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Losing weight has gotten a bad reputation. People avoid it, dread having to do it, try it and give up, and generally approach it with the idea in mind of how hard it is! But it can be much easier than that. The trick is to approach it gradually.

Don’t try to make huge changes all at once.

Make one small change at a time and give yourself some time – maybe a week or more – to get used to it. Then add on another small change. If you keep it up, which is not very hard to do, after only a few weeks you will start to notice changes in your energy, your strength, and how your clothes fit.

What kinds of things can you change? Well, we can start by remembering that weight loss or gain come from the foods you put into your body and the exercise you do with it. That gives us a lot of possibilities. One week you can add a short walk after dinner or lunch. Read the rest of this entry »

Well it is that time of year again, you are a little pale and the spare tire is a little bit bigger than it was in the fall and now you want to lose some weight and look better in those skin showing summer clothes. What you need is a plan and a bit of a change in schedule.

Here is a simple list of things that you can do starting today to make sure that you are buff and ready as the summer and summer activities come in a couple of months.

Eat Smarter

The key to a healthy diet plan is to eat smarter than before. Over the winter you may have been eating a little badly, keeping on track but cheating. Now is the time to start eating in a very structured and focused way.

No matter how you have been eating you must now start eating every couple or three hours. Really this just means toad snacks, good for you snacks. Let’s say that you eat breakfast at 8, lunch at 12, dinner at 6. Now all you have to do is add snacks (really just smaller meals) at 10 am, 3 pm and 8 pm. Now you must be wondering, what you should be eating.

The next important thing is to be sure to eat smaller meals and small snacks. The idea of eating so often is that your body will be better able to use the food that you are eating and a side effect of this is that it will raise your metabolism.

Raise the protein, drop the carbohydrates

What you eat is the next thing that is important. You should get a good idea of what is a carb based food and what is a protein based food and we all know what is fatty and these high fat foods should be avoided when you are trying to lose weight.

I said that you need to eat small meals but most importantly you need to make sure that you have lots of protein and less carbohydrates than you are used to. This may be initially harder than you expect but in the end this adjustment will pay great dividends in having a healthy diet plan for summer.

Stay hydrated when you exercise

When you are working out you will want to of course drink water and sports drinks so that you can keep not only your liquids up but the magic of sports drinks like Gatorade is that they bring back the electrolytes that you are losing by sweating. Getting dehydrated will drop your energy and in the end will stop your body from functioning normally.

These steps to a healthy diet plan will make a big difference this spring and summer to make you healthier and more fit.

A couple of days ago my son was not eating his dinner and my daughter piped in

“Jaiden eat the chicken, it has protein, it will give you energy”

I cringed a little but this myth has gotten legs over the years. If you are tired and need energy nothing can beat a big steak.

In fact this idea is not at all true. Carbohydrates are the choice of energy sources in the body the fact is that the simpler the carb the more likely your body is to break it down and use it. The way that I look at energy sources your body will use the following in order; glycogen stores in your muscles, sugar, starch, and then equally protein and fat.

Many people on a diet will try to cut down on all of their carbs and will try to lose weight. This works initially because the body uses up all of the easy to get carbs and then will then move on to eating away at fat and protein. After a while you will get tired as your body will be really craving some kind of simple carbs for energy and it is a struggle for your body to use protein and fat as quick energy sources. This problem is even more of a problem when you exercise as there are no easy ways to get energy for your workouts.

So now you see why I am always writing about how important it is to get protein in your diet, not for the energy but more to counteract your body eating away at the protein in your muscles as well as the fat on your body when trying to lose weight. Your goal should be to look healthy not to look starved and muscleless.

So yes your body can use protein for energy buy mostly as a last resort. The problem is that when losing weight your body will use the protein in your muscles for energy as well as the fat in your body. But it will not use that steak right away.

Theoretically, you could get adequate protein from a strictly vegetarian diet, but practically it would be extremely difficult. For one thing, it would require the eating of huge amounts of food. Most vegetarian diets make excellent use of eggs, milk, and cheese, and to that extent are only partly vegetarian.

Animal proteins are stressed in your reducing diet for another reason. Recent knowledge indicates that Vitamin A is not always well absorbed in the form in which it occurs in green plants. Such plants, normally rated as excellent sources of the vitamin, contain it in yellow pigments of which the chief is carotene.

This does not become the vitamin until it is altered in your liver. It has been found that some persons absorb as little as 5% of available carotene; hence, though their food contains plenty of Vitamin A units, they derive no benefit from it.
Animal foods, however—eggs, butter, liver, milk, cheese —contain the true vitamin. The animal has done all the work of converting the carotene into Vitamin A, saving you the trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

With the switch back to Weight Watchers for my wife we have also added a new twist to our daily eating, no eating after 7:00 PM.

I didn’t want to mention this until after we had done it for a few days but what started out as a joke has become a great change in our lives. We started on Wednesday night not eating after an hour or so after dinner and over the last three or four nights I have missed snacking less and less.

The first two evenings of not eating I found that I was hungry when I went to sleep and my stomach was a little unsettled for some unknown reason but in the mornings I have not felt any different then I did before, not too hungry.

I have spoken to a few people that have done the exact same thing and found that they have lost weight wityhin the first week or two just from making the cahnge to no evening snacking.

What do you eat at night? Is it good or bad food or nothing at all? I know that I was not eating any really bad foods although I was eating some not very great food. I was eating fruit as well as trail mix and other kinda salty food.

There is one drawback that I am concerned about and that is the really long time between meals and what it will do to my muscle mass and my metabolism. I am a bit of a graser usually and eat throughout the day so my body never has to get nervous about me starving and because of this my metabolism is always pretty high and good.

Next of course is the whole catabolic balance. If your body is looking for energy it will use the energy within your muscles but if your muscles and the rest of your body can not find any energy it will go into a catobolic state where your body eats away at the protein and fat in your body. I know that this is what we are really looking for when we try to lose fat but the problem is that with any prolonged fast that you will lose the muscle that you really want to keep at as great a pace as you are losing fat.

Time will tell if this experiment with not eating at night will be a great method of cutting some calories and maybe even helping improve sleep cycles.