Three fat loss tips....

Today's Post:  Friday, 11-13-2015

As you may very well know from experience, it can be difficult to lose all your fat even if you do most things right and have had some success because of it.  You often lose to a certain level and stop there.

And, if you are just beginning, your chances of fat loss success go way up if you make fast progress at first without cutting back too much on how many calories you eat.

So, here are three tips:

1.  One is tested to work and I’ve found it doable.  Many well to do people can lose 15 pounds of fat by adopting it over about a year.  And this is on top of anything else they do!

2.  The second one also works and, even better, it uses several things that work to create a very forceful positive effect.

3.  The third one may be very helpful.  It looks good for theoretical reasons; and it has strong health benefits.  So you may find it worth trying. (I’ve NOT tested it; but it looks promising enough I WILL do so!)

And the potential is quite good: in a year if you use it daily and it works for you it can cut your level of fat by at least 5 % by weight on top of anything else you do!

And, a sustained drop of 5% of fat bodyweight itself has proven health benefits!

1.  Tip one:  If you drink alcohol, stick to one drink a day BEFORE dinner.

I tried drinking a half drink before and a half drink after instead of the full drink I wanted and always failed before dinner and about half the time after dinner just trying to drink a bit less.

The sleep specialist I saw, said I’d sleep measurably better if I only drank before dinner because the sleep disruption effect of the alcohol would have cleared enough earlier my sleep would be higher quality and more restorative.

WOW! I didn’t need to force myself to NOT have the full drink I wanted before dinner.  And after dinner I still felt enough good effects from the full drink before dinner, I’ve found it surprisingly doable to have none.  So, I’ve easily dropped from 10.5 drinks a week to 8!

A responsible and professional English anti-alcohol group was well informed enough to realize that some people are going to drink anyway.  So they worked with nutritionists to show exactly how much fat each drink every week added to how fat the person was in pounds: 1.5 pounds.

That means that the 2.5 drinks a week I’ve cut, now that I know how to sustain it will remove about 3.8 pounds of fat from my body over the next few months – AND with no other changes needed!

But I read a study recently that found that men in their prime earning years who do well financially and are in their late 30’s to late 50’s tend to drink 17 drinks a week.

What if that’s you?  The English data shows that if you cut to 7 or 8 a week by having just one before dinner, you’ll lose 13.5 to 15 pounds  -- AND with no other changes needed!

I even know of such a man who did just that.  He founded the online publication Early to Rise.

Fat loss coach Isabel de Los Rios who he consulted about losing 25 to 40 pounds made this exact recommendation as one of her must do actions.  He took her advice and lost the fat weight he wanted to lose!  And, he was drinking the 17 drinks a week before. 

That means about HALF his success was from just using this one tip!

2.  Some people like potatoes and want to keep eating them and still become less fat.

And, surprisingly one study showed more fat loss in people who ate potatoes every day.

(The two kinds of carbs that seem to help fat loss are resistant starch and soluble fiber such as found in beans and lentils and apples.  You do NOT need to eat whole grains for either. 

Potatoes are high in resistant starch; and that means that preparing them and eating them using these 8 strategies gives you the resistant starch in a way that DOES help fat loss.)

BUT, most people who eat potatoes every day are fat.  And most of them who keep eating potatoes stay fat!

Here’s the second tip, there IS a set of things that enable you to have potatoes as often as every day and stay lean or keep losing fat!

It was in an Early to Rise email for Thursday 11-12-2015 and provided by Chef GUI ALINAT.

First, and separate from the tip, for health reasons ONLY eat potatoes of any kind if they are organic. 

The potatoes that are not organic are so heavily sprayed with herbicides and pesticides that many of the growers of potatoes used for French Fries and Potato chips will NOT eat any of their own potatoes or things made from them. 

(Mercifully, Whole Foods sells organic potatoes!)

(My comments on the Chef’s 7 methods are in the ()’s though some of them include his reasons.)

1.  “Choose small, baby potatoes only.” 

(They are lower glycemic than larger ones; and you can get red and “new” and Yukon gold small potatoes that are organic from Whole Foods.)

2.  “Avoid large, baking potatoes at all costs.  These are much higher glycemic than small potatoes.”  (His point.  Worse, if peeled, they become even more glycemic making them quite fattening and possibly diabetes causing – my point!)

3.  “Steam potatoes only. Do NOT bake, boil, sauté, or mash them.”  (Using a slow cooker such as a Crock Pot also works and sautéing them for a brief enough time at a temperature well below the smoke point of the extra virgin olive oil or coconut oil it’s best to use

may also be good enough.)

4.  “Keep potatoes as undercooked as possible.”  (This goes with 3.  Not only does this avoid glycated compounds that cause health problems and speed aging, the Chef notes this helps keep the small potatoes quite a bit lower glycemic.)

5.  “Do NOT peel. Keep the skin on and eat the skin.” (Yet another way to keep them lower glycemic.  It also adds fiber and nutrition and is safe to do if the potatoes are organic.

6.  “If possible, eat potatoes cold rather than hot. For instance make a salad with the fat-burning dressing in my book (page 89). Thanks to a process known as “retrogradation,” the Glycemic Index actually decreases when starch-based ingredients like potatoes are cooked, then chilled.

Take advantage of it.” 

(THIS one is at least half the effect of this list I think!

I even once read that cooking potatoes and then chilling them in the refrigerator overnight and eating them cold the next day cut their glycemic index at least in half!)

7.  “Add fiber to the potato dish you are preparing with kale, spinach, broccoli, or sunflower seeds.”  

(It’s quite important to only do this with organic greens.

And spinach comes with so much sandy grit it’s important to wash it thoroughly in water at least twice and sometimes three times.

Each of these low calorie, very high nutrition foods are super foods.

This includes spinach. 

It turns out the creator of the old cartoon Popeye was actually correct! 

Eating raw spinach or having it in a blender drink has tested to increase athletic performance!)

These first 7 are from the Chef’s article.  The eighth one below is somewhat similar to his # 7; but it’s one I’ve learned.

8.  Instead of or in addition to number 7, you can eat the cold potatoes with a health OK oil or fat or add foods that contain one:

To the cold potatoes or the cold potatoes plus salad greens -- add extra virgin olive oil and/or avocado or guacamole, grass fed cheese or Kerrygold butter from grass fed cows, and/or raw unsalted shelled nuts such as slivered almonds, walnuts, &/or pecans.

 Note that the potatoes should be served cold; but the cheese or butter you put on it can be melted or partly melted.

Just as the glycemic impact of the cold potatoes is cut by the fiber in the salad ingredients, it also is reduced by adding these ingredients.

Tip 3:  You may be able to lose fat with a method that works separately from or in addition to everything else you do.

Drink a large serving of organic, ceremony quality, Matcha green tea each morning.

Organic, ceremony grade, matcha green tea 

         has enough ECGC to cut cortisol and may boost metabolism by 5 to 10%!

“Matcha has 57.4 mg per gram of ECGC.  That's 137 times one cup of brewed green tea.  

So a cup of matcha might have 10 times as much.

ECGC cuts cortisol which adds belly fat 

AND matcha green tea can rev your metabolism up by a whopping 40%, thanks to the highly concentrated EGCG.

That sounds too high to me to be from actual research or likely to happen in practice.

But that may might mean that adding a cup's worth of matcha to my first of the day green tea would actually boost mine by a real 5% -- or do the same for you.

IF SO, losing that 8.4 pounds would get me a third of my 24 lb fat loss and with the cortisol reduction I might lose up to an inch off my waist!

In your case, to see what this could do, divide your current weight by 20.

Losing 5 to 10% of your bodyweight as fat and that you keep off has significant health benefits.

I’ve NOT tested this one. 

But if it works as a way to add on that much fat loss, 5 to 10 % of your bodyweight as fat, to everything else you do, it could be really worth doing.