Boost your metabolism to lose fat, part 2.....

Today's post:  Thursday, 2-2-2017

In some ways there are two basics for permanent fat loss.

1.  Stop routinely ingesting the things that reliably fatten you.

Then you stop making the problem worse!

2.  Boost your metabolism so you burn more calories twenty-four hours a day.

Over time that will remove your excess fat.

People who succeed at anything we now know take consistent action and keep doing it;

-- and they use what Reverend Bob Schuler called “experimental persistence”: They not only keep at things until they get the results they want, they take action and test things; they scrap the things that fail but learn from what happens, they look for new things to try and try them, they put in the time as a priority increasing their abilities and trying again. 

A new book describing this is called “Grit.” 

Use that on these two actions and you can lose fat and keep it off!

The post this time is, Part 2 of:

2.  Boost your metabolism so you burn more calories twenty-four hours a day.

Over time that will remove your excess fat.

There are four ways to do that:

a) Increase your muscle mass and healthy bone mass. AND, do the things that prevent losing them.  (This Part 2 continues this section.)  [See below.]

b) Make sure your thyroid levels which control your metabolism are high enough to give you energy and burn fat and NOT low enough to do the reverse. 

AND, make sure your mitochondria that are the power centers for each of your cells that supply their energy remain plentiful and healthy. This ALSO slows aging; and the way that MSG & its cousins reliably fatten apparently is to do the reverse!

c)  Eat the foods that actually have tested to enable you to eat more calories and food -- yet be lighter AND less fat!  (There ARE some; and eating them is a key to losing fat you keep off because you can do it without excess hunger.)

d) Ensure that the bacteria in your gut aren’t making sure you gain and store fat. 

(Research shows that if you import otherwise healthy gut bacteria to cure the dangerous C. Difficile infection but do so from a fat person, these gut bacteria then make YOU fat.

And, more recent research has found that when you lose fat even without triggering the low energy plus increase in hunger of the famine response by using calorie cut backs only some days each week or by properly done fasting, a separate genetic program causes those same bacteria to increase unless it’s blocked.)

 Here they are:

a) Increase your muscle mass and healthy bone mass. AND, do the things that prevent losing them.

Effective strength training is the foundation to do this.

Last Thursday our post was on how strength training both can boost your metabolism AND prevent the reduction in metabolism people who don’t do strength training get that gradually makes them fatter on the same food that once did not!

Two other kinds of exercise can increase your metabolism and prevent your metabolism from going down.

There are several versions of vigorous cardio that work.  Like strength training, they are safest when you start at a level that is quite easy and for less time than you could easily do.  AND, they work best when you gradually go faster or for a bit longer or reduce the rests in between vigorous parts.  You can also go from one to two to three sets as long as your total time for your whole session is no longer than 20 minutes.

One version is to rest completely between the vigorous parts called interval cardio.  The other version is to keep going but rest between the vigorous parts, variable but vigorous cardio.

Doing a brief set of very vigorous jump rope and then resting totally before the next set is interval cardio.

Dr Al Sears does this with calisthenics in his PACE program.

The running 100 meter or 220 yard dashes, resting, and then doing another etc is what sprinters do and is interval cardio.

Walking or running where you vary between very vigorous sections and slower sections is vigorous cardio.

If you have a safe place to do this kind of walking for as little as 7 minutes a time for four days a week,  this can give you enough cardio to be significant and benefit your health.  (I saw a study on Medical News Today that reported just that.  Since I had just added such walks to my strength training and interval cardio, that was good news indeed!)

Besides such vigorous cardio, simply spending time almost every day doing things as you stand tends to keep up your bone strength and the muscles in your lower back, legs, and buttocks from going down.

Housework that you do yourself each day often provides this.  Cooking, doing the dishes, doing the laundry and taking the clean clothes and storing them all gives you this kind of exercise.

For maintaining your bone strength, the calcium in the foods you eat and the small amount in a daily multivitamin plus minerals supplement you may already take is plenty.  That tends to be true and most true if you do the strength training or cardio on your feet or chores on your feet that we just described

We also know several ways to add to this effect and what to stop doing that remove bone mass and strength and the metabolism of this healthy bone.

Taking 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 helps calcium go into your bones.

AND, adding a daily supplement of vitamin K2 has been found to cause your body to add calcium to bone growth and replacement and REMOVE it from your blood vessels.

Eating foods high in magnesium and/or taking 400 mg to 800 mg a day of magnesium has also been found to be essential to maintaining bone mass and strength.  It turns out to be MUCH more effective and important for strong bones than calcium.

Lastly taking 3 mg a day of boron gives you strong bones that are hard to break and are dense enough on their surface that cancers often cannot get into them to cause bone cancer.

The combination of these foods and supplements with the exercises that add to or maintain bone strength is quite effective.  People who do both have bones that burn more calories than people who do not!

Both men and women who do both are much less likely to get osteoporosis and some have even reversed it in its early stages!

But there IS one more thing to NOT do that is essential to avoid REMOVING bone strength!

Simply, never, ever drink soft drinks!

In addition to how dreadfully fattening they are, they all remove bone mass from your bones.

Both diet and regular soft drinks are fizzy, carbonated drinks.  This means every single soft drink has carbonic acid and tends to remove a bit of bone every time you drink one.

AND, this even far worse with cola soft drinks which all have the much stronger phosphoric acid!

In short, soft drinks also fatten by removing healthy bone mass that burns calories!

Note that this is just as true for diet soft drinks as it is for regular ones.

They are well engineered to taste good; but for health and losing fat you keep off the only safe intake of soft drinks either regular or diet is ZERO!

*Women just starting menopause and after menopause, tend to have reduced estrogen which reduces bone mass and density.

Doing ALL the things above can prevent this bone loss in many women.

Women just starting menopause also tend to have increased chronic inflammation.  Slamming that to a stop by doing ALL the parts of a low inflammation lifestyle can prevent that many kinds of health harm this high chronic inflammation causes.

This reduces the loss of bone somewhat; but it makes a huge difference in getting less night sweats, insomnia, hot flashes AND heart disease, breast and ovarian cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease!

To do this, add ginger and turmeric -- and curcumin supplements to eating the foods that reduce inflammation listed in our health OK foods pyramid and completely STOP the foods that cause inflammation we list in the fattening foods to STOP eating post!

(The best resource for why this is so and more on how to do it is the book:

“Anticancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber.”

I’ve had other sources since with the same and added information.  But Dr Servan-Schreiber’s book was where I learned this initially and is still the one best resource for it!)

AND, if you do follow ALL the parts of the low inflammation lifestyle, there were studies that came out showing that continuing to take replacement estrogen then becomes safe to take which will help maintain bone strength.  Lastly, taking the bioidentical estrogen looks likely to work as well and be even less likely to cause health problems.

Lastly, the facts suggest that it is extremely unwise to take the drugs for osteoporosis.

They have dreadful quality of life and health harming side effects.

But they also do NOT maintain the healthy metabolism of your bones nor do they make your bones harder to break!

They prevent the natural increase in bone mass AND make harder but brittle bones that when they do break cause devastating injury.