Use It Or Lose It

It's an old proverb that most of us never paid much attention to. But it's  just as true today as ever before. Your body works in real time and if you're not building muscle you're losing muscle. Your body is continually changing. You build the muscles you use and you lose muscle that you're not using.

Most of us think that when we lose weight we lose fat. Not so, you're actually losing a small percentage of fat. You're mostly losing flabby muscle and only about 30% fat. This is the main reason that weight counselors want you to workout to lose weight. By working out you can increase the amount of fat lose and reduce the amount of muscle mass that's lost.
Your body has hundreds of thousands of muscles and we only use a few dozen muscle which means that thousands of your muscles are shrinking and turning to flab and if you don't work-out those muscles you aren't using will shrink and as they get smaller you are gaining flab.

Did you ever wonder why most people have lower back problems? I had lower back pain for years. Then I start to exercise to build strength in my core. I did sit-ups, and yoga and now no more back aches. I lost my belly and love-handles and no more pain. Even know I'm a senior, I can play ball with my grandsons, ride my bike and even jog. Exercising will give you your life back. I do some exercise every day. I can't start my day without some exercise. I'll exercise about an hour 3 times a week with lite days in-between. You have to give your muscles 48 hours or so to recover from a hard workout. The other day I do more yoga to stay limber, maybe 20 minutes in the morning while I watch the morning show.

I learned most of this on the internet. There's so much free information I can change my routine every week. As long as you workout with the same intensity, it doesn't matter what you do. Some days I swim, some days I ride a bike, some days I lift weights and some days I do yoga. If you change your routine you actually get better results.

Don't forget to eat better foods and never eat a lot at one time. I nibble all day long, and never eat a regular meal, and I'm never hungry. If I eat a regular meal I get sluggish and tired. I stopped doing that and now I'm more active. I'm back in size 34 pants after about 40 years, I weigh the same as I did in High School and I feel like I'm 35 again.

I'm never going back to that overweight guy who didn't know how to eat real food, snacked every night after dinner, stayed up too late and never wanted to get out of bed.  After I lost that body fat I was a different people and I like this guy.

If you really want to lose the extra flab you can get help, I write 4 blogs and I’ve written two E-books. Read some of my other blog posts.

gettingtoahealthyweight.blog
idropped40pounds.wordpress.com
howbaddoyouwanttoloseweight.blogspot.com

blogonweight.blogspot.com

E-books are the easiest and cheapest way to learn about any subject without groping through hundreds of website looking for the material you want.
My first e-book is “HowBadDoYouWantToLoseWeight” and it sells for $2.99 on most online bookstores like Amazon.com, BN.com, iBook, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, and Gardner books in the U.K.

My second e-book is available in the same stores. And on smashwords.com. If you use the Smashwords' promotional code You can get my second book for $1.99 (TL96R). Just type in the search line “getting to a healthy weight”.

 

How Does Your Body Loss Weight?

This post from Medicinenet.com gives you a good overview of how the body loses weight. This is what most of us get wrong. Why do you think 99% of us give up trying to lose weight?Because we think we know how but we really don't so we can't lose and we quit trying.

Introduction to weight loss

Whether you are trying to lose 5 pounds or more than 50, the same principles determine how much weight you lose and how fast your weight loss will occur. Remembering the following simple guidelines and putting them into practice can lead to weight loss without the aid of any special diet plans, books, or medications.

Our body weight is determined by the amount of energy that we take in as food and the amount of energy we expend in the activities of our day. Energy is measured in calories. If your weight remains constant, you are probably taking in the same amount of calories that you burn each day. If you're slowly gaining weight over time, it is likely that your caloric intake is greater than the number of calories you burn through your daily activities.

Everyone is in control of the amount of food he or she consumes each day, so our intake of calories is something we can control. To a major degree, we can also control our output of energy, or the number of calories we burn each day. The number of calories we burn each day is dependent upon the following:

• Our basal metabolic rate (BMR), the number of calories we burn per hour simply by being alive and maintaining body functions
• Our level of physical activity 
• You want to remember that the number of calories you burn everyday is different everyday. If your house is a two-story and you go up and down 8 times today and 9 times yesterday, then you may have burned more calories yesterday.
• Every movement your make uses up energy, so even if you do the same thing everyday, if there was any extra movement you burned more calories. That's the most important reason for exercise when you want to lose weight. Extra activity burns extra calories and if you eat the same amount you'll burn more calories which can translate into weight loss. 

For some people, due to genetic (inherited) factors or other conditions, the resting metabolic rate (BMR) can be slightly higher or lower than average. Our weight also plays a role in determining how many calories we burn at rest -- the more calories are required to maintain your body in its present state, the greater your body weight. A 100-pound person requires less energy (food) to maintain body weight than a person who weighs 200 pounds.

Lifestyle and work habits partially determine how many calories we need each day. Someone whose job involves heavy physical labor will naturally burn more calories in a day than someone who sits at a desk most of the day (a sedentary job). For people who do not have jobs that require intense physical activity, you need exercise or increased physical activity to increase the number of calories burned.

I make a suggestion, if your serious about getting into shape and losing body fat, take the time to learn about your body, what type of foods you should be eating and how much activity your body needs.

Check out my new website for more details: "howbaddoyouwanttoloseweight.com".

Are Food Cravings Your Problem?

Food cravings are one big reason for being overweight. Everyone has food cravings and the food industry is making millions off us. I was in Walmart yesterday to pick up some bottled water and I really believe there was more shelf space devoted to snacks and drinks then groceries. Then you add the frozen processed foods and all the candy and is it any wonder that we have an overweight population.

O.K., we do need snacks, but what can I buy that's healthy? What if you had a go-to salty/crunchy food that you could turn to in these instances that was actually healthy for you and your waistline?  Well you do...Almonds!

Almonds are loaded with healthy fats and protein that will keep you feeling full for hours, making them a terrific fat-burning snack to scratch that salty/crunchy craving itch. But I go one step further and buy salted mixed nuts. All nuts have good properties. Different nuts are rich in different vitamins and minerals so you don't have to skip any. I like a hand full in the afternoon and that kills the cravings until dinner. Remember just one hand full, the amount that will fill your palm. Nuts have calories and you can kill your diet by eating too much. 

So if you want to lose weight you have to start by changing what you eat. Start to eat natural foods, eat fresh, no processed foods, processed foods are foods that are pre-made and ready to eat, like the foods in restaurants and the foods in the frozen food section of the supermarket, no added sugar or salt, salt in foods adds to water retention and will cause high blood pressure. No enriched flour, including enriched wheat, it's as bad for you as sugar. 


Until you get back to a healthy weight you should make your own meals and brown bag lunch. One more tip "if you want to lose weight don't skip breakfast". For those who don't eat breakfast, have a protein shake. You need the protein first thing in the morning, the first hour your up.And here's another tip (after all, two tips are better than one):  While almonds are great, it's easy to overeat almost any food when eating straight out of the container.  In fact, research shows that you will eat on average two to three times MORE of a food when eating out of the container, than if you pre-portion your food out into a bowl.


Done of this is difficult, there are hundreds of websites that can help you. You have to want to change.
The point is that you can have healthy snacks. Losing weight doesn't mean starving.  I just changed  what I eat. So we covered snacks and that's a big part of your calorie intake, but drinks also count for almost as many calories as snacks. People will often forget about the calories in snacks and drinks because they don't think those calories are enough to count. But the truth is that snacks and drinks throughout the day will add up to more calories then your meals. 

Nuts, fruit including dry fruit that has no sugar added, seeds or some veggies like baby carrot are all good snacks, avoid the dips. 

For almonds, a 2 ounces (the typical serving size) is the perfect amount to set aside for a great fat-burning snack that will satisfy your cravings while holding you over until your next main meal.

A person should only consume about 1500 to 1800 calories a day depending on your weight. Now if you switch to drinking soda, they're about 200 calories a can unless your drinking a diet drink with zero calories. If your drinking a zero calorie can of soda you have to deal with the chemicals. And you might say "so what", "chemical are in everything anyway". Your right, but if your trying to lose weight, chemicals will affect your metabolism which is the bodies way of burning fat and if you slow down your metabolism your not burning fat, your just storing fat from the food your eating. 

If you start your morning at the coffee shop where you might order a Latte and then add sugar, you might be drinking 300 calories or maybe 600 depending on the size. If you drink plain coffee at work and put cream and sugar you might be drinking 100 calories and if you grab one of those donuts in the break room you might be taking a "500 calorie coffee break". It's now about 10 am you had no breakfast, just the Latte and your coffee break and your already consumed more then half your calories for the day. 

If you really want to lose your body fat than look for my e-books at the websites listed below. You'll get information on Healthy eating, exercise, and diet. Instead of spending hours on the internet reading dozens of posts, you can save time by picking up one of my e-books. 

There are two e-books. “How Bad Do You Want To Lose Weight?” is available at all the online bookstores selling for $1.99. Go to any of the websites below and search the title to find my e-book. This book gives you all you need to lose weight without spending money on gym memberships, diet plans or meal plans. Look for my book. at Amazon.com, B&N.com, iBooks, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, or Gardner Books in the U.K.

My new e-book is available on Smashwords.com, just type “getting to a Healthy Weight” in the search box at the top of the home page. 

The Argument Against Cheat Days

So cheat days sound like a good thing, right? Not so fast. The logic behind these days has more than a few flaws, and it’s due to the psychology and physiology behind them.

The Name Is to Blame

The trouble with cheat days starts with the wording.

“The very phrase ‘cheat day’ sets up enjoying a meal as something forbidden,” says Sondra Kronberg, R.D., executive director of the Eating Disorder Treatment Collaborative. “Separating foods into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories encourages you to associate eating with guilt and shame.” This means that instead of enjoying everything we eat, we feel bad about ourselves when we eat something we consider “bad.”

What’s more, when we deem certain foods “bad” or “cheating,” the negative name doesn’t help us pump the breaks.

“When a food is off-limits, it can develop a specific, emotional charge,” explains Melainie Rogers, RD, a nutritionist and eating disorder specialist. “You begin obsessing over it, fantasizing about, and looking forward to that ‘indulge day’ all week. Then, when you finally have access to it, you overeat.”

On the flipside, labeling foods as “good” or “healthy” can also backfire. Science shows when we think something is healthy, we’re not concerned with portion control and thus overdo it—whether it’s a “normal” day or a “cheat” day. Yes, there can be too much of a good thing.

Along these same lines, thinking of a meal or snack as “healthy” can have a surprising affect on our hunger. Studies show merely considering items we put in our mouth as “healthy” can literally make us feel hungrier—especially if we select a “good-for-you” item out of obligation over something we’re truly hungry for.

I want to add something, if your labeling your food you will start to recent the "good food". You will begin to crave more comfort food. The food you crave is not really "bad" food but pizza, burgers, fries, cheesy mashed potatoes, etc. just have too many calories and not enough nutrition. If you make your own hamburger on your grill and you use a healthy bun, and you put lettuce and tomato on it, I don't see anything wrong with that. Once a month I eat beef, but I cook my own. If you make your own food you know what's in it and you'll eat healthier and consume less calories.

Attack of the Calories

Folks who assume they can compensate for giving into temptations—say, by holding themselves back on all days except their cheat days—are actually less likely to reach their dietary goals. This is because they’re more likely to consume a greater number of calories, not just on their cheat day but on the days following it.

Restricting ourselves throughout the week and then slamming our bodies with sugar and fat once our cheat day rolls around, can have “a massive impact on blood sugar and insulin levels,” Rogers says. “You’ll wake up the next day craving more sugars and simple carbs, and you’ll find yourself feeling pretty ragged. And if you repeatedly increase your caloric intake above baseline, you may inadvertently end up gaining more weight over time.”

Cravings serve as a sign that your nutritional approach isn’t sound. “Most cravings come from overly restricting your food intake, using food as a drug, or over exercising,” Kronberg says.

A cheat day use to mean that for dinner on Sunday you could eat dessert. You could have an extra 200 or 300 calories, but today it seems to be a day you can go crazy and stuff yourself all day long. That's why I don't like "cheat days". Years ago when someone would diet they would restrict their calories and pretty much starve themselves, but today you quit doing that. Today when we want to lose weight we stop eating "comfort food" and we eat start eat healthier. We eat enough to keep from having craving but we are eating healthy and that's how we lose weight.

Being overweight may lead to joint replacement

A post on Medicinenet.com explains how being overweight can lead to joint replacement.  Obesity is a major risk factor for knee osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease that often leads to joint replacement surgery. The new study included just over 500 overweight and obese Americans who either had mild to moderate osteoarthritis or risk factors for the disease. The study participants were randomly assigned to a control group that lost no weight, a group that lost a little weight, or a group that lost more than 10 percent of their body weight. Four years of follow-up showed significant weight loss protected against cartilage degeneration and that larger amounts of weight loss provided more protection, according to the study to be presented Monday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, in Chicago. "Cartilage degenerated a lot slower in the group that lost more than 10 percent of their body weight, especially in the weight-bearing regions of the knee," study author Dr. Alexandra Gersing, from the department of radiology and biomedical imaging at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a society news release. "However, those with 5 to 10 percent weight loss had almost no difference in cartilage degeneration compared to those who didn't lose weight," she added. Significant weight loss not only slows the loss of knee joint cartilage, it also reduces the risk of osteoarthritis. Along with moderate exercise, weight loss is one of the best ways to prevent the disease, Gersing said. "It's most helpful if these lifestyle interventions take place as early as possible," she said. -- Robert Preidt

Rapid Resting Heart Rate tied to Early Death

You might wonder why I'm writing about this, but when I write about losing weight I always write about diet and exercise. My readers always ask the same questions, "What so important about exercise, I don't have time to learn all that". 

The idea of losing weight is to reduce the work your heart has to do. And why should we do that you might ask. The idea is to make your heart last longer which will help you to live longer. The reason you want to exercise is to strengthen your heart among other things. The stronger your heart, the stronger your blood circulation  and the lower your heart BPM when your resting. 

Read this short post from HealthDay and you'll see the science behind my conclusions.

A rapid "resting" heartbeat might mean you have a higher risk of dying early, researchers suggest.

"Higher resting heart rate is an independent predictor of all-cause and cardiovascular death," said lead researcher Dr. Dongfeng Zhang, of the department of epidemiology at the Medical College of Qingdao University in Shandong, China.

Your resting heart rate, or pulse, is the number of times your heart beats a minute. When you're seated or lying down and relaxed, a normal heart rate is between 60 and 100 beats a minute, according to the American Heart Association. 

Zhang's team analyzed 46 studies involving more than 2 million patients in all. Compared to people with the lowest resting heart rate, those with a resting heart rate of more than 80 beats a minute had a 45 percent greater risk of death from any cause, while people with a resting heart rate of 60 to 80 beats a minute had a 21 percent greater risk, they found. 

However, Zhang said the absolute risk is small -- that is, the odds of any one person dying from a rapid resting heart rate are low, he said. Also, the study doesn't prove that heart rate actually caused premature deaths; it merely finds an association between the two.

"However, people should pay more attention to their resting heart rate," he said. "These results also indicate the importance of regular physical activity that could lower resting heart rate."

You can check your heart rate by putting your finger over your pulse and counting the number of beats in 60 seconds, the heart association says.

For every 10-beats-a-minute increase in resting heart rate, risk of dying from any cause rose 9 percent, and risk of dying from heart disease increased 8 percent, the researchers found. 

When resting heart rate approached 100 beats a minute -- a rapid heart rate called tachycardia -- risk of death from heart disease grew significantly. Tachycardia can be a sign of serious heart problems, Zhang said.

Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, "Further studies are needed to determine whether using the resting heart rate to predict the risk of dying has meaningful impact and whether specific interventions to lower heart rate translates into improved outcomes." 

Numerous studies have shown that higher resting heart rate is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular events and death in men and women, Fonarow said.

However, whether higher heart rate is a marker of poor physical fitness or heart disease isn't clear, he added. A fundamental question is whether the higher heart rate is a modifiable risk factor for premature death, he said.

A fast resting heart rate can affect the body in ways that may be bad for the heart, Fonarow said.

Resting heart rate reflects the activity of the autonomic nervous system and hormone levels as well as heart fitness, he said. Increased activity of the autonomic nervous system and higher hormone levels can contribute to the start and progression of heart disease, Fonarow said.

For The Dieters Trying To Recover

This is a rough time of the year for anyone trying to lose weight. Back in the days when I was 50 pounds heavier, I would always gain about 10 pounds around the Holidays. The big problem though was after New Years I became accustom to overeating and the rest of the winter I couldn't stop indulging in comfort food. The winter was always my favorite time of the year because I loved all the food that you only see in the cold months.

The best way that I know to recover from Thanksgiving is first take those leftovers and put them in the freezer. You don't want to look at them for at least one week. Next for three days double up on water. Just plain water, about 8- 12oz. bottles a day. I know that sounds like a lot but this is the best way to flush your system. Drink one bottle every two hours. Today especially stick to salads, no carbs and no meat. You did too much of that yesterday. Saturday and Sunday stick to veggie and some meat, but no dark turkey meat for several days. Dark meat has lots of cholesterol and you probably had enough of that on Thursday.

Next week just try and go lite on the carbs until you feel normal again. I wouldn't weigh myself until next Friday morning. If you still feel bloated you'll have to keep drinking water until that feeling goes away. Don't skip any meals, just go easy, you could even eat RAW for a few days.