Top Ten List for Successful Weight Loss
DON'T DIET!
It really doesn’t matter what type of diet you try, any short-term diet for weight loss inevitably leads to weight gain. Whether it’s the Atkins diet, the Zone diet, the Beverly Hills diet or the Grapefruit diet, once you’ve lost the weight you were trying to lose, you’ll stop the “diet” and go right back to eating the way you used to that made you gain the weight and guess what happens? You gain back all the weight you lost along with a few more “insurance pounds”. The next diet, of course, produces the same result and hence the yo-yo diet syndrome. This is one of the quickest ways to gain weight. Rather than dieting, we need to permanently change our eating habits and behavior.
DO eat more fiber
OK, what’s so new about fiber? Could there possibly be new discoveries about the effects of fiber on weight loss and metabolism? The answer is yes. We’ve known for quite some time that a high fiber diet provides more of a feeling of “fullness” and can therefore reduce appetite. We also know that foods that are high in fiber are also generally low in calories, so a high fiber diet often means a lower calorie diet. But what we’ve just recently discovered is that fiber slows down the body’s absorption of sugar. The slower the body absorbs sugar, the less of the heavyweight hormone insulin your body makes. The less insulin (to a point), the better the body’s metabolism and the less weight gain. So fiber actually helps the body’s metabolism and can promote weight loss by helping to maintain lower insulin levels.
DON'T pass the sugar, please
Well, it’s certainly not news that sweets can make you fat. We all know that too many desserts, cakes, cookies, candies and the like will pack on extra weight like nothing else. But what is news are the hidden sources of sugar in our diets – those foods that our bodies immediately turn into sugar, as if we had eaten sugar itself.
One common example is alcohol – our bodies can turn alcohol into sugar in one easy step. This is the reason, of course, that a drink often serves as an “appetizer” to stimulate appetite. The same is true of refined grains and starchy carbohydrates, such as found in bread, pasta, rice, potatoes and cereals.
Our bodies can convert these foods to sugar very quickly. As a result, our bodies make even more of the storage hormone insulin, which slows our metabolism and helps pack on the weight. It’s no surprise that restaurants often serve bread and wine before a meal to boost appetite and make the meal more enticing. By reducing our intake of foods containing or converted quickly to sugar, we can keep our insulin levels low and supercharge our metabolism.
Also, try to avoid artificial sweeteners. Although it’s tempting to use non-caloric artificial sweeteners to replace calorie-containing sugar beware! This is not an example of “something for nothing” – everything has its price, including artificial sweeteners. These sweeteners found in diet drinks and diet foods trick the body by providing a very sweet taste without adding calories.
Although these sweeteners do not directly cause weight gain, they can secondarily for two reasons. First, these sweeteners are so sweet that they cause a certain craving for sweet foods. After training our taste buds to a high level of sweetness, other foods pale by comparison and we only tend to be satisfied once this sweet craving is fulfilled by another sweet. Second, even though artificial sweeteners do not contain calories, they can still promote a release of insulin, which has detrimental effects on our metabolism. This is similar to the “Pavlov’s dog” effect, where even the sight, thought, or smell of food is enough to cause the body to begin to salivate, and also to release insulin.
DO boost your metabolism
Boost your metabolism. Sounds great, right? How about “Burn calories while you sleep”? Even more interesting, no? But is this possible without taking dangerous diet pills? Absolutely. The solution comes from scientific research on the subcellular level. Inside each of the millions and millions of cells in our bodies are tiny energy factories. These energy factories are called the mitochondria.
The function of our mitochondria is to burn all of the calories we eat to produce energy. All of the energy in our bodies is made in these small little factories, each about the size of a bacterium. Cells that require a lot of energy, such as muscle cells, have thousands of mitochondria in each cell. Cells that don’t require much energy, such as fat cells, may have only a couple hundred mitochondria. The more mitochondria we have, the faster our metabolism. The solution is simple – make more mitochondria!
Unfortunately, you can’t get more mitochondria by eating them – that doesn’t work. Instead, we need to get our bodies to make more mitochondria. There is only one proven way to make this happen – build more MUSCLE and EXERCISE! By building more muscle and doing more exercise, we increase the number of muscle cells as well as increasing the number of mitochondria in each cell and metabolism will improve tremendously.
To build muscle requires resistance or weight training of some sort. We recommend concentrating on the largest muscle groups, as found in the thighs, hips, hamstrings, calves and buttocks. Aerobic exercise in your target heart zone, combined with interval training leads to an increase in the number of mitochondria in each muscle cell.
A personal trainer is one of the best ways to get you started on a muscle-strengthening and aerobic program to boost your metabolism.
DON'T eat fast food or food fast
Besides being extremely high in fat (and the wrong kind of fat), fast food is just what it’s billed as – fast. For optimal metabolism, our bodies require the full benefit of time to digest and absorb the necessary nutrients. Eating fast food leads to eating quickly, eating in our cars, or spending too little time chewing and digesting. This can result in undesirable surges in our insulin levels that lead to weight gain. If time is an issue, instead of grabbing fast food for lunch, try going to a restaurant that has a high quality salad bar, and you’ll have the extra time needed to adequately digest your food without leading to weight gain.
DO increase your physical activity level
Of course, we all know that exercise promotes weight loss by burning more calories. But what’s new is that even activities that are not considered “exercise” can also burn significant calories. You don't have to be Lance Armstrong to boost your metabolism with physical activity.
Recent studies have shown that such simple “non-exercise” activities such as chewing gum (unsweetened) or “fidgeting” can produce sustained and meaningful weight loss. Haven’t you ever noticed that your “fidgety” friends are also the skinniest?
Recent research has proven that spontaneous physical activity such as chewing gum or fidgeting can burn a significant number of calories – up to an additional few hundred calories a day!
Increasing physical activities in other ways such as using the stairs instead of elevators, parking farther away from the office, or using a bathroom farther away from your desk will also help to burn additional calories during the day and will further enhance weight loss.
DON'T eat late at night
Eating late at night is now just bad for your weight and metabolism - it may represent a specific health condition. According to Albert Stunkard, MD of the University of Pennsylvania's Weight and Eating Disorders Program, "Not only is night-eating syndrome an eating disorder, but one of mood and sleep as well. People who fall prey to this syndrome are not simply indulging in a bad habit. They have a real clinical illness, reflected by changes in hormone levels."
"People with this syndrome start out daily with morning anorexia-- or not eating anything all morning -- and consume fewer than average calories throughout the day. As the day wears on, their mood worsens and they become more and more depressed," said Stunkard. Then comes the night, when victims raid the refrigerator and cupboards for high-carbohydrate snacks, sometimes up to four times a night. As anxiety and depression increases throughout the night, so does eating.
"This snacking may be a way for these persons to medicate themselves," speculates Stunkard, "because they eat a lot of carbohydrates, increasing serotonin in the brain which in turn, leads to sleep."
"Night-eating syndrome shows distinctive changes in hormones related to sleep, hunger and stress. The nighttime rise in the hormone that accompanies sleep, melatonin, is greatly decreased in night eaters, probably contributing to their sleep disturbances. Similarly, night-eaters fail to show a nighttime rise in the hormone leptin, which suppresses hunger, and the stress hormone cortisol is elevated throughout a 24-hour period."
We recommend refraining from overeating after dinnertime, and shifting your intake of calories to earlier in the day, while spreading out your calories over the day more evenly, to avoid large surges of blood sugar and insulin late in the day. This improves metabolism and insulin sensitivity.
To read more about Night Eating Syndrome click here.
DO eat breakfast and include protein
Too often our breakfasts are skipped, missed, or eaten on the run – a cup of coffee and a muffin or bagel. Furthermore, most American breakfast foods are simply sources of sugar – sugar-added breakfast cereals, refined grains, muffins, bagels, toast, donuts, waffles, pancakes, croissants – these foods will produce a large early morning surge in insulin that sets us up for weight gain the rest of the day. Furthermore, eating a skimpy breakfast or skipping it altogether leads to a bigger appetite and a tendency to overeat later in the day or at night, when our metabolism normally slows down. If we become accustomed to a healthy breakfast that includes protein, we are less apt to overeat at dinner and after dinner. So consider adding a protein source to breakfast such as eggs, a protein “smoothie”, some lean meat or legumes.
DON'T eat under stress
Yes, stress can make you fat! When we are under stress, our adrenal glands boost their output of cortisol, our natural “stress hormone” that allows our bodies to adapt to stress. Although cortisol is an important and necessary hormone, too much cortisol can interfere with our bodies’ metabolism. Cortisol (as well as the synthetic forms of cortisone) causes weight gain, a rise in blood pressure, an increase in insulin levels, cholesterol, and can even lead to diabetes. Chronic stress can therefore lead to weight gain through the overactivity of the adrenal glands. Stress reduction techniques such as exercise, meditation, yoga and breathing exercises will help to reduce the levels of cortisol and will help promote weight loss.
DO ask yourself "What am I feeling?" and "What do I need right now?" before eating
If we just ate when we were hungry, a lot fewer of us would be overweight.
Unfortunately, we tend to eat not just when we’re hungry, but when we’re nervous, anxious, under stress, angry, to soothe ourselves, or when we see something that we can’t resist. Few of us ask ourselves what our motivation for eating is before we put the food in our mouths. By being mindful of the motivations behind our eating, we will discover the many reasons other than hunger that lead us to overeat. By identifying these non-hunger motivations, we may be able to make choices that satisfy our needs and desires other than eating. By simply asking ourselves, “What am I feeling?” before eating, we can begin to learn when we are truly hungry, and when we are eating simply to soothe ourselves or relieve some type of tension.
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