Many of us are guilty of going ‘on and off’ different diet plans. For the last few decades that is what you did when you wanted to lose weight. Magazines, books and television reinforced that with a huge array of the latest fad diet plans and we were all sucked in to the false promises of “lose 20 pounds in 14 days” or “trim your thighs in 8 minutes a day” and other such tempting promises.
But most of us who embarked on these diet plans are actually no slimmer now than we were back then and concede that for all the dieting we did it did not work as a long term weight loss strategy. Fortunately over the years as more research has been done we now know better ways to continue our weight loss battles but with more success than earlier attempts.
The new way to lose weight is based around being healthy and having good ‘metabolic fitness’ as opposed to being on a diet. This means fat burning hormones are working properly, blood sugar levels are kept fairly constant and appetite regulation systems are in balance so they are not working against us. Most diet plans tend to work against our metabolism (our bodies engine).
A diet tends to work against our body
Our ‘metabolic fitness’ is based around the premise that a healthy body is not overweight or over-fat. When things get out of balance that is when fat is stored rather than being burnt for energy. The first thing that gets out of ‘whack’ is our body composition (muscle/fat ratio). This is caused by our sedentary modern lifestyles and the fact that most of us sit in a chair of some sort for up to 80 percent of our waking hours.
This causes us to lose our precious fat burning muscle tissue and what is left is weak and flabby dropping the energy requirements of our body. We end up storing fat no matter how little we eat. And of course the other factor is we generally are eating the wrong types of foods and too much of them. This means processed and refined foods particularly sugary carbohydrates combined with the lack of muscular exertion and we have a ticking health bomb as the body fat accumulates.
The only way to fix this problem is to get our muscle toned back up and strong so they burn more fuel every minute of the day and night. This can easily be done with a proper strength training exercise program. ’Cardio’ type activity will not rebuild or recover lost muscle tissue so forget the long duration, low intensity activity.
A diet does nothing to rev up your metabolism
Strength training exercise is so efficient just 2-3 sessions each week are needed, but you will need to put some effort into each session as the body needs to be challenged to coax it into making changes. Your metabolism (your body’s engine) is based around the amount of toned muscle tissue you have so its rehabilitation is vital if body fat is to be lost in a healthy manner.
There is no need to restrict food intake as you do on most diet plans. Or if you do only reduce it a hundred or two calories each day to avoid triggering the survival mechanism that protects you from starvation and has you in fact storing more fat. You need lots of energy to put into your exercise sessions so you can make the changes necessary to your fat burning engine and restricting food too much will leave you low on energy. Keep up your strengthening exercise and before long you will have burnt off the excess fat and have in your clutches the body you have always wanted.
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