March 14th, 2011 Milan
This article is for guys mainly. And it is about a serious issue we all face. Slowly and certainly, over time, when men age, they gain weight and their waist grows.
Do a little test:
Stand straight, preferably naked, keep your belly comfortably out without forcefully pulling it in. Now look down. Can you see your toes?
If not, sorry to tell you, but you are in trouble. A serious trouble to be more specific.
If you can’t see your toes, you have a 50% higher risk of getting stroke or heart attack.
Weight gain – especially around your abdomen increases vascular trouble as you age. It’s that middle age spare tire that’s so important to prevent as we grow older.
The good news is, that losing weight has a clear-cut impact on your risk. If you lose weight, blood pressure goes down and your risk of getting a stroke or heart attack drops exponentially.
So guys. How about to make this as a number 1 goal for next 7 months – being able to see your toes and else when you look down.
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January 31st, 2011 Milan
If you are overweight and can’t loose weight, than you are doing clearly something wrong. Most of the time that think is your diet.
I know, you say that you already tried everything and nothing works. Or you just gave up, not willing to give up the stuff you really enjoy to eat.
However long you are already unsuccessfully trying to lose weight, don’t give up. Maintaining healthy low weight is essential to your overall health and well-being. And giving up on loosing it is very unwise thing to do.
However undisciplined you are, you can lose it. You can change! In fact, you have to, you don’t have any other choice.
Losing weight starts with nutrition.
Don’t worry about exercise right now. What you eat is more important, than how much you move. I know people who workout intensively every day and don’t sit down for the rest of their day, because their jobs are so physically demanding. Yet they are overweight and they can’t lose any weight. And than there are those who don’t do any physical activity and they are skinny. Most of the time, they are weak and fragile, because they don’t do any physical activity, but they are very skinny.
Give up your wine
You are going to hate me for this, but I see drinking wine, beer or other kinds of alcohol as a single biggest barrier to losing weight in many people. These are the people whose diet is already relativelly good, they eat lots of vegetables, fruits, lean protein and whole foods in general. They don’t go to fast foods, they don’t indulge in huge amounts of pasta, breads and pastries. They are not too heavy, they are about 10 – 20 pounds overweight and they can’t loose it. The reason is almost always wine.
The average overweight wine drinker has about 2 glasses of wine every day. That’s 160 calories. That wouldn’t be that bad. What’s the worst on it is, that wine and other alcoholic beverages are just plain sugar. The kind of sugar that enters your bloodstream and creates hormonal imbalance that prevents body to use the fat reserves you already have for energy. If you eliminate wine from your diet and you belong to this category of already healthy eaters, your weight will go down fast.
Eating right
If you can honestly say, that you don’t drink wine or beer or other alcoholic beverages regularly and you are overweight, than the problem is in your eating.
People who don’t drink any alcohol and are overweight, are usually overweight by a lot. They are overweight by 30 – 60 pounds by average. Sometimes it is a combination of a poor diet and alcohol drinking.
The problem often times is in eating sweet stuff like candy bars, chocolates, baked sweet goods, donuts, soda and sweet juices drinking and fast food restaurant sweet stuff eating – shakes, fries, cookies and others. If you can completely eliminate these foods from your diet, your weight will go down fast even without exercise.
30 day trial
30 day trial is when you decide, that you will not put into your body anything that is making it suffer and gain weight. If you stick to your 30 day trial, you’ll lose up to 10 pounds. That will depend on how heavy you already are right now. Heavier people with higher fat percentage will lose more and those who have lower levels of fat percentage will lose less weight.
If there is no regular alcohol drinking in your diet and you are eating healthy wholesome diet full of fresh fruits and vegetables, without drinking any sweetened drinks, you are most certainly lean and skinny.
Do this for 30 days and you will lose weight.
- eliminate wine and any other alcohol from your diet
- eliminate white flour products like pasta, white bread, tortillas, bagels, scones and other baked goods
- Eat lean protein like tofu, grilled fish and chicken breast, low fat dairy, eggs with every meal
- don’t eat white rice
- eat 7-10 servings of fruits and vegetables every day
- drink only unsweetened drinks like water, herbal teas, coffee and mineral water
- don’t eat deserts and other sweet goodies
And what is the reward for all this sacrifice? You lose weight fast!
After 30 day trial
If you really did it and you didn’t brake any rules for 30 days of these kind of lose weight fast healthy eating, you lost weight and probably realized that it is not that hard to do it. And you developed a habbit for life and you are going to stick with it.
Even the nutrition that seemed so boring in the beginning will be, I hope very tasty for you. You’ll be looking forward to have that apple, that chicken salad with olive oil, or salmon with vegetables, or fruit salad and you will enjoy eating it.
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March 7th, 2009 Milan
With weight reduction through dieting only, people loose not just fat mass, but a little bit of liver, heart, muscle, and other lean tissue.
Metabolism slows down, when you only diet. And you don’t want your metabolism to slow down while you are dieting. Yes, you loose weight, and than you’ll gain it back.
Your metabolism rate falls with weight loss. Metabolic rate falls, in part, because it’s closely linked to how much muscle and other lean tissue you have.
The only way to counter the slow down in metabolism is to exercise more. And the best way to increase your metabolism is to strength train and build lean muscle. Muscle is natural fat-burning mechanism, it is an active tissue so it consumes energy. 1 pound of muscle requires your body to burn up to 50 extra calories a day just to maintain it.
What doe’s more muscle mean for dieters? More food.
A higher calorie allowance makes it easier to stick to your eating plan – and you get more nutrients too.
Strength training – muscle building will help you maintain the weight loss you worked so hard for. You loose weight permanently. And that’s usually the hardest think to achieve.
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November 2nd, 2008 Milan
Intensive strength training has a bigger effect on metabolism – calorie burn and weight loss than endurance exercise.
Intensity is the most important factor determining post-workout metabolism, so the harder you work in the gym or on the beach the more calories your body will burn afterward.
People who intensively strength train achieve so called – post-workout fat oxidation. “Fat oxidation” is what happens when your body uses oxygen and fat cells to turn into energy.
Yes you burn more calories while you do your aerobic workout for an hour than lifting weights for an hour, but 13 hours after the intensive weight workout, the men and women are burning 20% more fat than they did 13 hours after the aerobic workout.
You would’ve need to burn twice as many calories during your aerobic workout, to reach the level of post-workout fat oxidation achieved by weight lifting.
Even if evidences show, that weight lifting is more effective to loose fat, you shouldn’t forget your aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise is a part of well balanced exercise program that improves your cardiovascular system and keeps your heart healthy, plus it also burns a lot of calories too.
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July 14th, 2008 Milan
If you ask people in the gym what they want to accomplish with their fitness regimen, most of them would say that they want to lose weight. But they’d be wrong. Most of them want to look better: they want to tone their muscles, fit into a smaller size, which doesn’t always correlate to a drop in pounds.
Most people who say that they want to loose weight really want to increase muscle and reduce fat.
Tracking body composition (fat %) in addition to weight is the best way to do this, since it gives you a more accurate view of your success.
If you are starting a fitness program you may actually gain weight as you develop muscle. This can be very discouraging.
Using body fat measurements can help you see that you are closer to your goal. That helps to keep you motivated!
In addition to body fat, measuring the waist and waist-to-hip ratio provides accurate measure of success.
The goal is to keep yourself from getting stuck in the mindset that the scale is the best way to track your success. It’s not!
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May 20th, 2008 Milan
Is your weight loss program right?
Here is my check list for you, to find out if you are on right track.
A desirable weight loss program:
- provides at least 1200 calories per day for normal adults to meet their normal nutritional requirements
- includes balanced nutrition – foods acceptable to the dieter from the viewpoints of sociocultural background, usual habits, taste, cost, and ease in acquisition and preparation
- provides a negative calorie balance (not to exceed 500 to 1000 calories per day), resulting in gradual weight loss of no more than 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) per week, without metabolic abnormalities
- eliminates dieting habits that contribute to improper nutrition
- includes an endurance exercise program of at least 3 sessions per week, 20 – 45 minutes per session, at a minimum of 60% of maximum heart rate
- Includes an resistance exercise program of at least 2 sessions per week, where all major muscle parts are exercised intensively – multi joint, core exercises to provide a muscle development
- provides for new eating and physical activity habits that can be continued for life to maintain the achieved lower body weight
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March 25th, 2008 Milan
When you start with exercise program and you resistance train, gaining weight is possible, you gain muscle and muscle weighs more than fat.
For beginners, you will notice some weight gain at the beginning of a work out cycle because of the dramatic increase of lean muscle mass, but these will later decrease as your body settles into it’s new frame and you stay active and follow your exercise program.
The important thing is the improvement of your body composition and health.
For example, when I stop working out, I will lose about 10 pounds in a month not doing anything. But I will lose muscle mass, which is not good. I will probably gain that weight back if I don’t exercise for a long period of time, but it will be fat.
The point is, you want to gain healthy muscle mass, which makes your body a very efficient calorie burning machine. And when you gain that active muscle mass weight in the beginning of your workout cycle, that will increase your metabolism and those muscle engines will burn that fat your body stores.
How far you can go with this is up to you. Combination of both consistent and intensive – resistance training and cardiovascular exercise and proper nutrition will dramatically increase your body’s potential to burn the energy that is being stored.
Read also: Why fad diets don’t work
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