EAT MORE - WEIGH LESS!
Part 1 of 3
So many of us get so caught-up in losing weight we fail to completely
understand the consequences of not eating enough food each day. You see
it's not so much of caloric restriction as it is calorie management. So
many times we feel like if I just stop eating I will lose weight. Well I
wish it were that easy, if it were we would all be in great shape.
The trick to dropping
unwanted body-fat may sound a bit confusing at first but once you
understand how the metabolism works you will have a much better
understanding.
Here's the facts
First we must understand why we eat and when we eat.
The obvious, "I'M HUNGRY" is NOT why you should eat. In fact if you
wait until you are hungry you have waited far to long to eat and proper
caloric management is disrupted.
(GOLDEN RULE: EAT FOR WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO DO, NOT FOR WHAT YOU HAVE JUST DONE)
I'm sure you've all heard that breakfast is the most important meal of
the day....and this is true. But have you ever really wondered why?
Let's examine the word, "breakfast" separate the word and you have two words and it simply means, "break the fast"!
Most people will eat their last meal between 5-8PM and then we relax a
while and typically go to bed between 10PM and 12AM. Then we sleep
between 6-8 hours. In many cases allot of us have not eaten for 10-12
hours by the time we have gotten out of bed in the morning.
Understand this, if you have a healthy metabolism your blood sugar will
be very low in the morning because you have not eaten for a long time.
We are not always hungry simply because there is no caloric demand from
waking up. Your body has been is a resting and rebuilding phase while
you were asleep.
We all get our day started by waking up and
hitting the floor with both feet just like everyone else does. But in
many cases that's where the similarity stops. What everyone should do
upon waking up is break the fast they have been in before they get
hungry and keep feeding the body all day long so it never gets hungry
and the facts are you will melt body-fat away.
However if you
are like many Americans you will skip breakfast grab a drug called
caffeine and get your day started with a stimulant. So let me tell you
what happens when you chose either situation.
First lets go with the benefits of breaking the fast and eating breakfast.
1. (And this is KEY throughout the day) You will elevate your blood
sugar to normal ranges. You see by not eating for 6-14 hours your
glycogen storage will be low, yes you do still burn calories while you
sleep. (I will get into that later) So it is important to get blood
sugar into normal ranges first thing in the morning and maintain normal
blood sugar levels all day long.
2. It prevents your body from
going into the catabolic phase. Providing the body with proper nutrients
upon wake-up will prevent the body from pulling nutrients from muscle
tissue. You see our body behaves much like us, the last thing it wants
to eat is fat, the nutrients your body craves are all found in the lean
muscle tissue throughout our body. Once you blood sugar has bottomed out
the body goes into starvation mode and will start wasting muscle
tissue. The saddest thing about this over a long peroid of time is you
are destroying your metabolism because muscle tissue and it's activity
is the only thing that burns calories. Think about it for a minute, how
many of you have had a steak with a ring of fat on the side and
purposely eaten the fat first because you love fat? The answer is very
few if any at all! The body acts the same way, just for different
reasons. You see fat is our reserve energy source and if you do not feed
the body the first thing that will happen is the body starts reducing
its need for more calories by getting rid of the cause for more calories
and that is your muscle tissue.
Here is the biggest problem we
have, our body is very efficient at saving itself from us (LOL) by being
able to store fat so easily and in many cases we are our own worst
enemy and we aid our bodies into hanging onto stored body fat by
starving ourselves.
3. Eating breakfast automatically elevates your metabolism for the rest of the day!
4. Eating breakfast also aids in brain function and sets the tone for a
better day. Yes eating breakfast stimulates a hormonal release to
energize your day.
The key is keep blood sugar in normal ranges and it becomes impossible to store body-fat.
Tomorrow I will explain why it's more calorie management than it is calorie restriction.
Here is what you will need to know more about.
1. The Glycemic index and how you can use it to maintain your blood sugar.
2. Proteins and the Protein Efficiency Ratio (PER)
3. Fats and their key role to a healthy metabolism
4. Feeding the lean body mass, not total body weight (your true BMR)
Food for thought, is resistance exercise the key to maintaining low body fat more so than cardiovascular exercise???
The basics on Protein.....
What is Protein?
You probably know you need to eat protein, but what is it? Many foods
contain protein, but the best sources are beef, poultry, fish, eggs,
dairy products, nuts, seeds, and legumes like black beans and lentils.
Protein builds, maintains, and replaces the tissues in your body.
Your muscles, your organs, and your immune system are made up mostly of protein.
Your body uses the protein you eat to make lots of specialized protein
molecules that have specific jobs. For instance, your body uses protein
to make hemoglobin, the part of red blood cells that carries oxygen to
every part of your body.
Other proteins are used to build
cardiac muscle. What's that? Your heart! In fact, whether you're running
or just hanging out, protein is doing important work like moving your
legs, moving your lungs, and protecting you from disease.
All About Amino Acids
When you eat foods that contain protein, the digestive juices in your
stomach and intestine go to work. They break down the protein in food
into basic units, called amino acids. The amino acids then can be
reused to make the proteins your body needs to maintain muscles, bones,
blood, and body organs.
Proteins are sometimes described as
long necklaces with differently shaped beads. Each bead is a small amino
acid. These amino acids can join together to make thousands of
different proteins. Scientists have found many different amino acids in
protein, but 22 of them are very important to human health.
Of
those 22 amino acids, your body can make 13 of them without you ever
thinking about it. Your body can't make the other nine amino acids, but
you can get them by eating protein-rich foods. They are called essential
amino acids because it's essential that you get them from the foods you
eat.
Different Kinds of Protein
Protein from animal
sources, such as meat and milk, is called complete, because it contains
all nine of the essential amino acids. Most vegetable protein is
considered incomplete because it lacks one or more of the essential
amino acids. This can be a concern for someone who doesn't eat meat or
milk products. But people who eat a vegetarian diet can still get all
their essential amino acids by eating a wide variety of protein-rich
vegetable foods.
For instance, you can't get all the amino
acids you need from peanuts alone, but if you have peanut butter on
whole-grain bread you're set. Likewise, red beans won't give you
everything you need, but red beans and rice will do the trick.
The good news is that you don't have to eat all the essential amino
acids in every meal. As long as you have a variety of protein sources
throughout the day, your body will grab what it needs from each meal.
8 Benefits of High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)
And why it needs to be part of your regular workout routine!
High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) describes any workout that
alternates between intense bursts of activity and fixed periods of
less-intense activity or even complete rest. For example, a good starter
workout is running as fast as you can for 1 minute and then walking for
2 minutes. Repeat that 3-minute
interval five times for a 15-minute, fat-blasting workout. It sounds too
simple to be effective, but science doesn't stretch the truth.
Below are 8 more benefits of HIIT.
1. It's Efficient
Super-efficient HIIT is the ideal workout for a busy schedule—whether
you want to squeeze in a workout during your lunch break or to get in
shape for a fast-approaching event. Research shows you can achieve more
progress in a mere 15 minutes of interval training (done three times a
week) than the girl jogging on the treadmill for an hour.
According to a 2011 study presented at the American College of Sports
Medicine Annual Meeting, just 2 weeks of high-intensity intervals
improves your aerobic capacity as much as 6 to 8 weeks of endurance
training. Now that's EFFICIENT!!!!
2. You Will Burn More Fat
Not only do you burn more calories during HIIT workouts, but the effect
of all that intense exertion kicks your body's repair cycle into
hyperdrive. That means you burn more fat and calories in the 24 hours
after a HIIT workout than you do after, say, a steady-pace run.
3. A Healthier Heart
Most people aren't used to pushing into the anaerobic zone (that lovely
place where you can't breathe and you feel like your heart is trying to
jump out of your chest). But in this case, extreme training produces
extreme results. One 2006 study found that after 8 weeks of doing HIIT
workouts, subjects could bicycle twice as long as they could before the
study, while maintaining the same pace
4. No Equipment Necessary
Running, biking, jump roping, and rowing all work great for HIIT, but
you don't need any equipment to get it done. High knees, fast feet, or
anything plyometric like jumping lunges work just as well to get your
heart rate up fast. In fact, some equipment like dumbbells can make HIIT
less effective because you want the focus to be on pushing your heart
to its max, not your biceps.
5. Lose Fat, Not Muscle
Anyone
who has been on a diet knows that it's hard to not lose muscle mass
along with fat. While steady state cardio seems to encourage muscle
loss, studies show that both weight training and HIIT workouts allow
dieters to preserve their hard-earned muscles while ensuring most of the
weight lost comes from fat stores. This is a Win/win Situation and your
metabolism will increase as the body fat drops.
6. Increased Metabolism
In addition to increased fat burning and more muscle preserved, HIIT
stimulates production of your human growth hormone (HGH) by up to 450
percent during the 24 hours after you finish your workout. This is great
news since HGH is not only responsible for increased caloric burn but
also slows down the aging process, making you younger both inside and
out!
7. Do It Anywhere
You can do it in a boat, you can do
it with a goat. You can do it here or there, you can do it anywhere! Dr.
Seuss would have loved HIIT. Since it's such a simple concept—go at
maximum effort for a short period of time followed by a recovery period
and repeat—you can adapt it to whatever time and space constraints you
have.
8. Challenging
This is not a workout you can do while
reading a magazine or chatting with your friend. Because it's so short,
you will be working hard the whole time. The trade-off is this format
offers seasoned exercisers a new challenge and new exercisers a quick
way to see results. You may be in pain, you may be sucking wind, but you
definitely won't be bored!
