Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 5....

Today's Post: Thursday, 12-29-2011

We posted on solutions to 3 of the most important problems in part 1 on Tuesday, 12-20-2011, last week.

1. Effective fat loss plans that do not turn on your body’s famine response succeed and you can keep the fat off. Diet, temporary starvation routines always turn on the famine response and fail. That post has the solutions that make up an effective fat loss plan.

2. Foods and drinks most people now think of as normal that did not exist or didn’t exist at all in their current forms 100 years ago. But they are NOT normal. That post has a bit about how that happened and why virtually avoiding all these foods and drinks makes hunger free fat loss almost easy. People who have been consuming a lot of these can lose tens of pounds with almost no other changes.

3. A key strategy in a fat loss plan that does not turn on your body’s famine response is to exercise. But finding time to exercise can be quite challenging. The post last Tuesday had 3 proven ways to find the time to exercise.

Last Thursday’s post began solutions to 3 more common fat loss problems.

4. Stress triggered eating.

5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat.

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

Last Thursday’s post covered 4. Stress triggered eating -- and solutions to keep it from sabotaging you.

Friday last week we covered 5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat --
and how to overcome the effects of that.

If your friends, family, and neighbors are fat, it can be much harder to lose fat yourself. But there are three ways to do it. And, of those there are many ways to keep enjoying your current friends while being more effective influencing them than the other way around. That post had those solutions.

And, on Tuesday this week, we posted on how to keep yourself on track. That about doubles your chance of success.

And, we posted on how to set up a support system making regular use of such supportive people and information. That too will at least double your chances of success.

Doing both, if you do them well and you keep doing it, it will at least multiply your chances at success by over 4 times. For many people doing both will guarantee your success.

Today, we add a bonus post to this series. When I decided to do this series I wrote down 6 common fat loss problems to give solutions to.

The last post, how to ensure you keep going I put in as the 6th problem to solve because I lost my original list of 6. And, I found I could only remember 5.

I remembered the first 5; posted on those; did the last post about how to virtually ensure success by both managing it yourself and getting skilled and supportive outside help.

Today, I was doing an end of the year clean up at work and found the original 6th problem.

It was too much sitting!

Until a hundred years ago most people didn’t sit much and before 1,000 years ago very few people sat more than 4 or 5 hours a day. Modern man evolved something like 30,000 years ago; and our primate ancestors go back over a million years. Most of them sat very little each day!

Today, it has become common for people to sit for 9 to over 12 hours a day.

That’s a huge difference in activity level and average blood circulation during each day.

The calories burned difference and the less exercised muscles that has caused are two of the reasons far more people are fatter than they were on the average before a 100 years ago.

But that’s far from all.

First, if you sit much over 6 hours a day, your risk of virtually everything you’d like to avoid goes up.

This includes aging, heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, and sexual dysfunction. It also includes brain shrinkage, memory problems, and also is a contributing cause of Alzheimer’s disease.

Second, fatter people sit even more than normal weight people. One study found that obese, definitely fat, people sat an average of 9.5 hours a day while normal weight people sat an average of 7.0 hours a day.

That 2.5 hour a day difference is quite large. Even very light activity burns at least 100 calories an hour more than sitting. Over a week’s time, it adds up to 1750 calories a week. That’s about the calories in half a pound of body fat.

If two people eat the same number of calories for a year and the one who sat 7 hours a day was the same weight at the end of the year, the one who sat 9.5 hours would be 26 pounds fatter!

Mercifully the person sitting more usually tends to eat less, so it’s usually not that bad.

BUT, for one cause of sitting more, it is often worse!

And, the studies reflect that too. People who watch TV less than 14 hours a week are routinely far less fat on the average than people who watch TV over 28 hours a week.

Watching that 2 hours more of TV tends to build in more sitting time. But it’s even worse than that for three reasons.

You sit so quietly while watching TV, you burn less calories than while you are sleeping!

Second, the ads on commercial TV specialize in advertising the bad for you and fattening foods and drinks that you should virtually write off if you want hunger free fat loss.

Third, if you eat any kind of snack – even healthier ones, let alone fattening ones -- while you watch TV, you simply eat on automatic pilot. You also even keep eating when, had you been paying attention, you’d have noticed you were no longer hungry and were full!

Earlier in this series under how to find time to exercise, we posted on two ways to turn TV time into exercise time.

One way is to turn off the TV and do some kind of vigorous exercises such as strength training or interval cardio or moderate exercises like walking, swimming, or gardening for longer times.

The other way is to set up some kind of exerciser you can use while you watch TV.

There are two other solutions.

Program in regular breaks in your sitting so you don’t just stay totally still for more than an hour or two.

Getting up to get yourself coffee, tea, or water throughout the day keeps you hydrated and gets you up to do it. But it gets you up a second time to visit the bathroom too!

I also got the idea to do about 30 seconds of a moderate exercise a few times a day. Good idea; but a few weeks later, I realized I’d done it once on the day I thought of it and never did it again!

I’ve since put in a double reminder and do it 5 times virtually every weekday.

When I get up to get a cup of tea or green tea, right then or when I finish the cup, I do the short exercise session. AND, I make a mark in my special logbook for that day. That combination is very effective. And only on the very busiest days do I fail to do it all 5 times.

But there is more coming!

What if you could burn 50 to 100 calories for at least half of your sitting time too?!

An expensive set up where you can work on your computer and on your phone while walking, a “walking desk”, has been tried. It does work; but it’s expensive for the purpose and it can be tiring or can distract you from your work.

Eventually I personally plan to get a specialized minibike or other exerciser I can use while seated at my desk and another I can use while reading at home.

They don’t yet make those that I know of but most people today need them.

Given the health harm of sitting too much and how many people do that, these minibikes and chairs that match them well are coming soon I think.

Walking burns about 300 calories an hour. (200 if you are skinny and walk slowly to over 500 if you walk really fast or walk somewhat fast but are much heavier.)

Using a seated minibike exerciser that you use much less effort on but keep moving slowly most of the time you sit can easily burn 50 calories an hour.

Then if like many people today you sit for 6 hours a day, you could easily add an extra 2100 calories a week by using a seated minibike exerciser most of the time you sit at home or at work. That would help people lose about 2 and a half pounds a month for a few months once they got into the habit of always using one. Then they’d keep it off!

(If I’d used one of the seated minibikes since I began my current fatloss plan, I’d still need to add the extra muscle to be at my goal weight. But I’d be trying to add muscle weight to get back UP to my goal weight! That’s because I’d be 10 to 20 pounds less fat. I’m only 5 pounds over my goal weight now; but my waist is still too fat!)

I’ve also had a new idea. Before sewing machines had electric power, they had an under the work area treadle that was designed to be effective but avoid distracting the person sewing from their sewing.

It may be possible to find an antique sewing machine and find a manufacturer to make a design of that treadle mechanism that would do the same for people working at a desk.

It’s proven to do the job needed in actual use!

But until those become available for $69.38 at WalMart or $79.95 at Big 5 Sporting Goods, by all means do the other things in this post! They will help.

Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 4....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-27-2011

We posted on solutions to 3 of the most important problems in part one last Tuesday, 12-20-2011.

1. Effective fat loss plans that do not turn on your body’s famine response succeed and you can keep the fat off. Diet, temporary starvation routines always turn on the famine response and fail. That post has the solutions that make up an effective fat loss plan.

2. Foods and drinks most people now think of as normal that did not exist or didn’t exist at all in their current forms 100 years ago. But they are NOT normal. That post has a bit about how that happened and why virtually avoiding all these foods and drinks makes hunger free fat loss almost easy. People who have been consuming a lot of these can lose tens of pounds with almost no other changes.

3. A key strategy in a fat loss plan that does not turn on your body’s famine response is to exercise. But finding time to exercise can be quite challenging. The post last Tuesday had 3 proven ways to find the time to exercise.

Last Thursday’s post began solutions to 3 more common fat loss problems.

4. Stress triggered eating.

5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat.

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

Last Thursday’s post covered 4. Stress triggered eating -- and solutions to keep it from sabotaging you.

Friday last week we covered 5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat --
and how to overcome the effects of that.

If your friends, family, and neighbors are fat, it can be much harder to lose fat yourself. But there are three ways to do it. And, of those there are many ways to keep enjoying your current friends while being more effective influencing them than the other way around. That post had those solutions.

This time we’ll cover how to set up a support system making regular use of such supportive people and information. It will at least double your chances of success. And, if it’s done well and you keep using it, it will virtually guarantee your success.

It’s a key part of

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

These basic three principles were in the first post in this series and all the others.

Plan to upgrade your lifestyle permanently to one that protects your health and supports your health without hunger. Instead of a temporary plan, a diet, that gets temporary results if any, focus on doing sustainable upgrades.

Do so in a way that does trim off some calories you were taking in and burns more while doing so in ways that avoid making you unusually hungry all the time.

Always aim to do these things in ways YOU find sustainable. (Not being too hungry all the time makes that much easier.)

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

The first part is the focus and controls you build into your life yourself.

The first way to do that and double your chances of success is to keep track regularly.

Exercise is a key part of staying healthy and losing fat without hunger. People who keep a logbook of their exercise they use at each session they do right then as they exercise each time, are more than twice as likely to keep exercising. I use a system that enables writing in mine to just a few seconds for each exercise.

Measuring your waist and hips and chest and your weight on the scale on the same day of the week or the same day of the week once a month and analyzing what went right or less than OK to cause that period’s results also can double your results. (My own monthly report was a post last week.)

If you eat a very varied diet, it can help to keep a similar log for what you eat.

But having planned variation for each breakfast and each weekday lunch and many weekday dinners where you eat what you planned and eating almost only the right kinds of food the rest the time is easier on you. You just have the meals you planned and by adding some variation but often eating the same foods for the same meals each weekday, you know what you ate without having to take the extra time to record it.

Having those planned meals also makes it much easier to shop for your food too.

You do keep control of what you eat that way; but save the time the more complex logs of eating would require.

Controlling your exercise, managing your food intake, and monitoring your progress taken together can ensure your long term success.

But if you aren’t used to doing that sort of thing or your motivation to stay on course is variable, it can more than triple your success chances to have regular support for your efforts.

Such support can help you do this kind of management. It can encourage you to continue. It can provide solutions to the problems that you need help with.

Jillian Michaels is not perfect. But she does have a decent online support system for a relatively modest fee. She does particularly well for women who find her and her successful students inspiring and who need specific exercises and eating plans to get them going.

Weight Watchers has both an online program and a weekly meeting you can attend in person. People who need to add calorie cut backs to exercise and eating foods that support your health can do well with Weight Watchers. And people who need in person support and more productive thinking styles can do well with their weekly meetings. The meeting leaders can give you the emotional boost and the positive way to think about problems and solutions you need.

Weight Watchers does have some problems but has improved in many of those areas. They recommend more of a calorie cut back than is wise for permanent fat loss to ensure people get fast enough results they don’t drop out. (I found that by adding more nonstarchy vegetables, a zero point food, and aiming for a smaller cut back, and continuing to exercise, I was able to lose more fat than the cut back looked likely to deliver.)

Though they have gotten more proactive at encouraging people to delete fattening foods and drinks than they were, they still don’t emphasize that enough nor cutting back on all grains. They also don’t emphasize exercise enough. And, for many kinds of fruit, it may have been a mistake to list them as zero point foods.

But if you join and use either Jillian Michael’s system or Weight Watchers, by adding our information to their system you can do well in improving your health, losing fat, and keeping it off.

We are working to design and make our own online support system available too.

To access that when it becomes available, just keep reading our posts and our fat loss posts in particular. We will announce it on our posts when it’s ready; and it will be available through its own link from our posts.

Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 3....

Today's Post: Friday, 12-23-2011

We posted on solutions to 3 of the most important problems in part one last Tuesday, 12-20-2011.

1. Effective fat loss plans that do not turn on your body’s famine response succeed and you can keep the fat off. Diet, temporary starvation routines always turn on the famine response and fail. That post has the solutions that make up an effective fat loss plan.

2. Foods and drinks most people now think of as normal that did not exist or didn’t exist at all in their current forms 100 years ago. But they are NOT normal. That post has a bit about how that happened and why virtually avoiding all these foods and drinks makes hunger free fat loss almost easy. People who have been consuming a lot of these can lose tens of pounds with almost no other changes.

3. A key strategy in a fat loss plan that does not turn on your body’s famine response is to exercise. But finding time to exercise can be quite challenging. The post last Tuesday had 3 proven ways to find the time to exercise.

Last Thursday’s post began solutions to 3 more common fat loss problems.

4. Stress triggered eating.

5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat.

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

It covered 4. Stress triggered eating -- and solutions to keep it from sabotaging you.

This time we’ll cover 5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat --
and how to overcome the effects of that.

This one can be quite challenging for many reasons.

For family members who still think junky foods and drinks are normal and want to keep eating them or who would dislike have being fat uncomfortably brought to their attention who are now ignoring it and those who both fail to support you or make it harder for you for whatever reason, some of these solutions will help.

The good news is that in many families where the person who lost weight is clearly happier and continues to be nice to the other people in the family, the influence goes the other way! You can inspire them to lose fat too!

But for bad family situations you need the last solution we’ll cover next week which is ways to get outside support by people who want you to lose fat.

a) The first idea is to get a firm grip on the fact that if you learn how to keep yourself healthy and lose fat and keep it off AND do it and keep doing it, you join a new and elite group of people.

You’ll keep your family and many of your friends. But you will now belong to a new group of people who include championship athletes, doctors who help their patients prevent diseases, personal trainers, health writers, and health coaches.

You’ll also fit better with groups of people who do the best in life including college professors, successful entrepreneurs and sales people, CEO’s and other executives, other achievers, and other college educated people. That’s because each of these groups is more likely than average to be in the new group you are joining.

People enjoy being members of an elite. And this is an elite you can join by choosing to do so and doing the actions necessary.

b) Find ways to socialize with your friends and acquaintances that support them but do not support their bad eating habits or lack of exercise. And, begin to avoid some situations where they would want you to eat badly with them.

If they are active on Facebook, do some of your socializing there.

Invite them to go with you on short hikes in interesting or beautiful places. Then let them set the pace.

Instead of going to their home, when you can, meet them at a restaurant at which there are food choices that fit what you need as well as the standard fare.

Meet them at potluck events where you can bring health OK foods you can eat and pick out what foods you’ll eat.

If you go to their home to eat, be an unusually friendly and polite guest and make the conversation fun and interesting for them. But take small servings of foods you shouldn’t eat and say if they taste good; but leave some of the most fattening stuff.

But do NOT try to sell them there on why to eat the way you do. ONLY do that if once you do lose enough fat it’s noticeable and either they ask how you are doing it or they say yes when you ask if they would like to do as you have done.

Focus on the things about that friend that you like and make the meal a positive event and focus on the things you have in common.

You’ll keep the friendship and be MORE likely to be positive example to them!

So by socializing some by Facebook and email; eating with them at locations that easily allow them and you to eat the way you want; and making the good times you share more important than the food when you eat at their place, you can keep the friendship and NOT have your fat loss derailed or your health harmed.

c) If you need to and can do so, spend some time socializing with people like personal trainers or people who have been going the gym for years and look like it in addition to your fatter friends.

Read books about health and fat loss. Read this blog when the topic interests you.

That way part of your thinking, social input, and social modeling is on people who already are the way you are becoming yourself.

Next time we’ll cover how to set up a support system making regular use of such supportive people and information. It will at least double your chances of success. And, if it’s done well and you keep using it, it will virtually guarantee your success.

Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 2....

Today's Post: Thursday, 12-22-2011

We posted on solutions to 3 of the most important problems in part one last Tuesday, 12-20-2011.

1. Effective fat loss plans that do not turn on your body’s famine response succeed and you can keep the fat off. Diet, temporary starvation routines always turn on the famine response and fail. That post has the solutions that make up an effective fat loss plan.

2. Foods and drinks most people now think of as normal that did not exist or didn’t exist at all in their current forms 100 years ago. But they are NOT normal. That post has a bit about how that happened and why virtually avoiding all these foods and drinks makes hunger free fat loss almost easy. People who have been consuming a lot of these can lose tens of pounds with almost no other changes.

3. A key strategy in a fat loss plan that does not turn on your body’s famine response is to exercise. But finding time to exercise can be quite challenging. The post last Tuesday had 3 proven ways to find the time to exercise.

This post begins solutions to 3 more common fat loss problems.

4. Stress triggered eating.

5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat.

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.


4. Stress triggered eating.

Some stress is so severe that the shock and adrenalin response completely turn off your appetite.

But most of the stress people have is chronic and mild to severe. The effect of this kind of stress is similar to the effects of the famine response.

People become more hungry for “comfort” foods that may be from the not really normal list and horribly fattening. It always tends to cause more appetite for sugary and fattier foods.

There are two ways to beat it.

Be less stressed. And, avoid this effect when you are stressed

Being less stressed IS possible. It’s not often easy. But there are ways you can have less stress. You can prevent some kinds of stress. You can escape or turn off some stressful problems, and you can turn off your body’s stress response.

The post we did: High leverage ways to live longer, part 2.... Thursday, 12-8-2011 covers these three methods in detail because people who do these 3 things age more slowly, have better health, and live longer.

Bonus for this post.: In that post we forgot three great ways to turn off your body’s stress response.

a) Believe it or not you can get quite substantial if brief stress relief AND wake up a bit too within a few seconds. You don’t even have to learn how because it was already wired in when you were born! Just take a few seconds and yawn and stretch on purpose.

(People you know you or who see you as similar to them in some way will tend to yawn too and get the same stress relief often without even realizing it.)

b) Another blogger reminded me that watching videos or old movies you think are funny and laugh at also can be superb stress relief.

c) Doing a fast set of a relatively vigorous exercise also gives you almost instant if brief stress relief.

Being stressed without giving in to fattening foods also works.

If you follow the methods that cause hunger free fat loss that does not trigger your body’s stress response, your real hunger will be low or reasonable.

Saying no to stress caused eating is dramatically easier when your real hunger is not also high! Women who always eat a filling and health OK breakfast can say no to very fattening treats found in some offices MUCH more easily than women who haven’t eaten since last night as one example.

If you’ve eaten food that turns down your hunger and fills your tummy with some fiber too and some food that you enjoy eating, if you do reach for comfort food, it’s dramatically easier to have just a bit instead of a lot more.

Another way is to know the health harms of the ingredients of some of the worst treat foods. You may be hungrier for them from stress. But focusing on what those ingredients will do to you can make it much, much easier to pass completely.

The last way I’ll list is to refuse to eat treat foods that you don’t really like that much normally. Only eat those you normally really like. And just eat some while remembering that you are aiming to average mostly healthy and nonfattening foods.

Next time we’ll cover 5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat --
and how to overcome the effects of that.

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.

Hunger free weight loss solutions, part 5....

Today's Post: Thursday, 11-3-2011

It may seem impossible since most people have to cut the amount of calories they eat to lose fat.

And, most people who eat less get hungrier.

The good news is that there are several basic strategies that work.

The even better news is that learning to do them and doing enough of them consistently works!

You do lose fat. You don’t get that much hungrier than you did before. And, since everything you do is sustainable, once you do them by habit and make them a part of your upgraded lifestyle, the best news is that your fat loss will be permanent.

This is part 5 of this series. They are consecutive here, so you can scroll down to the first one if you want to read them from the beginning.

This time we’ll cover ways to do some extra calorie cutting but which do NOT cause your body to jump into famine response mode.

There are several ways to do this.

Each of them works best if you are already using all the methods in the first four parts.

Each of them has some way in which it cuts calories but not that much OR it cuts them a bit more but it lasts a day or less each time.

Also, it’s important that you find the one to use that fits your lifestyle and preferences.

a) One of the best that I’ve already lost fat and weight on the scale by using is to be a bit more strict every other day for Mondays to Fridays and on most Sundays and of course avoid going overboard much at any time. I also eat more as I did before but more carefully every other day Mondays to Fridays and every Saturday.

The basic principle has a name, the Every Other Day Diet. And, I learned the idea from Jon Benson who sells the eBook with that title.

It seems that if you get enough protein and nonstarchy vegetables EVERY day; but eat a version that has just a bit fewer calories every other day, each week you will eat fewer calories than you were before.

There are three huge benefits.

Since you only eat things that you find OK each day on each more disciplined day and less disciplined day alike, it’s far easier to keep doing it indefinitely to keep the fat off.

Since on the more disciplined day, every time it takes even a bit of extra effort, you know it’s just that day and you’ll eat a bit more tomorrow. That’s huge! It makes it ten times easier than being that disciplined EVERY day.

Best of all, Jon quotes studies that found that this style reduces your body’s famine response to near zero! And, I’ve seen similar studies since.

Al Sears, MD talks about how one critical reason to eat well on protein each day is so your body feels like you can currently depend on your food. If your body feels that good times are here and famine is NOT, it sees no need to slam your hunger up extra hard right away.

The same thing works with every other day cutting calories a bit extra. You are getting enough to fill your stomach and enough protein to eat every day.

And you are eating enough to be comfortable every other day and almost that much every other day. So your body realizes that though it does vary a bit --overall your food supply is trustworthy and you get enough to eat every week. Then it concludes you aren’t in famine and avoids slamming on the brakes.

b) Similar studies exist for different forms of having one day a week where you cut back more on calories.

Some people have found they can get away with a complete fast once a week. Personally, I’m not comfortable with that. And, I don’t trust it much for either the nutrition my body needs or it’s ability to stave off the famine response or the ability of most people to do it and keep it up.

But there are two versions that HAVE worked for people.

Partial fasting one day a week for two consecutive meals.

I’m using one of them every Thursday. Today is Thursday so today I’m using it! It’s partial fasting for two consecutive meals. Doing that once a week HAS been tested to work. So far, its mild enough I’ve been able to do it each week with no extra effort needed. If it makes the difference I expect at the end of the month, I’ll simply keep doing it every week from now on. (Thanksgiving later this month WILL be one of my few exceptions!)

I eat my normal every other day breakfast with plenty of protein. And at each time I normally take supplements as part of my nutrition, I take the exact same ones at that time.

But at lunch I have my broccoli florets only. I skip the other part of my lunch.

And, at dinner I eat puréed squash instead of three times that many calories of pinto beans. I still add some Parmesan cheese and some nonfat cottage cheese. This way between the puréed squash and tomato sauce I add, I have close to the normal amount of fiber and enough protein.

c) The other once a week cut back I found in a popular diet book by a French doctor. Sorry to say I’ve forgotten his name. But he teaches his version of the low carb, high fiber Atkins style diet. What he found was that on one day a week eating only protein foods and nonstarchy vegetables and ZERO carbs of any kind otherwise helped his patients succeed at permanent fatloss.

d) A fourth method besides every other day and a one day a week extra cut back and one protein & veggies only day a week was one a news writer found worked for him.

He really liked eating dinners out in the evening. But he had become too fat. Then he read that many peoples in history had survived for extended periods by being able to eat only nonstarchy vegetables each day. Bingo!

He decided to keep eating breakfast each day and eating lunch each day. BUT he began to ONLY eat nonstarchy vegetables for each breakfast and lunch. But the payoff for him was to keep eating dinners out. Of course he didn’t eat junk at dinner. But he did continue to eat well and eat what he liked. His excess fat left and has never come back! (This was my inspiration for eating only my raw broccoli florets on my one a day a week partial fast in fact.)

e) The fifth method also works for some people. First you upgrade from fattening foods to real food and eliminate the junk from what you eat and drink. Second you begin regular exercise each week including strength training. Then you eat every two hours and a small meal that only has real food.

This keeps the size of your stomach small which some studies have found helps with fat loss. It’s almost as if you do a partial stomach shrinking without surgery.

And since you tend to only start getting hungry MORE than two hours after eating, this method also tends to allow you to eat this way without extra hunger.

You do have to calculate the calories and measure the servings more exactly to ensure the small net calorie reduction you want. And, you have to have a lifestyle where setting up these meals and eating them on time each time is doable.

But the clients of the man and woman who teach this method have gotten excellent results!

People who use it do achieve hunger free fat loss.

I’m willing to make an extra effort. But this method is way more time consuming and complex and inflexible for me to even think about. And, I suspect it would be for most people.

But if you work from home or are retired or just like the idea a lot, you might want to try it out.

Clearly, it works. And, if it works for you at all, it’s likely you can keep doing it.

Summary:

There are literally hundreds of useful fat loss tips besides those in these 5 posts. And, it can help to get extra information or coaching on any of the strategies in them that you have trouble setting up or doing or keeping up.

But by using the all the methods in these five posts to the best of your ability in ways customized to you, YOU CAN achieve fat loss that is mostly hunger free.

That means you can keep doing it! And between 60 % and ALL of the fat you lose will stay off once you lose it.

You will look better and be much lighter. And by using these methods, you will be dramatically healthier too!

Hunger free weight loss solutions, part 4....

Today's Post: Monday, 10-31-2011

It may seem impossible since most people have to cut the amount of calories they eat to lose fat.

And, most people who eat less get hungrier.

The good news is that there are several basic strategies that work.

The even better news is that learning to do them and doing enough of them consistently works!

You do lose fat. You don’t get that much hungrier than you did before. And, since everything you do is sustainable, once you do them by habit and make them a part of your upgraded lifestyle, the best news is that your fat loss will be permanent.

The most powerful strategies are these:

(We posted 5 of them in Monday’s post. These are mostly what you should do to upgrade to a nonfattening lifestyle.

Tuesday’s post, part 2, covered what NOT to eat since many of those things make you hungrier AND fatter at the same time! It also helps to stop eating or drinking things that harm you. Even better, the fattening foods and the bad for you foods are often the same or are in the same stuff!)

Last time we covered these two things.:

7. Why it’s so critical to focus most on the things to do and eat and drink and what not to.

8. Why it’s critical to underuse cutting calories.

(Exercise helps do this by doing part of the job so you don’t need as much calorie cut back. As long as you don’t overdo eating MORE or at bad things exercise allows you to cut back less and still lose fat!)

Today we cover: 9. The solutions to the remaining kinds of hunger.

.


This time, we’ll cover solutions to other kinds of hunger and ways to sneak in SOME extra calorie reduction.

Last time we covered how drinking soft drinks INCLUDING diet soft drinks and eating refined grains and packaged snacks and desserts made from them cause rebound or post sugar surge hunger.

The solution is easier for some than others.

But it is simple and it prevents that kind of rebound hunger. Do NOT any longer eat or drink that stuff. Or cut it back to once to three times a month! (Once to three times a day is what makes and keeps many people fat!)

Last time we also covered the new study that found how overdoing calorie cut back both increases your hunger and then makes you eat longer before you stop being hungry! (That’s why you can make a massive effort everywhere else; but keep your extra calorie cut backs very small if you want to have permanent fat loss without getting too hungry to continue!)

Here are today’s topics:

Addictive eating and stress driven eating feel like real hunger but are not. There are proven ways to turn them off.

And, once you do the basics, there are ways to do some extra calorie reduction that tend NOT to trigger your body’s famine response.

Addictive eating is when you are so used to eating or drinking things that create extra hunger and rebound hunger, that you are addicted to doing it.

There are three solutions.

a) The best one is to really understand and know that these things cause dreadful harm to you if you eat or drink them.

Any that you have in the house pour out or toss in the trash. If you hate wasting things and are tempted to give them away, remember how the people getting them will be harmed.

b) If you are tempted later to buy or order them at a restaurant, you’ll stay addicted if you thing of how you once liked them.

But even if that’s there, if you focus on the ingredients and how they harm your health or how they’ve made and kept you fat, it can be dramatically easy to take pass.


c) If you still want treat food, follow these guidelines.:

> Dramatically drop the frequency. Once or twice a month will keep you fat far less than two or three times a day.

The author of the book, Why French Women don’t get fat, found that this was one of the key reasons!

Cut the days a week in half that you have that kind of treat. Then cut the number of times a day or the amount in half. Then cut the days in a month you have that treat in half again. (I went from over three tablespoons of sugar every day to two tablespoons 7 times a month. I still eat sugar. But I went from 105 tablespoons a month to 7

>> Only eat real food sweetened with real sugar when you have treats.

Remember why omega 6 oils and fully and partially hydrogenated oils and refined grains and high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners make you fat and help cause type 2 diabetes and heart disease. If check the label on a treat or know it came from a place that uses that stuff. Take time to remember it and avoid those foods and drinks.

>>> Eat treats that contain health OK oils or almost OK oils instead of those that contain refined grains only. Candy bars with real sugar and real butter or ice cream with real sugar and real cream only not only are far less harmful than other kinds, the butter and cream cut back the blood sugar surge from the treat.

That makes them less fattening, less harmful, and less addictive. Just remember to not eat them too often or too much at a time.

(Or have a smaller treat with some real food with health OK oils. Some raw walnut halves with a small piece of dark chocolate can be quite nice. It’s more filling and will boost your blood sugar less than no walnuts and three times as much dark chololate.)

Also see the emotional eating and stress eating below. You can reward yourself and manage stress and get relief from stress without eating food treats too.

Stress driven or emotion driven eating is when you use food – often high in sugar or fat to reward or comfort yourself.

Here again there are multiple solutions.

The guidelines above for addictive eating and treats work better than eating lots of really fattening and bad for you foods – or drinking them.

But there are some more strategies.

There are long term strategies to be under less stress.

a) Learn to work well with people. They will cause you less stress and their support or actual help on occasion will slash your stress levels!

Know and like people for their strengths. Know and remember reasons you like particular people.

Make an effort to know what they want and are trying to do and find opportunies to encourage them or even help them get it.

For most people, if they do bad things it’s because they are temporarily in a bind or in bad mood. People who know this and think of people as crabby or having a bad day instead of hateful, have dramatically less stress.

And, if you need them to stop doing something that annoys or harms you. Ask them to stop. Sometimes it helps to say how that action makes YOU feel. (But always avoid saying something that suggests they ALWAYS do this or are a bad person or calling them a name. Don’t think it to begin with. But even if you think it might be so, NEVER say it!

The effect is always like pouring gasoline on a fire. They may do something really hateful to you. Or, perhaps they may decide they really are that way. Oops! That can be even worse, because they might do MORE of that thing instead of less in the future!

If you really feel or think you MUST have them stop, give them a consequence you will do if they persist. But try asking nicely FIRST for them to stop.

b) Be prudent, well organized, and work hard when it counts.

People who do this live longer, have better health, and experience dramatically less stress.

Never text while driving. Never drive when really drunk and rarely drive when you’ve had more than a drink or two. Always wear your seat belt. Avoid following other cars so closely you haven’t time to stop or drive around them if it suddenly is important for you to do that.

The stress that these simple steps can save you is so huge it’s hard to measure. You’ll be less than half as likely to be in an accident. You’ll be way less than half as likely to be in accident that was legally your fault. And, if you ARE in an accident you are at least 3 times as likely to escape disability, death, and injury.

Always brushing and flossing your teeth at least once each day slashes your stress in your life from bad breath, toothaches, paying for false teeth and huge dental bills. It even may cut your chances of heart attack and stroke by as much as two to one!

These little seeming practices done right virtually every single time, slash some serious kinds of stress out of your life.

Then you won’t have stress eating from the stress you didn’t have to begin with!

And, you can apply the same skills of acting consistently to avoid bad consequences to your fat loss skill!

c) For some kinds of horrible stress, the best solution is to ESCAPE.

A job where it’s so stressful, you’re almost sick from the stress after you are there each day may be worth asking to be transferred to a different location or department. Or it may require spending 10 hours a week finding a better job before you quit. Some jobs, even unemployment in this economy is a better choice. But that has its own stresses, so use that one only after trying every other way to escape the problem.

A relationship where the other person is beating you up is another run for the exits situation.

Surprisingly, many people who lived to be 100 years old told of using this method at least once in their lives and credited it as a reason for their long life.

d) Almost everyone has more stress than they’d like. And there are things like earthquakes and tornados and the like that can cause very significant stress to anybody exposed to them.

If real disaster strikes, be glad it wasn’t worse; and think through what you can still do to make things better. Then systematically rise to the challenge of doing those things. Start right away and keep going. They call it resilience. But that’s what does it for you.

The other mercifully more common thing is to have ordinary stresses but have trouble turning off the fight or flight emotional response when you aren’t actually being stressed right then.

That one tends do cause emotional or stress driven eating. The best solution is to have a practice -- or several of them! – that allows you to turn off the fight or flight physical response that you do when this happens or do every day no matter what.

The information I’ve read suggests that regular practice of Tai Chi is the best way to do this. It was tested best for lowering high blood pressure. It has been found to have multiple other health benefits from stronger bones and better balance and more. And, best of all for people working to take fat off and keep it off, every minute you do Tai Chi burns as many calories as walking!

That said, some people have gotten similar results from yoga. And for people who have the time for it and get good at it spending more time each day than needed for yoga or Tai Chi meditating can help.

Much shorter meditations do less; but some people might find them enough to prevent stress driven eating.

Similarly many kinds of stress relief are enjoyable recreations. Take a hot bath. Read a favorite book for half an hour. Go shopping or window shopping if you like it and have the time.

Have ONE alcoholic drink when you get home from work on some days. (Alcoholic drinks have calories and drinking too much can cause things that INCREASE stress. But one drink can be far better than pigging out on 3 servings of a treat food. It’s less calories and it actually lowers stress faster, more reliably, and lowers stress more!

In addition, red wine has other health benefits. This is one reason why the Mediterranean diet has the health benefits that it does.

Reward or celebratory eating is another kind that many men find can be a problem.

Ideas to use.

Do it but make up for it 100 % later by covering ALL the extra calories with temporary eating less or extra exercise or both. Or simply go back to more disciplined eating but make sure to do it for at least a week with no other exceptions.

Better is to do half of what you feel like with food or drink and do something else to celebrate. Buy something. Treat a friend to something. Get some extra sleep or do one less chore this one time.

Best is to have same treat or drink that you would have normally had that day; but share it with someone you like or who will be pleased for you for what you are celebrating.

Some of these solutions are easy enough you can do them this week with no problem. Others like learning Tai Chi or getting a less stressful but decent job may take longer.

But the more of them you do, the less stress related eating you’ll do – or need to do.

Next time we’ll cover ways to do some extra calorie cutting but which do NOT cause your body to jump into famine response mode.

Hunger free weight loss solutions, part 3....

Today's Post: Friday, 10-28-2011

It may seem impossible since most people have to cut the amount of calories they eat to lose fat.

And, most people who eat less get hungrier.

The good news is that there are several basic strategies that work.

The even better news is that learning to do them and doing enough of them consistently works!

You do lose fat. You don’t get that much hungrier than you did before. And, since everything you do is sustainable, once you do them by habit and make them a part of your upgraded lifestyle, the best news is that your fat loss will be permanent.

The most powerful strategies are these:

(We posted 5 of them in Monday’s post. These are mostly what you should do to upgrade to a nonfattening lifestyle.

Tuesday’s post, part 2, covered what NOT to eat since many of those things make you hungrier AND fatter at the same time! It also helps to stop eating or drinking things that harm you. Even better, the fattening foods and the bad for you foods are often the same or are in the same stuff!)

Today we cover three things.

7. Why it’s so critical to focus most on the things to do and eat and drink and what not to.

8. Why it’s critical to underuse cutting calories.

9. The solutions to the remaining kinds of hunger.

No surprise. They are related.

7. Why it’s so critical to focus most on the things to do and eat and drink and what not to.

People who eat real food and that only become less hungry on fewer calories. People who eat and drink a lot of fattening junk are actually MORE hungry on MORE calories.

So upgrading completely from junk to real food is a critical way to lose fat. You take in less calories AND are less hungry.

One version that works and has health benefits is the DASH II diet with extra nonstarchy vegetables and some added extra virgin olive oil and less grains.

The Mediterranean diet with extra nonstarchy vegetables and some added extra virgin olive oil and less grains is very similar except it tends to use more red wine and garlic and cooked tomatoes and spices. And, it is less focused on reducing salt than the DASH II diet. This diet too works and has health benefits. Just be moderate with your use of red wine and extra virgin olive oil instead of using them heavily.

Creative use of these diets includes many foods that you’ll find taste good. People all over the world have eaten them successfully

That means that this switch and upgrade to a better lifestyle for food and drink is sustainable. Making it permanent is doable!

Best of all the faster you upgrade completely and more strict you are in following it, the faster you lose fat. But you tend NOT to get hungrier. You get enough calories your body tends not to decide you are in a famine. The fact that you get enough protein and key oils and eat enough to fill your stomach makes that even easier.

Similarly, using the 3 kinds of exercise helps you burn more fat without cutting down on your food intake. That’s huge! You lose fat a bit faster and do NOT need to cut calories as much.

In fact, you can actually eat more! The trick is to exercise enough to boost your calories more than you add.

People who do enough exercise to burn 200 calories in a session who eat something fattening with 500 calories not only make no progress, they can go backwards! But if you add 100 calories more of healthy foods, you are about as much less hungry but keep losing fat.

Milder exercise that you fit into your life as you find you can such as tai chi, walking, gardening and similar things for a total of an hour or two a week burns 300 to 600 calories a week. And, it tends not to make you much hungrier.

Progressive strength training and interval cardio do some even better things.

They add muscle which enables you to burn more calories even when you are resting. This also helps the pounds you lose be fat only!
And even in brief sessions, once you build up slowly and safely to very vigorous workouts, they have two incredible benefits.

You burn more calories for up to several hours after your session—NOT just the calories you burned while exercising.

Best of all, when you do eat beans or whole grains or sweeter fruit or an occasional treat with real food ingredients, when you exercise vigorously and use your muscles intensely, your body is able to release less insulin for a shorter period of time. That means your body deposits less fat and allows you to use your fat for energy more easily. And, it means the added hunger you get is low enough you can eat more but still be under the calories you burned!

8. Why it’s critical to underuse cutting calories. (Make progress as fast as you can on the things to do and not do. But be sparing about cutting calories. You must cut calories in ways that do NOT trigger your body’s famine response.)

We covered that initially; but new research has just endorsed it big time.

If you cut back to a third or a fifth of the calories you were eating, you will lose weight at first. But since you often cut protein when you do that, some of the weight will be bone and muscle, NOT fat. And as bad as that is! -- something MUCH worse happens!

Your body decides you have been in a famine! The recent Australian research just reported this week found that your body then sharply increases your food cravings for up to 12 months!

Oops!

They found that ghrelin, which makes you hungrier, increased after weight loss created by this very low calorie diet.

AND, leptin, which tells you you’ve had enough food it’s OK to stop eating now went DOWN.

That means that after such low calorie weight loss people began eating sooner and stopped later. Bingo! There bodies basically caused them to eat more.

Why are the eating right and the exercise so critical?

Because the solution to this kind of hunger is to NOT do the things that produce it.

Eating right and exercise give you a lower net calorie effect but do NOT cause your body to think you have been in a famine.

Next time, we’ll cover solutions to other kinds of hunger and ways to sneak in SOME extra calorie reduction.

Addictive eating and stress driven eating feel like real hunger but are not. There are proven ways to turn them off.

And, once you do the basics, there are ways to do some extra calorie reduction that tend NOT to trigger your body’s famine response.

Hunger free weight loss solutions, part 2....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 10-25-2011

It may seem impossible since most people have to cut the amount of calories they eat to lose fat.

And, most people who eat less get hungrier.

The good news is that there are several basic strategies that work.

The even better news is that learning to do them and doing enough of them consistently works!

You do lose fat. You don’t get that much hungrier than you did before. And, since everything you do is sustainable, once you do them by habit and make them a part of your upgraded lifestyle, the best news is that your fat loss will be permanent.

The most powerful strategies are these:

(We posted 5 of them in yesterday’s post. Today’s post, part 2, has more!

So far, we’ve covered what to keep eating or even eat more of.

6. What do you eat less of then?

Simple. Stop ingesting the foods and drinks that harm your health or make you hungry instead of less hungry!

(Some of those foods are double fattening too! They cause your body to produce more insulin which causes your body to store extra fat and use less of it for energy.)

We cover that today.

a) Cut calories but not eating or drinking foods or drinks that harm your health!

One of the best reasons to lose fat is to protect your health. So, every single food or drink you may have ingested that harms your health, STOP doing it!

By doing that you win twice! You no longer take in those calories which helps you lose fat. And, you just may live 15 healthy years more when you do!

And, the fat loss can be HUGE. Most Americans today get something like 25 to 40 % of the calories they take in from these two kinds of foods and drinks!

That means if you are 40 or 80 or more pounds too fat, just doing these two things may remove most of them!

(Yesterday we covered what to mostly keep eating or even eat more of!)

b) The second part which very often overlaps the first is that high glycemic carbs and artificial sweeteners create a delayed INCREASE in hunger.

This stuff is the perfect storm. You want to lose fat but get sidetracked by getting too hungry.

This is the biggest solution. Stop eating and drinking the foods and drinks that add calories or cause you to add fat AND make you hungrier too!

You will actually wind up LESS hungry AND you’ll take in fewer calories too!

a) Here are two kinds of harmful and high calorie foods to never or close to never eat again:

Hydrogenated vegetable oils are heart attack starter.

Not all fats and oils are bad for you. But they are high in calories.

Hydrogenated vegetable oils ARE horribly bad for you. So, STOP eating those calories!

Hydrogenated vegetable oils are still in a remarkable number of products from candy bars to ice cream to cookies to donuts to bread to even peanut butter. And, that’s what shortening and margarine are made out of!

Hydrogenated vegetable oils lower your good cholesterol, HDL. They increase your LDL and triglycerides. And, we now know that anything that lowers HDL and boosts triglycerides makes your LDL divide up into small particles that literally go into your artery walls and cause heart disease. In fact, it was when hydrogenated vegetable oils were directly tested to increase the number of small particle LDL particles that this stuff began to be outlawed.

Worse, hydrogenated oils are often found with other fattening foods such as refined grains, sugar, and high fructose corn syrup.

So, if you can read a label on a commercially baked treat and see ANY partially hydrogenated oils don’t buy it or eat it. (Fully hydrogenated or interesterified oils are even worse.)

(Similarly, if it has ANY trans fats listed at all, somehow it has hydrogenated oils even if they were not listed. So, pass on any food that has any!)

What if it lists zero trans fats but also says it contains some hydrogenated oil?

Take a pass! It does contain trans fat! The truth is that so far it’s legal to list a product with 0.49 grams of trans fat per serving AS zero. But if most people eat three to five such “servings” at a time, they really are getting 1.47 to 2.45 grams of trans fats each time!

In addition, these vegetable oils are cheap to buy. That’s one reason that until the science catches up with the market, they are still so much used.

But these oils, corn, soy, canola, and cottonseed are also harmful even without being hydrogenated. They are high to extremely in omega 6 oils. Those omega 6 oils tend to cause heart disease and help cause some cancers according to the information in the Anti Cancer book.

This effect may be made worse and other harms to your health may be in them as well because at this writing in the United States, most of these oils are made from genetically modified plants.

(These health harms from these oils are why to use extra virgin olive oil or eat or take omega 3 oils instead.)

So, even if the oil is not hydrogenated, take a pass on buying or eating these oils high in omega 6 too.

(Canola oil is not quite as bad for you and it has some plant based omega 3. So it is somewhat less harmful. Just try to minimize how much of it you eat. Also, as far as I know it isn’t currently hydrogenated.)

b) The second part which very often overlaps the first is that high glycemic carbs and artificial sweeteners create a delayed INCREASE in hunger.

This stuff is the perfect storm. You want to lose fat but get sidetracked by getting too hungry.

This is the biggest solution. Stop eating and drinking the foods and drinks that add calories or cause you to add fat AND make you hungrier too!

You will actually wind up LESS hungry AND you’ll take in fewer calories too!

Refined grains, sugar, and high fructose corn syrup and even white potatoes and to some degree whole grains have this effect.

To lose fat without hunger, STOP eating or drinking refined grains, sugar, and high fructose corn syrup.

That specifically means to virtually never drink either regular or diet soft drinks.

The regular ones add calories without making you less hungry at first. THEN the sugar surge & insulin surge that follows causes your body to store extra fat and make you HUNGRIER later. Yikes!

The diet ones have no calories but your body tastes the sugar and your insulin surges making you much hungrier and hungry for sweets even faster.

When you are trying to lose fat without hunger, do you WANT to drink something fattening that also has a strong or extremely strong appetite booster in it?!

If not, do NOT drink soft drinks!!

As far as I know, carbonated water or club soda has none of these effects. So if it’s the bubbly thirst quencher you crave, drink that or drink it over ice.

If it’s the caffeine you were getting in colas you really needed, coffee or coffee with 2% lowfat milk, or green tea or black tea or unsweetened cocoa without milk actually have health BENEFITS and will do the job.

And, plain water or water and a whole piece of fruit will quench your thirst.

High fructose corn syrup (which may soon be labeled as corn sugar) is cheap but tends to have this effect whether it’s in soft drinks or food.

Plus about 30% of it was tested to contain mercury. Plus if you eat too much of it you do get too much fructose which is worse for your health and more fattening than regular sugar.

Even worse, it tends to go with refined grains and hydrogenated oils in the foods that contain it.

Always read labels and never buy or eat high fructose corn syrup.

Lastly, real sugar does taste good. But it tends to fatten too. It makes you hungry after you eat it also.

The double solution is to find many savory and unsweetened foods that have no sugar that you actually and enjoy eating AND only eat sugar or foods containing it rarely instead of several times a day.

The average American was found recently to ingest 22 teaspoons a day of some kind of sugar. That’s a bit over SEVEN TABLESPOONS full!

So, to lose fat without excess hunger, cut back to eating that much a MONTH or less instead.

You can go directly there. Or you can do as I did and keep cutting it in half.

Once I cut back on how much I ate each time, I cut back more than double how many times a week I at sugar.

I still enjoy some sugar; but I enjoy my food on the other days too when I have none!

I’m no longer addicted to sugar. I’m less fat. And, my blood sugar readings are better – in the desirable range instead of a bit too high.

The last category of food that is fattening due to triggering a blood sugar and then an insulin surge is refined grains.

Bread has been a traditional food. But our bodies evolved to eat other foods for hundreds of thousands of years before humans had any grains at all starting about 10,000 years ago.

Many people who eat in health supporting ways otherwise and who exercise regularly and who eat it with other foods can be healthy and even not fat while eating SOME 100 % whole grain foods. But the ones who eat whole grains least tend to be the least fat.

But for refined grains that it is far from true. Refined grains began to become what the average person thinks of as normal food about 150 years ago.

But grains spike your blood sugar about 50 % MORE than sugar or high fructose corn syrup. The whole grains when eaten in moderation make up for that with some nutrients and with the fiber they contain to some degree.

Refined grains are NOT normal or good for you AT ALL.

Yet because refined grains have become so cheap to produce and breads made from them make useful, edible wrappers for other foods, refined grain breads, snacks, and desserts are in every store and almost every restaurant in the country.

But they are as fattening as soft drinks.

Every time you can find an opportunity to NOT eat a refined grain food or bread or snack or dessert will help you to lose fat without hunger.

Does that mean to do things like eat the topping on a pizza and leave the crust or get a plate and eat the filling of a sandwich or hamburger but not the bread or bun?

That’s exactly what it means in practice now! That’s because this information is too new to have changed these foods yet.

The good news is that NOT eating refined grains was one of the things Dr Atkins got right as a way to be healthier and less fat.

As a result, people in many restaurants have had his followers come in before.

So, simply asking for your sandwich “Atkins style” sometimes will save the restaurant the bread or bun and just get you the real food part of the sandwich on a plate.

Since I’m out of time again today, I’ll do part 3 next time.

Hunger free weight loss solutions....

Today's Post: Monday, 10-24-2011

It may seem impossible since most people have to cut the amount of calories they eat to lose fat.

And, most people who eat less get hungrier.

The good news is that there are several basic strategies that work.

The even better news is that learning to do them and doing enough of them consistently works!

You do lose fat. You don’t get that much hungrier than you did before. And, since everything you do is sustainable, once you do them by habit and make them a part of your upgraded lifestyle, the best news is that your fat loss will be permanent.

The most powerful strategies are these:

1. Slow and steady wins the race! Why?

Most of us are descended from people who survived not one but multiple famines. So, if we cut back too much or too fast, our body’s failsafe famine response gets triggered.

We get too hungry to ignore. We get hungriest for sugary and fatty foods. We burn fewer calories and have less energy and our metabolism. Usually all the fat you lost comes back faster than you lost it!

So, the core principle of permanent and effective fat loss, is to cut net calories in ways that do NOT trigger this destructive response.

So it’s been found that it works far better to use lifestyle upgrades to lose your fat over several months to a couple of years depending on how much you have to lose.

It’s silly for most people to try to lose the same amount of fat in a few weeks instead. Unfortunately, over 99 % of the time that fat comes right back just a short period of time after the famine response kicks in which it almost always does.

2. Your body is far more likely to trigger your famine response if you cut protein too much than just cutting calories.

(For your health, we now know it’s important to focus on health OK protein foods such as beans and lentils; nuts if you aren’t allergic; wild caught fish;
100 % grass fed beef, and some superlean and fat trimmed skinless poultry or meat from grain fed animals but not too much.) (Never eat farmed fish or meat processed with nitrites if you can possibly help it. Eat very little fat from animals fed grain.)

You do not have to stuff on protein. But eat the same or slightly more. If you want to achieve permanent fat loss, do NOT cut back on protein.

Protein foods turn off hunger best and longest. So that helps too!

By eating enough protein, you’ll be less hungry and your body will forgive you cutting calories in OTHER areas and won’t be so quick to hit the panic button and trigger your famine response.

3. Cutting back too much on even health OK fats and oils harms your health and makes you hungry and tired of not having any!

Fat does help satisfy hunger. In addition, health OK oils keep you healthy in several ways.

People who lose fat permanently all keep eating some of these healthy oils. By actual test, they succeed far more than people who cut ALL fat.

Fats taste good; they carry flavors; and they buffer harsher spices enough you can enjoy eating those spices when you can’t with no oil at all.

So, no fat diets tend to fail and cause hunger. Eating LOTS of fat does gain fat too. The secret is to eat some every day but in controlled amounts.

(Extra virgin olive oil, raw nuts and avocados if you aren’t allergic, and oils from fish high in omega 3 oils are the health OK oils. Small amounts of dairy fat from animals 100 % grass fed are OK. Some nonfat and lowfat dairy from animals fed grain is OK but in moderation only.)

4. For most people, exercise alone won’t produce fat loss. But you likely won’t get permanent fat loss or the health benefits you could have had if you leave it out.

It’s simple really. If you want to cut a certain amount of net calories each week, if you do enough exercise to do half the job, you only need to cut the calories you eat by half as much!

And, that more than triples your ability to achieve mostly hunger free fat loss that is permanent.

But there’s more. Exercise can directly give you some of the benefits you lose fat to achieve. Better health; more energy; more self esteem; often a better sex life; and better appearance all get better with exercise. That happens even before all your fat comes off! It makes the combination of your upgraded lifestyle MUCH easier to sustain.

And, here again, it makes your body far less likely to trigger your famine response.

5. To some extent, did you know there is an appetite suppressant that works effortlessly and automatically, has close to zero calories, makes you healthier, and has few side effects?

Yes indeed there is. And, within reasonable limits, the more you eat, the easier hunger free fat loss gets.

Raw and lightly cooked nonstarchy vegetables on their own or eaten with other foods do exactly that.

Dr Dean Ornish even featured them in a book, “Eat more; weigh less!”

Recently I posted that I calculated I’d lose a small amount of weight by adding a couple of nonstarchy vegetables each day. I did. But because of this exact effect, I found I’d lost three times as much weight!

The only two caveats are to add vegetables gradually.

Add just one or two at first. If you add 5 servings from none, your body will freak out. And, the experience is no fun. But adding one a week or every other week until your body gets used to 5 slowly can work just fine.

Focus on vegetables that you feel good about eating because of their health benefits or you like their taste or crunch when you eat them. Or eat them with spices you really like. The idea is to find vegetables that you will be OK eating enough you will keep doing it! When you also enjoy most of them, or KNOW your health is better protected, it’s a LOT easier to keep doing it!

So far, we’ve covered what to keep eating or even eat more of.

6. What do you eat less of then?

Simple. Stop ingesting the ones that harm your health or make you hungry instead of less hungry!

We’ll cover that tomorrow.

Calories do count but there IS good news too....

Today's Post: Thursday, 6-30-2011

There ARE many ways to cut net calories that do NOT cut back much on what you eat, make you hungry, or trigger your body to start its famine response.

Amazingly, in some cases, people who use these methods wind up losing fat each month and eat more calories each day than many people who stay fat!

My first ever weight loss success was when I used the Weight Watchers point system then in use to decide where I could cut calories from what I had been eating regularly.

I saw that they listed nonstarchy vegetables as having zero points. So if I ate more nonstarchy vegetables each day, that might help. And, I saw that if I could cut back on my alcoholic drinks per week, that would help.

(Disclosure: I was already getting regular exercise including strength training and interval cardio each week, BEFORE I made these changes.

Had I not been doing this, I’d have had more fat to lose to start with and what I did may well not have been so effective.)

Based on my calculations, it looked like adding the vegetables each day and the cutting back on my weekly alcoholic drinks I was willing to do would cause me to lose about 10 pounds.

I made the cuts in my alcohol each week and ate a medium to large medium serving of cooked broccoli each day with my dinner and added a serving of vegetables to my daily lunch during the week.

I simply continued to do this and weigh myself once a month.

After a month or two I lost the 10 pounds I expected to lose. The two changes I’d made were not that hard so I kept doing them. (I also didn’t want the 10 pounds of fat back!)

But something else was going on!

After another month or so, I lost a SECOND 10 pounds!

I was pleased but felt that was a nice extra I’d not expected.

Of course I kept up the two changes.

But that wasn’t all! After another month or two I lost a THIRD 10 pounds. So in a few months, I’d lost 30 pounds.

Two things allowed that to happen.

1. Instead of making big cuts that would have made me feel deprived and extra hungry, I made SMALL cuts. That meant that I had no trouble doing what I decided on or continuing to do it. It also meant that my energy level stayed high and my appetite was normal.

(People who make much larger cuts become extra hungry, lose their energy, and their appetite feels as if it has tripled. These are caused by their body’s famine response. Then all the weight and fat they lost comes right back.)

So a key to successful fat loss and weight loss is to make sustainable SMALL cuts in net calories and keep doing those lifestyle upgrades.

2. How did I lose 30 pounds instead of 10?

Eating more vegetables gives you food to eat that does come very close to adding no calories. Doing so also gives you superb nutrition.

But I discovered that this strategy does far more!

Because you chew the food and take in the extra fiber, when you eat vegetables, you stop being hungry – so much so that WITHOUT EFFORT you eat less of other foods that have more calories almost automatically.

I found out that means you get triple or even quadruple results by eating more nonstarchy vegetables.

Dr Dean Ornish even wrote a book about this called Eat More, Weigh Less.

3. When you do cut calories, if you eat ample protein foods now, continue doing so or even add a bit more.

Besides fiber, eating protein foods satisfies your hunger best and longest of all the kinds of food.

In fact, there is ample research to show that if you maintain a good protein intake, you can cut back on net calories a bit more without triggering your famine response or causing health problems.

4. And, if you combine eating the same or more protein with cutting back net calories modestly and do strength training and interval cardio every week, the weight you lose is FAT. That means you are far less likely to gain it back.

You burn calories when you exercise. You burn calories after you exercise if the exercise was quite vigorous. And, the muscle you add or keep burns more calories than you would burn without that muscle.

This is NOT an unproven theory either.

In the recently released study of nurses and health professionals, the ones who took in relatively moderate amounts of junk foods and soft drinks and did not exercise gained a bit over 16 pounds of fat over 20 years. The ones who DID exercise regularly gained 8 pounds. (The ones who exercised took in virtually no junk foods and soft drinks gained ZERO pounds.)

The ongoing study of people who have lost 30 pounds or more and kept them off found that over 90% of them exercised regularly. And, their average is about 400 calories a day or 2800 calories a week.

(Vigorous strength training and interval cardio can have similar effect with fewer calories directly burned during the exercises. That makes them more doable for those of us who haven’t the time to do that much walking or other less focused exercises.)

5. The calories (and carbs) to cut virtually 100 % of without becoming more hungry are those in packaged snack foods and desserts and in soft drinks.

(For the vast majority of people, diet soft drinks fatten about as well as regular soft drinks, so it helps in two ways to not drink those either. Tomorrow’s post will cover that in more detail.)

Why?

Soft drinks and sugar added drinks and even to some extent fruit juice add calories but do NOT make you less hungry!

But that’s not all!

They cause your blood sugar to surge. That causes an insulin surge to get you back to normal. That tells your body to hang onto the fat it has and not allow you to burn it for energy. But even worse, after the insulin surge lowers your blood sugar a bit too much, you get hungry for something to boost your blood sugar back to normal!

Does that mean that these drinks add calories and not only don’t reduce your hunger, they turn it up?

That’s EXACTLY what that means.

That means that the calories you cut by not drinking soft drinks and sugary drinks is one of the very most effective ways you can cut calories.

It’s almost like free money! (In fact it IS free money. When you stop buying these drinks, the money you were spending is available to you to spend on other things.)

6. Packaged snack foods and desserts are made with refined grains. These foods and breads made with refined grains and white rice have a very similar effects on you as soft drinks.

Many of them have additives such as MSG that make them more addictive to eat.

And, most of them are made with cheap omega 6 oils that cause heart disease. Worse, many of them are still made with hydrogenated oils and trans fats. That stuff is like heart disease starter!

Some have some protein and some have some fiber, so they turn down hunger at first a bit better than soft drinks. But they have the same hunger rebound later.

Low carb diets produce fat loss. And virtually every successful person who loses fat and keeps it off eats virtually none of these foods.

These foods and soft drinks are the carbs that do the most good to cut.

What about whole grain foods and homemade desserts or desserts made as if they were homemade?

Three strategies work.

a) Only keep eating the ones you like most. STOP eating any of them that you find just OK.

b) Eat them less often or far less often. Back when people were so much more active they burned as many as ten times as many calories and only had desserts a few times a month, desserts were hardly a problem. So eat the desserts you like most but from a few times a year to a few times a week.

(People who eat them every day or several times a day will stay fat.)

c) The one I’ve used is gradual but effective.

I didn’t eat a lot of these foods to begin with. And I’ve now cut my intake of them in half THREE times. That means I eat an eighth of the sugar and whole grains I once ate.

7. Always eat breakfast.

This works for men. But it works about three times as well for women.

People who always eat breakfast have better health than those who do not.

They are less fat than people who do not.

(That’s in part because the are less hungry later in the day and less hungry for sugary foods.

So part of the effect is that they eat less by the end of the day than people who skip breakfast.

Even better, they are far less likely to eat junky snacks or desserts due to hunger between meals when the foods available easily are in vending machines or convenience stores.)

But there is an added benefit too.

Calories eaten at breakfast are both used more efficiently in some ways AND seem to give you less net calories.

In fact, I once read that people who always eat breakfast eat more calories a day than those who do not AND they are also less fat.

The protein foods many people eat for breakfast help do this I suspect. But eating breakfast may also lift your energy and help you burn more calories.

So, always eating breakfast and including some good protein foods when you do is yet another way you can cut net calories without eating that much less.