEEK is closer to the max your body can process well – and that’s only if you exercise regularly.

5. Eat less often in restaurants. Some still use hydrogenated oils in preparing food. They typically give you refined grain bread when you are hungrily waiting for your order in a sit down restaurant or have the default drinks offered be soft drinks in fast food restaurant. Then many of them tempt you with sugary desserts or extra servings of wine or other alcoholic drinks. So, eat in them less often and most of the time you do, be even more careful of your food and drink choices than you are at home. And, to the extent you can afford to, choose restaurants that serve people who are upscale and health oriented.

6. Always eat breakfast. People who do get several fatloss breaks. They are in better health so much so that’s even true for people who eat fattening foods at breakfast. Their metabolism is higher all day long. They have much better resistance to food cravings between meals and much better control of their appetites at lunch and dinner. And, foods such as real fruit juice, whole fresh fruit, and whole grain cereals are far less fattening eaten at breakfast than when eaten later in the day.

7. Escape junk food addiction and emotional eating. Some people literally become addicted to things like regular soft drinks, desserts, snack foods, and junk food meals and their components such as French fries and potato chips.

Learn to completely stop that stuff even if you have to go cold turkey to do it.

Notice what it is made out of! See step 3 above! Once you remove the sugars and high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, refined grains, oils high in omega 6, hydrogenated oils, salt, and appetite stimulators such as MSG from these things, there’s almost nothing else left in them!

Learn other ways to reward yourself. And, if you need more emotional support, see our post yesterday on the 9 ways to turn off depression. Almost every one of those 9 steps helps you to feel better without using junk foods and soft drinks to do it!

8. Use multiple and doable and sustainable ways to lose fat and keep it off. If you use one and it proves ineffective or you can’t do it for a week or so or simply mess up and don’t do it for a couple of days, it can derail your fat loss or cause you to gain fat back.

But if you use 10, 12, or 14 each of which helps a little bit and no one of which is that hard to do by itself, they become a part of your lifestyle. The combination is very effective. And, your fat loss becomes much more reliable and long lasting. If one proves ineffective or you can’t do it for a week or you mess up doing it for a couple of days, the other 9 or more parts will still be working and doing the job.

9. Watch less TV or cut back to 15 hours a week or less.

Simply put, you burn fewer calories watching TV than you do sleeping. And most people DO have time to do 7 hours a week or more of regular exercise with more hours left over because they watch 21 hours or more of TV each week. For some kinds of recreational TV, it can even work to do a mild cardio workout on a stationary bike while you watch.

Secondly, a huge amount of the ads on commercial TV are for the foods and drinks that will make you fat and keep you that way. Those things are so cheap to make, they do make money for the companies that sell them even with the high cost to advertise them. So, if you watch less TV, you can more easily resist consuming these things or thinking of them as normal or desirable when they are neither.

10. Track your progress at least once a month. Weigh yourself on the same scale at the same time of day. Measure your waist in the same way. And keep a log book or computer file where you store and can review your records.

Failing to do this is like trying to drive on the Freeway without looking out the window because it becomes so much harder to see where you are going.

But, when you do it, you can see when you are doing well; and you can see if you are getting off track in time to fix the things causing you to do so.

Similarly, it can really help to keep a log of your exercises each day as you do them.

Just doing this one step doubles your chances of success at keeping off the fat you lose according to some studies!