It is common for people who have become overweight to focus on just one thing – losing that fat weight in the fastest possible manner. They jump on the latest ‘fad’ get thin quick diet on the market and start restricting food intake without thinking that they are simply on another merry-go-round of yo-yo weight loss/gain.
We now know that 95 percent of diets fail and the main reason is that they are short term solutions that are impossible to stick to long term and do not even address the root cause of why you have become overweight in the first place.
It really has nothing to do with eating less food, low fat/low carbohydrates or low calories. In fact if you follow these sorts of programs or plans you will likely make the problem worse than it is already by slowing down your metabolic motor even more. It is likely that your fat burning mechanism – your metabolism has slowed to a crawl.
This is common in our inactive world when we do not get enough muscle building and maintaining activity in the course of our usual sedentary day. We mostly sit for up to 80 percent of our waking hours stuck in one chair or another and wonder why we slowly but surely being overweight and over-fat. Two thirds of us are now in this category to one degree or another.
Going on a diet and not eating enough food is the last thing you need to do as it will force your body into ‘fat conservation’ mode. This is where it holds on to every scrap of fat and the more you restrict calories the more fat it will hold and store.
No matter how many times you use these methods to try and lose weight you will not be winning the fat loss battle as you have not addressed or solved the problem of preventing your body from becoming fat in the first place so any weight lost is quickly put back on and usually some more as well.
So to win for the long haul the focus needs to be a whole lot more than simply eating less. This is only half the equation. You have allowed your metabolism to slow down and now will have the predisposition to store and preserve body fat from here on in.
To free yourself from the awful burden of being overweight (physically, mentally and emotionally) you have to heal, rebuild and reset your metabolism making it fat resistant. This is going to take the right combination of metabolism restoring strength training exercise and metabolism stimulating healthy eating – NOT just a diet.
This means your meals should be small (300-400 calories), contain a source of protein at each meal and number 5-7 per day. Eating like this and your strength training program need to be done consistently over time so you are not only rebuilding your metabolic motor to what it should be but you are making it healthier as well.
Bottom line – an overweight body is an unhealthy body. Healthy bodies are not overweight as their metabolism is running efficiently to burn up all the food they eat for energy and this happens within the muscle cells.
So get yourself toned back up with your strength training program 2-3 times each week, support that with healthy eating so you have enough energy to be able to put some effort into your exercise program and watch the magic happen.
If you do it right, the combination of your exercise and healthy eating can boost your fat burning capacity 15-25 percent which may mean a loss each week of around one half pound of body fat. And the exciting thing is – think forward to 12 months from now – that will add up to a loss of 25 pounds of pure fat. So rebuild your fat burning motor, think healthy and the fat loss will follow automatically.
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