Solutions to common fat loss problems....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-20-2011

1. The fail safe famine response is the big one.

Fat loss eating plans with no net calorie reduction tend not to work. But 95% or more fat loss plans overdo calorie restriction enough that the bodies of the people using them, trigger this famine response.

It makes people get hungrier and for it to take more food to stop them feeling hungry. It slows fat loss. It lowers energy levels and metabolism so you feel less like exercising and burn less calories. And, it makes sugary and fatty foods taste better than they already do.

It’s like taking 3 effective drugs to fatten you up at the same time.

The 3 main solutions are to:

a) Eat only or almost only lower glycemic and nutritious foods that support your health. These foods have fewer calories or cause your blood sugar and insulin to spike very little or both. The health OK protein foods and the health OK fats and oils turn off hunger well and have no extra rebound hunger later. And, many of these foods are high enough in fiber that you have a full stomach when you eat them.

Eating enough of them to turn off your hunger will NOT trigger your famine response.

That’s particularly true for the protein foods and the foods higher in fiber. And adding some health OK fats and oils most days makes the famine response even less likely research finds.

(We post quite often on these foods and drinks that actually support your health without fattening you by the way. Virtually all of them also have multiple health benefits and protect you from many diseases.)

b) Do enough more exercise overall and enough strength training and interval cardio to use up more calories instead of eating less of them.

This doesn’t work by itself short of 8 to 10 hours a day of exercise. But even a few minutes almost every day of such exercise does burn enough more calories to cause more fat loss. It also helps ensure you lose fat instead of muscle.

The biggest two benefits though are that you get enormous health benefits even before you lose much fat. And, because you can lose fat with less food cut backs, you can lose fat without triggering the famine response.

c) The additional calorie cut backs need to happen in a pattern that does NOT trigger the famine response. We are descended from people who had a variable food supply. So some calorie cuts backs are OK. But meal after meal day after day calorie cut backs at every meal and every day, your body will read as a famine.

Strategies like only cutting calories extra every other day or only two days a week that have a day or two off between them or only one half day partial fast a week done every week, do net out fewer calories each week. But because they allow you to be normally fed most of the time -- tend not to trigger the famine response.

In summary, every day calorie cut backs in a temporary diet plan, produce temporary results and zero permanent results.

Since it is unpleasant to do and doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked for the people who try to lose fat that way.

People who try it feel as if they have failed at fat loss. They were fine and still are able to lose fat. They used a method that always fails. To lose fat they have to use the method that does work instead.

But people who do a thorough job permanently upgrading their lifestyle to these 3 methods lose fat they keep off.

It’s not easy for many people. But it is doable. And it gets easier once you get used to it and customize it to you.

2. The boiled frog problem.

It’s said that if you put a frog in a pot of water on the stove and increase the heat very gradually, the frog will cook without noticing the risk at all.

Most people today are far too fat because something very like that happened to all of us over the last 100 years.

People now see fattening foods and drinks as normal today. These foods and drinks often did not exist a 100 years ago. Or they were a few times a month treats eaten by people who burned thousands of calories a week walking and in other ways few people do now.

The change from then until now has been so gradual that few people realized it was happening.

Similarly, the companies that have been making money providing these foods and drinks, only gradually cut the quality and cost to make them and increased how addictive they were and gradually advertised them more. They now make a lot of money by harming masses of people and making them fat.

But they didn’t start out that way. They began making small amounts of treats that people only consumed small amounts of a few times a month. The people doing it got plenty of exercise and many of them needed MORE calories to be healthy instead of less. And, the companies used real foods just like the original home made recipes of the day.

Seeing these foods and drinks as normal and safe to eat and drink is easy to do and most people do it.

But every last one of them is unnatural and fattening and harmful in any but the tiniest amounts. They tend to be made out of refined grains, cheap vegetable oils high in omega 6, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, preservatives, and artificially saturated vegetable oils. They also add chemicals and other additives to make the food more addictive.

People who succeed best in fat loss throw out these products, don’t buy any more or take them as gifts. And, they stop buying foods or drinks with these ingredients or ordering them in restaurants.

It’s truly an unfortunate situation. And it can be challenging to do when the people around you don’t know any of this or how harmful to health these ingredients are.

But now you do. You can stop being a slowly cooking fat frog and switch permanently to being less fat.

But once you know and get used to not having these things, strangely it can be relatively easy to lose tens of pounds of fat.

These foods tend to not turn off your hunger very well and they all tend to turn it back on again from the blood sugar and insulin surges they cause. That means you actually may be LESS hungry while losing tens of pounds of fat.

This is even true for diet soft drinks research has repeatedly found. Despite having no calories diet soft drinks or foods with artificial sweeteners act as a potent appetite increasing drug. Worse, they increase your appetite for sugary foods!

Fat loss is far easier for people who don’t take this kind of appetite increasing drug!

3. Lack of time to exercise is another real problem.

Two solutions that work are these.

a) Do strength training an interval cardio you can do at home in 15 to 30 minute sessions. And do one session first thing in the morning most days.

You get a lot of results for short periods of time this way. And by doing it before the demands of your day start up, it’s dramatically more reliable and doable to fit it in.

b) Trade TV watching time for time exercising or exercise as you watch TV.

Both of these are well worth trying.

You burn fewer calories watching TV than you do sleeping so doing less while doing things like going to the gym or taking a Tai Chi class an evening or two a week instead of watching TV can really help!

Watching less TV also cuts your exposure to ads for the foods and drinks you should completely avoid.

So exercising instead of watching TV is a triple win for your fat loss and keeping it off.

You can also get some kind of easy cardio you can do while watching the TV you really want to watch. In fact many gyms have cardio equipment rooms with TVs to make this easier for people.

If you burn only 50 to 100 calories an hour but you do it 5 to 15 hours a week it can really add up!

There are many other problems people have with fat loss. But here are solutions for three of the most important to solve problems.