How to improve your fatloss efforts....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 6-30-2016

I’d planned this post on another topic.  But I found something so well done and clear that can help people start or improve their fat loss efforts, it took priority!

Here it is:

Hector Santiago, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, points out that even a small promise kept can work wonders.

“I improve my game by one step at a time,” Santiago says. “I constantly make small adjustments when I have to and repeat the ones that work until they become habits. The result is my skills get better and I’m a better player.

” Santiago says that a basic health pledge can work the same way. “Playing baseball has shown me that better choices don’t have to be huge to get good results. A promise to make simple health improvements in your daily routine and sticking to them will pay off. You don’t have to promise to run a marathon right off the bat. Steady dedication wins more pennants than home runs.”

From:  “Pledge4Health: Take the Pledge and Turn Health Goals into Reality”

by: Michael Stouder, MD  06/27/2016

This is great advice!

Know what works well now and ensure you keep doing it until it becomes a habit.

Know what needs to be fixed or needs to be replaced with something more effective;

try some solutions;

then add the solutions that work to the things you ensure you keep doing until they too become habits.

Do this and your performance will improve.  Keep doing this and your performance will improve a lot!

1.  Some fat loss actions are like whether or not pitcher Santiago shows up to work or not.

Some foods and drinks do little more than fatten you and enrich the providers.

Soft drinks – both diet and regular and any refined grain food including chips and fries and packaged snacks and desserts and most refined grain breads are all fat gain foods.  Excessive sugar and artificial sweeteners also test to be in this group.

Simply learning what they are and stopping them all is mandatory.

Not doing so is as effective for fat loss as not showing up to pitch is to pitchers like Hector Santiago. 

2.  Similar to this and very often in the SAME foods and drinks is stopping any foods or drinks that contain ingredients that harm your health and waste your calorie intake on foods that make you sick.

Many of these ingredients are proven heart attack starters.  Others tend to cause Alzheimer’s disease and MS and cancers.  Some cause fatty liver which can be fatal too.

Why waste your calories on these things when there are so many good for you foods and drinks it’s hard to eat as many as you’d like without taking in too many calories??

Simply learning what they are and stopping them all is mandatory.

Not doing so is as effective for fat loss as not showing up to pitch is to pitchers like Hector Santiago. 

In addition, because they are almost all fattening too, every time you turn down consuming them because you do not WANT heart attacks or mental decline etc, you just successfully avoided add those calories to the fat you wish to be rid of!

Here are a few of those: 

High fructose corn syrup; other forms of free fructose such as agave nectar, fruit juice, fruit juice concentrate, and powdered fructose.

Refined grain hybrid wheat and even whole grain hybrid wheat also cause disease, particularly type 2 diabetes and heart disease.  Hybrid wheat also tends to CAUSE harmful and unpleasant reactions to gluten.

Most other grains tend to cause similar problems as they also tend to boost blood sugar and triglycerides.   That helps cause diabetes and heart disease too.

Rice does this and is also fattening AND currently has health damaging amounts of arsenic.

The book Anticancer documents that the excessive omega 6 oils in grains and oils made from grains causes high chronic inflammation which helps cause heart disease and some cancers and helps cause Alzheimer’s disease.

So soy oil and corn oil and canola oil also help cause disease.

So, minimizing all other grains is also wise.  Oatmeal, quinoa, barley, and buckwheat may be OK for some people in moderation and not as fattening or harmful as other grains. 

Artificial sweeteners belong here too.  The Center for Science in the Public Interest rates them all as mildly carcinogenic.  Sucralose and possibly others kill your probiotic bacteria which can result in disease and gut bacteria that keep you fat.  Aspartame has cause the symptoms of MS which leave when people stop ingesting it; and it may cause MS and other autoimmune diseases if you ingest it too many years.  The capper is that they reliably fatten MORE than sugar does.  Worse they add to your belly fat and visceral fat more than sugar.

MSG.  Not only has MSG been implicated as being a cause of Alzheimer’s disease and autoimmune disease and maybe autism, it too fattens the people who ingest it. 

(The people who ingest MSG are fatter even than people who take in the same number of calories but who eat no MSG!)

Hydrogenated oils also belong here!  Simply put, they have been directly proven to be heart attack starters causing your LDL to become the small particle kind that causes heart disease!

How much causing of heart disease do you want to do?  If you are like me, the answer is zero!

In fact, if you don’t want heart disease the only safe intake of hydrogenated oils is also zero!

You can still find sources today that suggest eating less hydrogenated oils.  That advice is harmful if you follow it.  It’s flat out totally incorrect!

Here’s why:  Manmade hydrogenated oils are not things your body processes well.  So when you ingest some your body only gets rid of part of it each day.  One source says it takes about a month before it’s all gone.

So if you eat just a bit of hydrogenated oils EVERY DAY, by the end of a month you have enough build up of this heart attack starter to do you real harm!

To make room for the fats and oils that support good health from olives and nuts and avocados and wild caught fish and coconuts, and animals only fed their natural diet, it makes sense to cut ALL of the grain oils and hydrogenated oils from what you eat.

3.  People who eat a high protein diet and do regular strength training and some high intensity short duration cardio AND cut back on calories enough to lose fat, get three huge benefits:

ALL of the weight they lose is fat!

Their health improves and their aging slows.

And best of all, they can cut fewer calories and eat more and still lose fat!

Finding versions of these exercises that you can do and keep doing – and doing better is challenging.

It’s certainly worth it for health and permanent fat loss.

This is where Hector Santiago’s advice is very valuable:

““Playing baseball has shown me that better choices don’t have to be huge to get good results. A promise to make simple health improvements in your daily routine and sticking to them will pay off. You don’t have to promise to run a marathon right off the bat. Steady dedication wins more pennants than home runs.”

Try some cardio that is vigorous that you build up to very gradually.  Rest or slow down after you begin to be out of breath or about 30 seconds later whichever comes first.  Build up to 3 to 6 of these each time or day you do them.  And do them 3 or 4 days a week.

Do effective strength training at least two days a week with at least one day between sessions.  Find a way to do exercises that work the big muscles of your lower back and butt, and legs.

Both in direct calorie burn and in building muscle so those parts of you burn more calories 24 hours a day, these are the muscles that will get results.

I have found that having an exercise session the same weekday each week by routine is a great way to ensure you keep doing this. Every Weds and Friday morning I do an 8 minute cardio session and on Saturday morning I do half an hour of slow rep strength training.  This is an easy routine to keep doing! 

And, it is similarly well known that doing your exercise sessions or most of them early enough each morning before the variable demands of your day can prevent them REALLY helps.

The third way to make this reliable is to have journal where you keep a brief record each time you exercise. This not only helps your maintain your routine, it motivates you when you see your progress over time,

4.  Did you know that there is a way to ensure good health that makes fat loss so easy many people lose 25 pounds of fat with no other effort when they begin it?

There is! Like exercise, it is spectacularly effective in protecting your health too.

But also like exercise, if you haven’t been doing it, it takes some real effort to build up to doing it enough.

This is another area where Hector Santiago’s advice is very valuable:

““Playing baseball has shown me that better choices don’t have to be huge to get good results. A promise to make simple health improvements in your daily routine and sticking to them will pay off. You don’t have to promise to run a marathon right off the bat. Steady dedication wins more pennants than home runs.”

UK researchers found that people who eat 6 or more servings of real vegetables each day (NOT potatoes or French Fries or chips) are something like 40% less likely to die from any cause than people who don’t.

It cuts their death rate from heart disease and strokes and cancer too!

The researchers also found that ONE serving of a whole fresh fruit each day cut BOTH the ischemic or obstructive kind of strokes and was even better at cutting the bleeding in the brain hemorrhagic strokes – AND cut the death rate from them too!

So begin to find ways to eat vegetables each day that you continue to do as a weekly and daily routine.

Cruciferous vegetables that are raw or lightly steamed also prevent cancer.

Greens and yellow and organge vegetables high in carotenes protect you best if cooked or pureed and eaten with extra virgin olive oil or other health OK oil because it makes the carotenes bioavailable.  Those carotenes also prevent cancer; keep you healthy overall; and even make you LOOK healthier.

Onions and garlic help prevent heart disease and the sulfur in them helps keep your joints from causing you pain.  Skillfully used, they can help savory foods taste really good.

These foods are super high in nutrition and water and fiber and low in calories.

This is so effective for fat loss, almost everyone who eats both that much organic vegetables and fruit each day will not stay fat AND if they have lost fat, they are much LESS likely to gain any back.

Improving in each of these areas and maintain the actions that are effective DOES take effort.

Learn what works well for you now and ensure you keep doing it until it becomes a habit.

Discover what needs to be fixed or needs to be replaced with something more effective;

try some solutions;

then add the solutions that work to the things you ensure you keep doing until they too become habits.

And remember:

Hector Santiago, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, points out that even a small promise kept can work wonders.

“I improve my game by one step at a time,” Santiago says. “I constantly make small adjustments when I have to and repeat the ones that work until they become habits. The result is my skills get better and I’m a better player.

” Santiago says that a basic health pledge can work the same way. “Playing baseball has shown me that better choices don’t have to be huge to get good results. A promise to make simple health improvements in your daily routine and sticking to them will pay off. You don’t have to promise to run a marathon right off the bat. Steady dedication wins more pennants than home runs.”