Two easy habits permanently make you less fat and healthier....

Today's Post:  Friday, 6-1-2012

Last time, yesterday, 5-31, we posted on how by adopting what are called keystone habits you can change a whole list of bad habits to good habits successfully.

We also posted that beginning and continuing regular exercise is an unusually effective keystone habit.

People who do so are much more likely to begin to do other things to lose fat and stay healthy!  Not only does exercise do a lot in both areas, it empowers the people who do it mentally. They become more optimistic and effective.  That makes it a very powerful keystone habit indeed!

Today we have great news.

Researchers found two more keystone health habits very nearly as effective as exercise!

Even better, one of them makes it easier to exercise and more likely you’ll begin regular exercise and keep doing it.

Adopting both of these keystone habits will cause you to be less fat and protect your health.

In my Medical News Today email this week, they had this headline:

Just Making Two Lifestyle Changes Spurs Big And Lasting Results

http://mnt.to/a/46s3

A new Northwestern Medicine study reports the finding that simply adopting two specific good  habits has a domino effect on improving other health habits.

These were: cutting time each week watching TV and eating more fruits and vegetables.

"Just making two lifestyle changes has a big overall effect and people don't get overwhelmed," said Bonnie Spring, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and lead author of the study published in Archives of Internal Medicine.”

By doing this, the researchers found that people who did this became able to make big lifestyle changes in a short period of time and maintain them.

There was something about increasing fruits and vegetables that made them feel like they were capable of any of these changes," Spring said. "It really enhanced their confidence."

A.  We’ve posted on watching less TV before. Watching less TV often will create a huge improvement in your health and life.

People who watch a lot of TV harm their health and tend to be fat.  This is NOT guesswork but the findings of every study made on TV watching in younger kids and adults both.

Watching TV burns less calories than sleeping.  And, most of the ads people are exposed to for health harming and fattening foods and drinks are on TV.

Watching too much TV is so mentally passive, doing so tend to make you less proactive and effective.

But there’s more.  The average American watches 21 to 56 hours a week of TV and cannot find time to exercise. 

But cutting that TV watching time to 14 hours a week, adds 7 to 42 hours a week to the time available to exercise.

And, exercising  for 30 minutes on 5 to 7 days a week only takes 2 and half to 3 and a half hours a week.

You even can open up time to go to a gym two nights a week by not watching TV those two nights.

Best of all, cutting back on TV watching is reasonably doable. 

1.  Most of the TV watching people do is in the OK but not great category.  Simply insist on turning off those shows and doing something else in that time.

2.  The TV you most want to watch is not on at convenient times quite often.  So instead of watching TV that whole evening to see one show you really like, have it saved when it runs and watch it at a better time.

Even better if you have money, have someone watch it for you and only save the show while deleting the ads. You can watch the show then in far less time and see less ads for junk foods and soft drinks.  If you can’t watch a sports event when it’s on, that can cut more than half the time needed to watch it in replay.  A college or pro football game takes maybe an hour and a half to see the plays and including the key commentary but three and half hours when you add the commercials, for example.

3.  Many people watch extra TV or watch late at night to see the news.   Only do that for breaking news important to you because it’s local and might threaten your safety or the results on election night when you care about the outcome.

Online news and newspapers are MUCH more time efficient than TV news.  You can read a story in fifth of the time watching the video news report takes.  You delete the TV ads and the time needed to watch them automatically.  And get less news you don’t want and more of the news you DO find of interest.

4.  For the lighter things you watch on TV but keep watching, you can also get a seated exerciser which come as low as $50 or watch them from a treadmill if you have room and money.  That way you see the shows you like; but the time you lose and the exercise you otherwise would not do come back to you.  It’s like cutting TV time and getting to see the shows too!

B.  Eat more vegetables and some more fruit.

There are two or three proven ways to eat right for health and maybe ten more that are almost as good.  They have many differences and some fit some people better than others for cultural or genetic reasons.

But guess what?  They all have one food group in common!  They all include lots of vegetables and some whole fruit.  And they stress eating nonstarchy vegetables most.

These foods are low in calories and high in fiber and water content.  So they fill you up and turn off much of your hunger without making you fat.

If you eat lots of them every day, it becomes virtually automatic to find you can easily eat a bit less of the foods that have more calories.  And, you don’t extra hungry from doing so.

This is most true of the nonstarchy vegetables.

Humans are evolved to eat a diet most of which is vegetables and some fruit. 

Unlike cutting back TV time, it takes a bit more work to eat more of them.

And, you have to add them gradually if you’ve not been eating them and that much fiber so your body can gradually adjust.

But the biggest reason to do so is how nutritious and protective eating lots of vegetables and some whole fresh fruit most days really is.

If you eat cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli and cauliflower raw you can cut your risk of harm from cancer of almost every kind by more than half.

If you eat dark green and yellow and orange vegetables with multiples carotenes both raw and cooked with or served with extra virgin olive oil, you are less likely to get most cancers and your eyesight will be better and you are less likely to lose it as you get older.  In fact, alpha carotene is apparently so protective, people who are high in it live longer and in much better health. (Carrots are high in alpha carotene I found out.)  Eating lots of these vegetables also makes you and your skin look healthier even though it’s a subconscious effect on the people who look at you.  Last, but far from least, eating lots of these vegetables protects you from sunburn and skin cancer better than gloppy sunscreen!

Although most whole fruit has some positive effects, berries, cherries, plums, and whole apples are very nutritious to incredibly nutritious and are low glycemic too!

So, while this one is a bit harder to get into, it protects you in dozens of ways at once.

So, once you do so every week every aspect of your health will be better.

(Every time you can afford it and find a decent source, it will pay you to buy and eat organic vegetables and fruit. 

Organic produce not only has fewer contaminants and harmful compounds, it has a good bit more of the most protective nutrients studies find.)

One of the reasons doing this is so protective is that it makes it far easier to eat far less junk food without being hungry.

Another is that vegetables and fruits are very low in sodium an high in potassium, magnesium, and some calcium.  That’s why eating a lot of them every week prevents or lowers high blood pressure.

So between the value of what you do eat and the harm you save yourself by easily eating less harmful foods, this is an extremely valuable keystone habit to start and have.

New information shows diet drinks and artificial sweeteners DO fatten you....

Today's Post: Monday, 9-26-2011

We’ve already posted that two of the reasons for this are that:

Drinking diet soft drinks makes you hungrier for sweet foods within a short time after that.

People who drink diet soft drinks often eat them with the same fattening foods such as potato chips and French fries and the like that they were eating with regular soft drinks before.

But since then, I’ve found out it gets MUCH worse than that!

1. Recently, I read that the reason that you get hungry for sweet foods later in the day after drinking diet soft drinks is that your body releases the insulin needed to lower the blood sugar spike it expects because of the sweet taste.

Then your blood sugar drops and you immediately are hungry for something sweet to bring your blood sugar back up to normal.

That alone can cause fat gain. You tend to get strong cravings for sugary, fattening foods and eat some.

But, here’s why it’s so much worse. These insulin surges also are a biochemical messenger that tell your body to add more fat from the food available and hold onto this added fat even if it’s needed for the energy you are using.

That tends to fatten you and make it harder to remove the fat! Oops!

2. I just read an article, “Artificial Sweeteners Could Be Sabotaging Your Diet” by Mark Hyman, MD.

He quotes research showing that drinking diet soft drinks also likely slows your metabolism.

Without even realizing it, when you drink diet soft drinks, you also burn fewer calories each week!

That also tends to fatten you and make it harder to remove the fat! Oops!

This is a huge issue. About two thirds of adult Americans drink diet soft drinks or eat sweet treats often made with refined grains and sweetened with artificial sweeteners.

Most of them are fat or still fat too!

A) To lose fat and keep it off, you need to do several things.

To NOT get fat in the first place, you need to do the same several things.

1. Eat foods that turn off your hunger but do so without feeding you too many calories. Eat foods that boost your insulin levels very little.

Then you stay trim and free of excess fat WITHOUT getting extra hungry.

2. Get either a lot of exercise or get exercise that burns calories after you stop doing it or both.

3. Doing both things together, eating right AND exercise, gets the job done.

B) How to fail at fat loss and weight loss:

1. Trigger your famine response. Trying to lose fat and its weight by eating less than we are hungry for usually triggers your famine response. When you keep doing eating less than you are hungry for long enough it almost always does so.

That makes you very hungry and particularly hungry for fattening foods.

And, it slows your metabolism so you also burn fewer calories.

That stops fat loss even if you force yourself not to eat the fattening things. But after days and days of this, few people can resist eating more fattening things.

It’s a failsafe most of us have since we are descended from people who survived famines. The people without it died and we are not descended from them!

2. Do something else that makes you particularly hungry for fattening foods and slows your metabolism.

NOW we know, drinking diet soft drinks DOES fatten because it does exactly that!

Permanent fat loss without excessive hunger IS possible.

But two sure ways to trigger the opposite are:

to temporarily eat way less than we are hungry for every day for weeks --

and/or to drink diet soft drinks or eat sweet treats sweetened by artificial sweeteners.

What is the solution?

a) Drink things that have NO sweetener – with NO sugar or high fructose corn syrup OR artificial sweeteners.

Such as?

Water! (Chilled or iced water is even better since you need extra calories to combat the chill.)

Tea or green tea with no milk or sweetener added. (Milk prevents some of the health benefits of tea and unsweetened cocoa or chocolate.)

Hot drinks with only unsweetened cocoa or chocolate added and NO sweetener added.

Black coffee or coffee with 2% lowfat milk but no sweetener added.

Water that is only carbonated -- or chilled or iced water that is only carbonated but with NO sweetener added.

b) Eat some treats with real sugar (and NOT high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners); but eat those treats once or twice a month or less instead of two or three times a day or more.

Or eat treats that have no sweetener added. Eat raw nuts if you aren’t allergic or eat some low glycemic whole fresh fruit for treats instead of sugary treats. Or eat savory treats like guacamole or hummus.