Search Results best way to lose weight for long term success

weight loss solutions article image

Weight Loss Solutions

On May 19, 2011, in Weight Loss, by admin

In my previous article, best way to lose weight, I talked about some of the theory behind different weight-loss solutions. I said that the most important thing you have to consider is whether or not your method of losing weight is sustainable. I discard of the ideas of fasting, surgery, supplements, and a sedentary lifestyle. This article will outline specific strategies for how to exercise, eat, and live so that you have a leaner, healthier body. I will also address the questions that I left at the end of the last article.

 

Let us start with sustainability. If you lose 10 pounds aweight loss solutions article imagefter a lot of work and then gain it back, are you happy? How about if you lose 20 pounds over two weeks, keep it off for three months, and then slowly gain it back over the next six months? Do you want to live a lifestyle where you’re continually dieting, losing weight, gaining it back, and then having to diet again?

 

The answer for most people is a resounding NO.

 

It is important to choose things that we can habituate. Aristotle talked about the power of habit and said that it was far stronger than the powers of nature. This is because once we adopt a habit, it becomes our nature. Nature can only instill a few habits in us, whereas we have the power to choose whatever habits we want to become part of us. If you learn how to eat healthy in a way that is not too difficult and you make this a habit, you will become a healthy eater. It will be natural for you to eat healthy. If you decide to become active and incorporates more activity into your life, habitually, you will become a more active person. You will naturally be more active. This is not rocket science, but it is something very important that we do not explicitly teach in our schools.

 

 

Weight Loss Solutions:

Let us first consider the fundamentals of exercise. Force equals mass times acceleration. Your goal in any physical activity can be summed up as either increasing your total volume or increasing your total force. If you do something faster than you did last time, you’re increasing your acceleration. If you are lifting something heavier than last time, you’re increasing your mass. These are the two variables of the force equation. I am of the opinion that the best way to exercise is by lifting weights. It is easy to track your progress, set clear goals, and manipulate your mass, acceleration, and total volume. These are the primary variables that increase your strength.

 

Everything else is secondary.

 

You want to increase your strength because the more volume you can do, the more calories you can burn, and likely, the more muscle you can retain. For weight loss, your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is very important. This is determined by the amount of muscle that you have on your body, how much you suffer from stress, and the amount and quality of your sleep. If you increase your basal metabolic rate, you can burn far more calories in a day than with just about any kind of exercise. However, exercise is also a part of determining your basal metabolic rate. Difficult exercises which few people perform can elevate your basal metabolic rate by a factor of eight to 10 for a short period of time. This is why you can eat so many more calories after a workout and not gain fat than you can consume before bed. The stronger you are, the more muscle you have, the more frequently you eat, and the more active you are in general, the higher your basal metabolic rate. I will now talk about how to eat so that you are not shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to the synergy between exercise and eating.

 

Calories and weight loss are closely related. However, as I mentioned in my last article, the difference between the amount of calories you consume and the amount of calories you burn are not easy to determine. In addition to needing more exercise, people could also use better diets. If you’re overweight, it is likely because of both of these reasons. You should be more active, and you should eat better food. You should also eat less junk.

 

Substitution is the key to a better diet. You can habitually replace bad foods with good ones. This helps you eat more healthy stuff as well as eat less junk. You are also not left with a void that you do not know how to fill. For example, many people fail to quit smoking because they stop smoking and, in the process, they lose a way to deal with stress. Simply deciding to do something in place of smoking, like drink and a glass of water, can help them ensure that they do not replace their smoking with another bad habit. This also decreases cognitive dissonance, so they are not as bothered by not smoking. Clearly, calorie restriction is not enough. It is smart calorie restriction that is sustainable which is most effective. This is why substitution is so effective.

 

 

You can easily choose your own rules to set and follow. Here are some of mine:

 

Weight Loss Rules

  • Eat every two to three hours
  • No carbs afternoon
  • No junk food unless it’s within one hour of a workout
  • Walk 30 minutes every morning before doing anything else
  • No caloric beverages after 3PM
  • Go to the gym at least twice a week and always aim for some kind of personal record
  • No work or computer after 10PM
  • Go to bed at 11PM and wake up at 7PM

 

Note that all of these rules are now natural. I do not have to think about them because they come to me automatically. I feel odd if I do not eat every three hours. I feel lethargic if I did not get my morning walk. I feel sludgy if I drink some caloric beverages after 3PM. I feel that if I do not get to the gym, then I am getting fat. I do not feel relaxed before bed if I do work or use the computer after 10 PM. I go to bed at 11PM so I can get a full eight hours of sleep.

 

The best way to lose weight is really a combination of habits. Set clear goals so that you know exactly what you need to achieve, then adopt habits, one by one, that will bring you to your goal. Once you have achieved your goal, you may either reevaluate your goal and strive to do more, or you can just continue on as you are. There is no need to do more or less. Just keep the habits that you have worked so hard to attain.

 

We are sum of our habits.

 

If we are inactive, we are not fit. If we eat more calories than we burn, we gain weight. If someone uses contraband habitually, then they look like a junkie. If someone trains to be strong, and they look strong because they are strong. If someone sleeps very little every night, then they look tired on a regular basis. They may develop deep bags under their eyes.

 

Poker players have to read people for a living. I used to play a lot of poker, and several of my friends are professionals. From this, I know that it is easy to get into the mind of somebody by observing their body because we are sum of our habits.

 

Lastly, let us look at efficiency.

 

Losing Weight Efficiently:

If you think that running is the best way to lose weight, then you are sadly mistaken. First, we must define running. When most people say running, they’re referring to this odd activity where a person maintains a steady, walking-like state, usually on a treadmill, for a long duration of time that is not too physically demanding. This is easy by comparison to sprints. One cannot accelerate for more than a few seconds before their acceleration decreases. Since forced equals mass times acceleration, they are not generating their maximum force once their acceleration decreases. It is important to keep such activity short, unless your goal is to try to develop very large muscles because low force does not generate strength. Furthermore, it has been shown that high intensity interval training burns far more calories than does steady-state cardio in the same amount of time.

 

The general rule of thumb is that the most efficient exercise is the one that recruits the most muscle fibers and generates the greatest amount of force. Therefore, if you have a choice between steady-state cardio and sprinting, you should choose sprinting with short rest periods. If you have the choice between doing squats and leg extensions, then you should choose squats.

 

For greater fat loss, keep your rest periods short. By short, I mean 60 to 90 seconds. Powerlifters will often rest for four to five minutes to ensure that they have had enough time to recover between sets. This allows for optimal strength development and recovery because they are always able to generate the largest amount of force in any given set. Unless you decide to become a powerlifter, stick to circuit training so that you can work different muscle groups as hard as possible with short rest intervals while still allowing them ample recovery time.

 

There are few more easy ways to burn calories worth mentioning in case you want to habituate them. Sleeping can increase your metabolic rate, so be sure to get a solid eight hours every night if possible. As you saw in my daily habits, I do not drink any calorie containing beverages after 3 PM. The exception to this is green tea because it can help with weight loss and because it can be used to substitute for calorie-containing beverages. Finally you may have also noted that I eat every three hours. By keeping the stomach constantly digesting by having protein containing meals every two to three hours, your metabolism stays elevated throughout the day.

 

Find habits which are suitable and sustainable for you. Work on implementing them, and let your habits bring you to your goals. I hope you have enjoyed these weight loss tips, learned a great deal, and enjoy success beyond your imagination.

 

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Tagged with: • • • • • •  
0 Comments
Leave a respond
image of the yin-yang representing weight loss balance

Quick Ways to Lose Weight

On April 24, 2011, in Weight Loss, by admin

Unlike my last blog post, Quickest Way to Lose Weight, I will cover several quick ways to lose weight in this post. Rather than just cover what I think is the best way to lose weight, I will go over several very good ways to achieve this goal.

 

Weight loss tips abound, but most are missing the forest for the trees. A few really good tips will go much further than a huge bag of very minor tips. In addition, it will be far easier to implement a few solid tips than to try and remember a hundred different things that you need to do differently.

 

You can lose weight, and you will if you follow these tips without adopting new bad habits. Often, when trying to make a positive change, people will sabotage their efforts by simultaneously adopting a new bad habit. For example, when I first decided to stop drinking pop, I thought juice would be better. Little did I know that juice is also just a bunch of dead calories, just as calorie dense as pop, and I often drank more of it than I did pop because it both came in larger containers and because I mistakingly though it was healthier.

 

The result – weight gain. I thought I was doing something healthy, but I made a simple mistake. I adopted a new good habit (not drinking pop) but also adopted a new bad habit in its place (drinking calorie dense juice instead).

 

So the first quick way to lose weight is to evaluate all decisions related to weight loss carefully. Here is a short, but important checklist to make sure that you are making good weight loss decisions:

image of the yin-yang representing weight loss balance

  • Is this new habit/rule sustainable?
  • If eliminating a habit, what will fill its place?
  • Is the new behavior/rule better than the old one?
  • Is there an even better alternative?
  • Would trim, vibrant people who I want to be like benefit by following this rule/habit?

 

Is this new habit/rule sustainable?

 

If it is not sustainable, it is not worth doing. Why bother to lose ten pounds if you will just gain it back in a week after you change your habits? Short-sighted thinking causes most people no end of pain. Looking to hook a man with your great looks that usually aren’t there? Go off the diet, and if he was interested in a slimmer you that you can’t sustain, expect him to go bye bye when the weight comes back on. Unless it’s a one-time event (like a vocabulary test), short-term fixes hurt more than help. They just waste your time at least twice (once when doing it the first time, and again when you decide to take the quick fix in the future).

 

If eliminating a habit, what will fill its place?

 

New years resolutions usually fail not because of poor intentions or lack of willpower. They simply fail because they are not engineered to succeed. You may decide to workout eight hours a day, and can keep this up while on vacation, but as soon as you go back to work – you simply can’t do it… not as long as you are human anyway. The sad fact is, most people have no idea how to plan for change effectively, although there is one simple rule that always works.

 

Whenever removing a habit, you need to find a new one to put in its place. If you do not have a new habit in mind beforehand, you will simply end up filling the space / scenario with something random. Since it is random, it may be a better or worse habit. The only way to guarantee success is to decide on a good habit to replace the eliminated one. For example, instead of just saying you will stop drinking Coke, decide to drink water every time you feel like drinking Coke.

 

I got off of the Coke habit while my father tried doing the same thing with beer. However, since my father did not have a replacement, he ended up substituting scotch for beer which just made him more inebriated and cost a lot more to boot! Moral of the story is, you cannot quit cold turkey. Have something to put in place of what you plan on eliminating before you start and stick to it.

 

Is the new behavior/rule better than the old one?

 

Let’s pretend you are working out to lose weight, but decide that you will do something more fun instead of something that is really working for you. Let’s say that you decide to go on a morning walk in the nice fresh air for half an hour instead of doing interval sprints on the stationary bike because it is more enjoyable. Now, there is something to be said for doing what you love, but the new behavior will probably lead to bad weight gain rather than added weight loss. You may like your walks more, but the new rule is not better than a harder workout to lose weight.

 

Is there an even better alternative?

 

Let us continue with the previous example. If you want to get more fresh air, you can substitute a morning walk for high intensity sprints on the stationary bike. However, instead of just walking, turn the walk into a sprinting exercise. Do the same amount of work that you would normally do at the gym, but do it outside at your favorite time of the day when the air is fresh and the birds are singing. At worst, you see the same results, but at best, you get even better results and feel better about it. Extend the length a bit more so you can wind down and enjoy the outdoors more and you have found a much better alternative from all angles.

 

Would trim, vibrant people who I want to be like benefit by following this rule/habit?

 

Another excellent question to ask about your method for losing weight is whether other healthy and vibrant people would adapt your idea. If, for example, you wanted to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger used to, you should expect to do similar training to what he went through – steroids and everything else included. Are your weight loss solutions actually helpful, or just helpless distractions? If you have a very fit friend or acquaintance, ask them about your idea and see what they think. If they shoot it down and recommend something else – strongly consider their advice. They may be a meathead or whatever derogatory term you have made-up to save your own ego, but they have something you desire. The quickest way to success is often simple emulation.

 

One of my favorite quotes comes from a world-famous powerlifter by the name of Jim Wendler. To get whatever physical goal you want, his advice is pretty much the same:

 

Eat a ton, exercise hard and sleep well. Repeat this daily for 10 years.

 

It’s hard to argue with that! However, few people are able to find habits which they can sustain for ten years since most diets and routines are all about fast results. Shift to a long-term perspective and your goals and behaviors for attaining them become clear.

 

My last quick weight loss tip will also save you a ton of time and frustration:

 

Focus on behaviors and not results.

 

If you do the right things on a consistent basis, do not worry about the results. They will eventually come as long as you keep doing the right things. However, if you are lying to yourself and not doing the right things, the results will never come. Therefore, if you fail to get your desired results time and again, you really need to change your approach because it is not working for you.

 

I hope you have enjoyed these quick ways to lose weight and wish you success in implementing them.

 

Find Related Posts:

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Tagged with: • • • • • •  
0 Comments
Leave a respond
diet1

Ways to Lose Weight Fast

On April 5, 2011, in Weight Loss, by admin

If you are looking for ways to lose weight fast, then you have come to the right place. This website has many weight loss tips from how to exercise to how to eat and everything, including psychology, in between.

The first question people often think about with weight loss is what they are eating. A reasonable first question may then be about what to eat to lose weight fast.

While this is a good question, the negative is even more important. So instead of just thinking about what to eat to lose weight, you may first want to consider what not to eat to avoid gaining weight.

The reason I focus on what not to eat first is because one bad meal or snack can ruin an entire day, or even several days worth, or perfect dieting.

So what are some good rules for what not to eat?

  1. Think “outside of the bakery”
  2. Processed means dead calories (lots of dead junk that makes you fat)
  3. Fats and carbohydrates are like cats and dogs – they usually do not get along
  4. Do not eat until you feel like an inflated balloon

Actually, rule 3 is just a repetition of the first rule. carbohydrates and fats are like carbohydrates and sugars – they help you gain fat very quickly. Unless your bakery is very different from the one by my house, almost everything found inside of one will destroy any efforts you make to eat well.

Rules two and four help you constrict calories where they should be constricted. Do not drink or eat anything that is contained in metal, plastic or cardboard. Many of you may not know how to eat at first given this rule, so you may have to go and ask active and healthy looking people how to eat better.

This means no cereal, no fruit juice and no canned vegetables.

You actually need to go to the produce section and buy foods that will rot if you do not eat them in the next week. You also should drink beverages like green tea (no sugar or milk), miso soup, and apple cider vinegar water or fresh fruit smoothies and yogurt.

Of course, water is at the top of the list – no calories and it helps hydrate you when your body is thirsty – asking to be hydrated with, well, water!

Follow these dietary guidelines and you will quickly lose a lot of weight quickly!

However, this is not all for this article since there are many ways to lose weight fast. I will now talk about the other key component; exercise.

You may be wondering, “What is the fastest way to lose weight?” The above recommendations are good, however, a better question to ask is:

“What is the best way to lose weight?”

Focus on the long term and you are guaranteed long-term success. Focus on the short term and your results will only be temporary.

Therefore, the best way to lose weight fast is to follow my “do not eat” rules and to become an active person.

Active person means that you are a person who regularly seeks activity. You do not avoid it, and being active becomes a very important part of who you are.

If you want to lose weight, you likely have a lot of excess weight on you. This comes from two things; poor diet and inactivity.

I discuss in other articles what I think are the best exercises to lose weight, but for now, just look at your current activity.

How many hours of exercise do you perform each week?

Walking up stairs does not count as activity, nor does walking into stores from your car. If you are not going to use your legs, you may as well get one of those electric wheel chairs. Many people who are forced to use them would kill to be in your position with a working pair of legs.

Whatever your current level of exercise, a simple recommendation is to increase it by 4 hours per week. If you currently get no exercise, go to the gym and workout 4 hours a week, or play a few games of soccer / football. Sorry, bowling and baseball do not count – you need to actually exert yourself for it to count as exercise.

If you have a lot of extra body fat, consider riding bike outside where you are forced to pedal up hill sometimes. Try to beat your old times, and push yourself.

Your body will not change unless you force it to.

I have not talked about what food to eat to lose weight, but what food not to eat since this is more important in the beginning. Couple this with four more hours of exercise per week and you will see fast weight reduction.

Enjoy the rest of this site – most articles will help you find several ways to lose weight fast, but remember, the three keys are diet, exercise, and becoming an active person.

Find Related Posts:

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Tagged with: • • • • • •  
0 Comments
Leave a respond
W

Fat Loss 4 Idiots

On January 3, 2011, in Fat Loss 4 Idiots, by admin

Welcome fellow fat loss idiot! I say fellow fat loss idiot because until a few years ago when I finally started getting things right, I had been on just about every weight loss diet around. Most of these diets claim fat loss 4 idiots, and they often deliver, but they only deliver temporarily. Whenever people are trying to lose weight, they forget one important thing with most diets and exercise routines:

Sustainability.

Without sustainability, there is no reason to start a diet or go to the gym in the first place. People can lose weight with just about any diet out there or any fitness program out there. These are idiot proof, and they work. However, what us fellow dummies forget is the long run. We get excited about the short term benefits, and do not realize that they will go away soon. Like a night when I drank about twenty martinis as a college student and then realized the next day that I could not go drinking for the next two months because I had spent so much. We are great at being enthusiastic, but are fat loss idiots.

So, how can we get more permanent results? Just follow my recommendations below:

Fat Loss 4 Idiots: Sustainable Practices for a healthier body with less fat

1) Set a SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound) goals

If you have not heard about SMART goals, you are missing out on a real good thing. Go to Google and search about them for more info; I will not be justifying them here because I do not have time, but they are very helpful. If you do not know exactly what you want (specific), you do not have a target, so you can never hit it. If your goal, for example, is to lose weight, that tells me nothing.

How much weight do you want to lose? Fifteen pounds? Five percent body fat? What is the end goal? A six pack? Less saggy man boobs? Seriously, how do you define success? The more clear you are, the better you can measure your progress and correct your course to attain your goals. Which bring me onto the measurable bit.

If you cannot measure, you do not know your progress. In my article fastest way to lose weight in a week, I talked about the importance of measurement. If you just want to lose five pounds, that is not specific enough. You are on the right track measuring something, but five pounds of what, muscle? Fat loss is probably what you are after, so you decide to measure your fat loss, but do you know how to measure fat loss? If not, look into buying a set of calipers and learn how to do site tests for fat. You cannot measure without the right tools, so know what you need to measure, and learn how to measure it.

OK, so you now know what you want, and you know how to measure it. Be honest with yourself now; ignorance is an excuse at first. If you are going for a six pack in a few months with twenty percent body fat, it is probably not going to happen. Elite level bodybuilders may have a hard time pulling that one off naturally – then again, they would never let themselves get as fat as you; they have moved beyond fat loss dummies – they are elite. Now, more realistically may be to have a six pack after two years of heavy weight training, four times per week, with interval training on your non-weight training days. In addition to learning how to cut water weight for a bodybuilding competition, you can achieve this goal for a day or two unless you are genetically gifted. In this case, you can walk around with a visible six pack all the time. However, since you are not doing so already, your attainable goal will be to have a visible six pack for a day after two years of consistent hard work and be sure to take photos!

Relevance is also important. Does the above attainable goal sound like more work then it is worth? If so, it is not relevant. Perhaps you just want to get into single digit body fat and look much better than ninety nine percent of the population. If this is more relevant, then you are more likely to succeed.

Finally, your goals must be time bound. If you at any point answered, “I want a six pack,” my question is when? Someday? When you are dead and your body is decaying under the ground? The answer, “someday” really means never because you are missing one of the keys for success – a deadline.

Once you master the art of SMART goal setting, you get really good at achieving specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant goals by a given deadline. This applies to weight loss and anything else in life. If you cannot fit in into a SMART goal, it is probably not worth pursuing.

2) Commit to a healthy and sustainable diet.

Once you know your SMART fat loss goals, you can begin the second phase of my fat loss for idiots guidelines: commit to a healthy and sustainable diet. If you do not have a healthy diet, you surely will not lose fat unless you are doing crazy amounts of exercise. So, what is a healthy and sustainable diet? I will not spend too much time defining one here because I have covered it in other articles on this website. However, a quick summary would be helpful. I consider a healthy and sustainable diet one in which you eat a serving of protein sufficient for your body composition five to six times per day and have some kind of fruit or vegetable with every serving of protein, and healthy fats at snacks.

3) Do resistance training four times per week

The third guideline of my fat loss 4 idiots plan is to do heavy weight training four times per week. Three times will suffice if you are an elite athlete, otherwise, get your butt in the gym four times per week. That means Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday of every week (or some other four day variation). Without weight training, you are missing a factor equally important to a healthy and sustainable diet. You must also get used to the idea of weight training several times every week for the rest of your life. If you do not, you simply will not be able to walk around at your lowest levels of body fat. Heavy lifting gives you the biggest bang for your buck, so stick to complex, machine-less moves like squats, deadlifts, cleans and presses with barbells and dumbbells (not machines). You want to activate those stabilizers all over your body that machines hinder and get optimal muscle activation for the best results. If you do not know how to lift heavy; learn. Look up any powerlifter forums or Olympic weight lifter forums, and the people will help you out; they are a very nice bunch of folks.

4) Interval Train on Non-Workout Days

My fourth fat loss 4 dummies tip  is to take advantage of the days you are not training with weights by doing interval training. This could be sprinting hills or HIIT (high intensity interval training) on a bike (or stationary bike), or track sprints, or sled drags, or any other short burst maximal effort movement. I suppose even swimming laps could count if that is what you have available, but make it from short end to short end and not long to long. These should be about fifteen to thirty seconds in duration, giving it all you’ve got, with a minute or two’s rest between sets. This will keep your metabolism elevated all week and your body will turn into a fat burning furnace.

5) Cheat Your Diet 10% of the time.

My final fat loss 4 dummies tip is to cheat your diet ten percent of the time. This serves several purposes, and let me give a cautionary warning: DO NOT GO OVERBOARD! Enjoy some foods you normally would not, but exercise a bit of restraint. The cheat meals give you a bit of a psychological release from the strict exercise and dieting as well as keep your body from adapting to all of those healthy foods you put into it. If you are eating five good meals per day (minimal recommendation), this means that you can have a cheat meal every third day after two good days of eating. Note, if you miss one of your meals so that you are not eating five meals per day, this counts as a cheat meal; just another incentive to stick to your regular meals.

In this article I have outlined my fat loss 4 idiots guidelines that any dummy can understand. Depending on how smart your SMART goals are will determine how successful you will be. As a fellow idiot, I recommend to aim low at first. Achieve the results you go after, then set more ambitious goals. In this way it is possible to build on your small successes as well as see immediate results. Good luck, and despite the harsh language, I really do hope you succeed. I hope you have enjoyed these weight loss tips as much as I enjoy sharing them. Learning how to lose weight has been my inspiration for this blog, and really does make life a lot better.

Find Related Posts:

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Tagged with: • • • •  
0 Comments
Leave a respond