The basics of fatloss....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 9-27-2011

We’ve already posted on this topic quite often in parts.

An example is yesterday’s post on the new information that the diet soft drinks so many people consume DO tend to make them fat.

(Drinking diet soft drinks often goes with eating other things that are fattening.
When your body gets the sweet taste it releases insulin to power down the expected blood sugar surge. But that drives down your blood sugar then making you very hungry for fattening, sweet foods. And, the insulin tells your body to store fat and hold onto it.

Then there’s the recent research finding that diet soft drinks and artificial sweeteners lower your metabolism so you burn less calories which also makes you fat or makes fat loss much harder.)

The 3 biggest basics are:

A. You have to custom fit your fat loss plan to you because YOU have to be the one doing it.

The way you put together your fat loss plan has to custom fit you. You can grow into things and do more. You can learn new skills.

But to work, you have to upgrade your life and keep doing the upgrades. Your plan has to work using things you are willing to try. It has to help you develop an upgraded lifestyle you can keep doing. The way your plan works has to also help you achieve the goals you want.

At each step, ask yourself, what of this am I willing to try? How can I use this? What seems to be working for me? How can I make this fit me or my lifestyle better and still get the job done?

B. Your plan has to leave you with your energy levels intact or improved. Your plan has to slightly increase your metabolism or at least leave it the same. And, your plan has to keep you from being excessively hungry all the time.

It’s also helpful if you can do much of it on autopilot once you set it up and get used to it. (You may put your thumb in the dike to hold back the flood. But you can’t hold your thumb in it forever. You need to upgrade to a permanent repair so you can also attend to the rest of your life.)


And, it is extremely important to find ways to support your efforts from strategic information to giving you solutions to common problems to encouragement or even direct individual coaching.

Each of these helps virtually guarantee your success and not having them or worse, having the reverse, definitely makes failure much more likely.

Probably the single most important one is this: People who lose fat without extra hunger most of the time usually succeed. People who are too hungry all the time for too long all fail.

One reason for this is your body’s built in famine response failsafe. If your body decides you are in a famine, it makes you a LOT hungrier; you have far less energy; and your metabolism goes down. Worse, your body orders up fat storage and restrictions on fat withdrawal to ensure you keep up your emergency reserve in case the famine is a long one!

Hunger free fatloss is sustainable fat loss. That means you never gain it back!

C. An orientation to protecting your health is vital!

There are two reasons for this.

There is about an 80 to 90 percent overlap of the lifestyle that will help you lose fat and keep it off and the lifestyle that enables you to be healthy and stay that way.

If you learn and follow the lifestyle that enables you to be healthy and stay that way, adding the other specific fat loss skills is easy!

The other reason is also extremely important. There are often times that your motivation to be less fat may be a bit on the low side. But if the tempting but fattening thing you are presented with also is extremely harmful to your health, you may well be able to pass on it even when your fat loss motivation is temporarily low!

What do you do to get all that done?

1. Stop eating or drinking things that either, make you hungry, don’t turn down your hunger when you eat them, are fattening, or are harmful.

This one is HUGE lever for fatloss. It’s even potentially easy to do. Why? Eliminating most of these foods and drinks either has no effect on how hungry you are, or it may even make you LESS hungry.

The potential in just this one strategy is astounding. Today, most Americans eat and drink virtually only things in this category! They are from 15 to 105 pounds fatter than they would be if this were not the case. If they stopped 100 % and followed the next strategy well for a year or two they would be 10 to 80 pounds less fat even without doing the other things we list to get rid of excess fat.

Other than changing their patterns, it would be and often has been ridiculously easy. There’s no extra hunger to deal with at all!

2. Do eat and drink the things that support and protect your health and do so without fattening you.

You get a lot of extra leverage if they are good at making you feel full and less hungry.

You get mental leverage if you know why they support your health.

And, you also get a lot of extra leverage if you enjoy eating or drinking them; combine them in ways you enjoy; or get used to eating things that for you are OK but not great but which turn off your hunger well or give you superb health benefits.

3. You can lose fat more easily, be far healthier and even enjoy life more, and will be dramatically more likely to keep any fat you lose from returning if you also add exercise.

You can lose weight and fat without exercising. But if you exercise you lose the fat faster and most of the weight you lose is fat only. That ensures you don’t harm your health with your weight loss. And, it also means your body won’t work to make you gain back the muscle and bone you lost. That makes it a LOT easier to keep off the fat if you exercise.

Interval cardio and strength training help you ADD muscle and bone. That makes you healthier and tends to increase the calories you burn all day long.

It’s also true that if you eat wrong and exercise, you will tend to stay fat though you will be much healthier.

The second strategic reason to add exercise is that if you try to get all your net calorie reduction from taking in less calories, you may get too hungry.

Oops! If you get too hungry, that’s BADD news! Game over. You lose. And your fat loss stops.

But you may well easily get away with cutting back half that much on calories by doing the first two strategies. Then by adding exercise for the other half you lose fat just fine. But you do NOT get so hungry you fail.

And, there’s two more reasons to exercise.

If you get regular, vigorous exercise every week, your body regulates your blood sugar using LESS insulin for shorter periods of time. That does prevent type 2 diabetes. But this effect is HUGE for fat loss. With this lower amount of insulin in your system if you do have a sweet treat, your body will store far less of it as fat. The excess insulin to do that has been removed by the exercise you’ve been doing.

The other reason is the massive and astounding health benefits of regular exercise. It helps prevent almost every kind of preventable disease. But in addition to that, your rate of aging slows, your sex life improves or stays as good, and you think better and are much less likely to get or stay depressed. You even grow new brain cells.

4. It’s also helpful to find a way to eat some of your meals each week where you find extra ways to cut calories with out adding much to your hunger and to be extra strict mostly by using foods that have more fiber or protein or less calories.

There are several styles. Our upcoming eBook on Fat Loss will feature the one I find most doable.

This category is important.

Some people won’t lose fat without doing it.

(I was never hugely fat since I ate so much less junky food than most people. But until I learned to do this step, I was unable to lose the extra fat I did have. When I used this step, the fat and pounds came off.)

It is the one strategy that is NOT included in just doing what’s best for your health.

But, surprisingly, it can be reasonably easy to do.

By eating right and exercising far less of a cut back is needed. And since you don’t eat that way at every single meal, it’s MUCH more doable. You CAN keep doing it.

5. Make a study of what foods and drinks prevent the avoidable diseases and which ones do the reverse.

You can prevent something like half of all cancers and the majority of heart disease (and erectile dysfunction) with this knowledge. And, it’s beginning to look as if you can also prevent well over half of all kinds of mental decline – including Alzheimer’s disease.

This knowledge makes it MUCH easier to pass on eating things that are fattening when you also know it will cause you to be sick, in pain, or die or spend thousands of dollars in preventable medical bills!

6. Set up your own system to track your efforts. You may not be able to directly manage your results. But you can track what improves them or makes them worse if you track your results.

And, a proven way to keep up exercise and feel good when you make progress is to keep a log of the exercise you do.

This also gives you an early warning to make an extra effort or make corrections if you begin to gain weight or fat in time to turn off the problem.

7. Find ways to support yourself in your efforts or use a paid service that will give you fatloss support.

This one step can double your chances of success.

I think this can be done more effectively than Weight Watchers does it and am working on a service that will be better.

But until then, if you add these basics to attending their meetings or using their online service, it may be very helpful to you.

By using all these methods together, your chance of successfully achieving fat loss that is successful and permanent and will avoid making you hungry all the time go from less than 10 % to well over 90%.