Our greatest health risk is overweight, but it’s not complicated to become lean,
if you know how your body works. You might have tried commercial weight-loss systems or fad diets, or bogus slimming aids, which only set you up to become fatter.
You can save yourself the cost of professional visits, psychological counseling or complex behavior therapy,as most of such intervention is detrimental.
The National Institute of Health expert panel on weight loss showed that behavior therapy and counseling get worse long term results then people who are losing weight by themselves.
The amount of fat you carry around is not determined by your genes, but by what
you do and what you eat. Recent scientific studies has shown that neither the number of fat cells nor their seize is genetically fixed, but body fat is dependent on lifestyle.
Your body has no internal reference for a permanent level of fat, only for a habitual level.
When you remain at a particular fat level for a year or more, your body develops all the adipore cells, capillaries, enzyme counts, periphial nerves,hormone levels and connective tissues to support it. It becomes to recognize that level of fat as self and will defend it vigorously.
That’s called your fat point. You body constantly monitors its fat point with hormonal messages,such as glycerol, which warns the brain to take defensive action if even the smallest quantity of fat is suddenly used for fuel .That’s why usual forms of dieting can’t possibly work.
By slowing metabolism, increasing fat storage and increasing appetite, your body’s fat point defenses will defeat you every time. Then how can you treat it? Easy!
Reliable studies show that it takes years of overeating to grow fat.
Body fat accumulate very slowly, an ounce or so per day, a pound every two or three weeks.
In a year you are 20 lbs over. In 3 – 4 years you gain 60 lbs of flab.
As your body shifts its habitual fat point up very slowly, you have to operate down the same way,very slowly. Otherwise your body will cannibalize your muscle, excite your fat storage enzyme and boost your appetite to ravenous.
It’s important to reduce you total daily calories by no more than 20%. That’s 400 calories off a 2000 calorie diet. That’s 2800 calories or 0.8 lbs of fat per week.
Because of increases in body efficiency, you will not lose 0.8 lbs of fat but only about half a pound.
That’s the most you can lose without triggering body defenses.
Step 1.: Lose no more than half-a-pound of fat per week.
Get your body composition measured once a month, including fat weight, lean weight and body water. A newly available alternative to underwater weighing are the inexpensive skin-fold calipers for self-use at home. These calipers have a tension device on them to ensure you get the same pressure on the fat each time you measure, provided you take the measurements in exactly the same spot every time.
Step 2.: Measure your body fat once a month.
The calories you cut from your diet have to be the right calories,importantly from all kinds of fat.
Contrary to the calorie-counting strategies of much of the weight-loss industry,
we know that fat calories are fatter.
When excess carbohydates or protein are eaten, the body makes complex metabolic adjustments to promote glycogen storage in muscle and increase the use of protein or sugar for fuel.
It also has to use a lot of energy to convert these foods to body fat. Hence you have to eat a bigger excess of carbs and protein than you do of fat before they
end up on your hips.
But when excess fat is eaten, metabolism remains unchanged. Virtually all the excess is promptly layered onto all the wrong places.
Now you know why calorie counting doesn’t work. Numerous recent studies show that you put on much more body fat by eating fat than by eating the same number of calories from carbs or protein.
Fat calories pack on more body fat than calories from any other food.
Step 3.: Eat a low, low fat diet.
Look on the nutrition facts label when you buy food. Divide the total calories by the calories from fat. If the answer is less than 5, don’t buy the food. In a diet of 2000 calories, that’s a maximum of 400 fat calories.
Step 4: Don’t eat foods that contains more than 20% fat calories.
Many dieters think that they are on healthy, low-fat nutrition, when in fact they are mislead by false food labeling. Many apparently dry foods like cookies, baked goods, crackers & chips are higher in fat than ice-cream. Even low-fat milk is really high fat.
How does low fat milk get away with its name? By jiggery-pokery lobbying power,
the dairy industry got an exemption from the new labels. Nevertheless, an 8 oz glass of low-fat milk (2%) serves you a hefty one-third of its calories from fat.
Food industry lawyers have filed exemption claims for all kinds of foods.
So if you want to avoid hidden fats, don’t trust anything on food labels except
the Nutrition Facts panel. That has to be accurate if it’s legal.
Especially beware of “reduced fat” products. Under the label law “reduced fat” means 25% less fat than the original product. So it goes with everything from reduced fat bologna,high can still be 60% fat, to “light” and “lite” variants of foods, that have to be one-third less fat than the original, but can still be
40 – 50% fat.
Step 5 : Trust only the Nutrition Facts panel on food labels.
Next, you should cut down on simple sugars. Chocolate cookies, candy and table
sugar are obvious, but raw sugar, refined honey, corn syrup, fruit juice
concentrate and date sugar are bad as well.
Look out for fruit juices, orange juice contains more sugar than Coca Cola.
What’s the reason that sugar increase body fat? Because quick absorption into
your bloodstream causes an excess insulin burst from the pancreas.
When it reaches the liver, excess insulin, which is toxic, is converted into
neutral triglycerides. Triglycerides are exactly the form of fats that are stored
in all your adipose cells.
Sugar not only causes excess calories that turn to fat, but it also causes the
body to make even more fat from its own insulin. Replace as much as the simple
sugars in your diet by complex carbohydrates, like whole-grain and vegetables.
Step 6. Cut down on sugar, eat complex carbohydrates instead.
If you think you can lose weight by skipping a meal, forget it.
It wouldn’t work because this results in bursts as soon as you eat again.
The excess insulin that will be turned into fat will compensate for the skipped meal. If you want to lose fat, you have to fast for a longer period, at least
24 hours. It’s important to keep your insulin output level steady for the whole
day. For optimum fat loss, reduce the size of your meals and eat five small meals
per day.
Step7. Don’t skip meals, eat five small meals per day.
Almost all popular diets are deficient in essential nutrients. Don’t fall in the trap of eating only grapefruit, bananas and milk or only salad.
By doing so you become nutrient deficient, it increases your appetite and makes
you fatter. Instead, eat a large variety of foods.
Step 8. Avoid all fad diets
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Most of our foods has become deficient in many vitamins and minerals. As a result,
your body turns up your appetite and makes you to eat more in order to supply the
missing nutrients. You have to eat far too many calories to make up for the
missing vitamins in your diet. A single nutrient deficiency is enough to make you
fat like a hog.
The best solution to this problem is to take a full range, high quality multi-
vitamin supplement plus a multi-mineral supplement every day. They act as a
regulator to your appetite and naturally curb your desire to eat.
Step 9. Take a high quality multi-vitamin and multi-mineral supplement every day.
The US National Academy of Sciences believed that chromium was great for car bumpers, but useless for human nutrition, till Dr. Walter Mertz of the Human
Nutrition Research center in Beltsville, MD. Showed that chromium is essential
for your body to use insulin.
Now the latest RDA handbook recommends 50-200 mcg of chromium every day to
maintain insulin metabolism.
Because of the large number of diabetes, folk are well aware that insulin enables
the body to deal with sugar. What they usually don’t know is that insulin also
controls fat and muscle.
However, unfortunately nobody gets even the minimum recommended level of chromium
in their degraded food. Studies show that 90% of the selected diets contain less
than 50 mcg of chrmium per day. The average chromium intake is only 29 mcg.
As a result, this poor nutrition causes your insulin metabolism to barely limping
along and your body fat piles up.
Dr Gary Evans developed a new form of chromium: chromium picolinate.
More than 20 studies show that it improves insulin metabolism, reduces body fat
and increases muscle mass.
Pigs who have similar insulin metabolism to men, when fed chromium picolate,
increased their lean mass by 7% and reduced their body fat by 21%.
That’s a much healthier animal.
Your daily multi-mineral supplement should contain 200 mcg of chromium picolinate.
For fat loss you should use an additional 200 – 600 mcg of CP per day, in
conjunction with an exercise program. Don’t use any other form of chrmium.
Hexavalent chromium or chromate for example, is highly toxic.
Step 10. Use a chromium picolinate supplement every day.
Dr. Leonard Storlien and his colleagues from the Garvin Institute for Medical Research in Australia, were the first to prove that omega-3 fatty acid found in fish oils and also made by our body from Alpha-linolenic acid in flax oil, improve insulin efficiency, by using carbohydrates and fats for fuel.
Most Americans are deficient in omega-3s. It’s important to get it to combat body fat.
Step 11. Take a flax oil essential fatty acid supplement every day.
The bodyfat stored in adipose cells is carried by a nutrient called l-carintine,
to the mitochondria (furnaces) of muscle cells, where it is burned for energy.
By increasing the level of l-carintine by means of supplementation, more bodyfat
is transported and burned.
Your body makes l-carnitine, but if you are overweight and yet don’t eat a lot,
your body doesn’t make enough for optimum use of fat for fuel.
To inprove fatloss,take 2-4 grams of l-carnitine per day in conjunction with exercise.
Make sure you get l-carnitine, not racemic- or dl carnitine, which is cheap and toxic and interferes with l-carnitine metabolism and consequently increases body fat. Don’t except cheap l-carnitine.
Step 12. Take an l-carnitine supplement every day.
Make sure to take 30 – 50 gram high-fiber per day to prevent disease and to create
slow and even food absorption from your intestines, keeping your insulin level steady and also promote the use of food for energy rather than for the building up of body fat.
The average American don’t get more than 10 – 20 gram of fiber per day,
which promote a lot of diseases and put on body fat.
Fiber is essential to prevent colon and rectal cancer.
Step 13. Eat 40 gram of mixed fibers per day.
Dr. Peter Wood from Stanford University has shown frequently that exercise is more
important than food intake to keep body fat under control.
As a regular exerciser you can eat a lot more and keep slimmer than sedentary people.
If a plump person does the right exercise at the right time, he can increase his caloric
intake far above the amount used by the exercise and still lose a lot of fat
The key is to do the right exercise.
Aerobics are usually recommended in the weight loss industry, the more intense
the better, which is all wrong!! The problem is that aerobics exercises that raise your heart rate above 120 beats per minute, which include running, rowing, swimming, cycling and many of those fancy aerobics classes in health clubs,
all strip off muscle almost as much as they strip off fat.
And as you know, muscle loss reduces your ability to burn fat and sets you up
to become even fatter. Remember, muscle is the engine in which body fat is burned.
You should do everything you can to maintain it for the rest of your life.
Walking is good for many health reasons,it also burn some fat and will not burn muscle.
But the best exercise for fat control is wide-variety high repetition resistance training,using weights or machines.
By exercising all the muscles of your body, you burn a lot of fat.
Another advantage of resistance exercises is that it increase muscle and as a result provide more muscle cells to be able to burn fat. It’s a real health bargain.
Step 14. Do high-repetition, wide-variety resistance exercise.
The basis rules for muscle work are simple. If you use heavy resistance so that
you can complete only 3 – 6 repetitions of an exercise and you do 5 – 6 sets,
you build maximum strength but you don’t lose much fat.
If you reduce the weight so that you can complete 8 – 12 repetitions and you do
3 – 4 sets, you build muscle well and burn medium amounts of fat.
If you set the weight so you can run out of steam in 20 – 25 repetitions, while doing only one set, you build a little muscle but burn a lot of fat.
Step 15. For maximum fat-loss, do one set of each exercise with a weight that
exhausts you in 20 – 25 repetitions.
It might be true that running burns more calories than walking and cross-country skiing burns most calories of all, but fat loss has little to do with calories used during an exercise session.
Many recent studies show that the right exercise raises your metabolic rate for up to 18 hours afterwards.
However, if you exercise in the evening and then go to bed, you lose most of the
fat loss effect, because sleep causes your metabolism rate to drop rapidly.
The best time to exercise is in the mornings, the earlier the better.
Step16. Exercise in the mornings.
Dr. Leonard Epstein analyzed all the published studies on exercise and fat loss
and showed that people who exercise five times per week lose three times as much
fat as those who exercise only twice or three times per week, even if they exercise for a longer period. Those who exercise only once per week lost no fat at all.
For fat loss, five days weekly exercise of 30 minutes is much superior to three days weekly of 70 minutes, even though the total weekly exercise time of the three day people is an hour longer.
In order to keep that metabolic rate churning, frequent exercise is the key.
Step 17. Exercise five mornings weekly for a minimum of 30 minutes.
As you can read in my article about exercise, oxidation is the primary cause
of human degeneration.
Because exercise uses 12 – 20 times more oxygen than sitting in a chair, it also creates masses of free radicals that causes a lot of oxidation damage.
Without additional anti-oxidants you are slowly killing yourself.
You can prevent exercise oxidation damage by taking antioxidant supplements.
Step 18. Take a multiple anti-oxidant every day.
The first strategy in your fight against body fat is to reduce your appetite.
Phenylpropanolamine helps a little. Better is ephedrine hydrochloride and its original source: Ma huang or Ephedra sinica.
But you should be very sensible in the use of these compounds.
Don’t use more than 25 – 50 mg per day, otherwise it lose it’s effect and can cause many side-effects, including raised blood pressure, anxiety and insomnia.
The second strategy is to reduce the taste of food, especially sweet tastes.
The herb Gymnema silvestre has been used for this purpose for thousands
of years in Ayurvedic medicine. It works a bit.
The third strategy is to reduce your body’s tendency to store fat.
The herb Garcinia cambogia, a specific variant of the English brindleberry
is used in Ayurvedic medicine for this purpose.
The active ingredient is hydroxy citrate.
Ongoing studies by DR. Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona indicate
that 500 mg of garcinia may reduce fat storage from a high-fat meal by up to 30%.
As a bonus, it may also reduce appetite.
The final strategy is to raise metabolic rate so that your body burns more calories
during the day. It’s called thermogenesis, which means: it raises body temperature.
To maintain the increased temperature, the body has to burn more calories to make
the heat – lots of calories. And because it is low level activation, the calories burned come mainly from fat.
There are a lot of drugs that does the job, but all of them causes side effects.
It doesn’t make sense to make yourself unhealthy while trying to lose fat.
Least damaging are the beta-adrenergic agonists and most harmless of these
is ephedrine or its herbal source: Ma huang. These compounds work by increasing
bodily output of noradrenalin, one of our “fight-or-flight” hormones.
That warns you right away not to use too much,(25-50 mg per day max.) or you
run into severe anxiety, irritability, headache and insomnia.
The FDA are against ephedrine, because folk have used larger doses and
caused real damage to the thyroid gland and other organs.
However, ephedrine on its own is not effective, because your body quickly
defends itself with multiple mechanisms that turn off the extra noradrenalin.
The three main defenses your body uses against a sensible ephedrine
regimen (25–50 mg/day) are: increasing output of phosphodiesterase enzymes,
and increasing prostaglandin production.
These defenses can be overcome respectively by using caffeine, theophylline
(from tea) and acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin).
Herbal sources can also supply the caffeine, theophyline and aspirin.
Standardized extracts of kola nut, guarana, black tea and white willow are good
sources. And you can prolong the effect of caffeine, which is mildly thermogenic
by itself, by using naringenin, a compound found in grapefruit.
Another effective chemical to use in conjunction with beta-receptor agonists
is yohimbine, a compound from the bark of the yohimbe tree.
Yohimbe is one of the class of compounds called selective antagonists
of alpha-2 receptors. This action of yohimbine has shown to cause long- term
thermogenesis and fat loss in animals.
Controlling excess body water is the last thing you can do to lose body fat.
Especially for women, who have this problem. Bloating and edema prevent
your Lean For Life program, because they make you feel blah and make you
to sit like a slug and avoid exercise.
Diuretic drugs are not the solution, but mildly diuretic foods like melons,
cucumber, grapes, apples, parsley, pineapple and cooked asparagus
all help to shed excess water.
Mil diuretic herbs, like Uva ursi and Sarsaparilla also have a use in this
phase of fat loss.
Step 19. Use the right herbal fat loss supplement every day.
Success is always achieved by setting goals. To improve your performance,
you should set specific goals and sub-goals and write them down and post
them on the fridge, for example, so that everybody can see them.
Goals have to be specific, measurable and time limited.
“To lose weight” is to vague. Instead for example: to lose 10 lbs of fat by
my next birthday is a good goal.
Lean for Life is a very long-term goal, so you have to use sub-goals to be able
to check your progress.
Finally, you have to make your goals public, so that your family and friends
can blame you for failure, but praise & reward you for success.
Step 20. Form specific, measurable, public, rewarded fat loss goals.
Edition #42
Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) describes an estimated $290 billion U.S. marketplace for goods and services focused on health, the environment, social justice, personal development and sustainable living. The consumers attracted to this market represent a sizable group in this country. Approximately 13-19% percent of the adults in the U.S. are currently considered LOHAS Consumers. This is based on surveys of the U.S. adult population estimated at 215 million.
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