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What To Eat To Lose Weight

On May 28, 2011, in Weight Loss, by admin

what to eat to lose weight article imageAre you wondering what to eat to lose weight?

 

Or perhaps you are thinking about not eating to lose weight.

 

In either case, this article will address how to lose a lot of weight, primarily through dietary techniques, although exercise can greatly speed up your weight loss efforts. In this article, I will talk about the benefits and pitfalls of losing weight through calorie restriction as well as some sustainable dietary tips.

 

Let us first address a very common and loaded question:

 

Does not eating make you lose weight?

I have done just about every diet under the sun, and many of them have been calorie restriction diets. While effective, the biggest pitfall of these is how difficult they are to sustain. Competition bodybuilders have mastered this art, but it is not an easy road to travel.

 

Alternatively, if you consider the Bragg diet coupled with fasting, this leads to severe calorie restriction that causes you to lose both fat and muscle. This may be sufficient for your needs, and I honestly felt wonderful on the diet, but if you want to eat meat, you should look elsewhere. A raw foods diet is not for everyone, and if you couple fasting with a typical western diet (instead of a raw foods diet), you are far more likely to gain weight than to lose it.

 

You usually gain weight on this regime because your metabolism gets downregulated when you are fasting, and if you follow a fast with a high calorie meal anytime soon, your body absorbs all of the calories and quickly converts them to fat so that you can survive the next fast when it comes around.

 

So, can you lose weight by not eating?

 

Yes but…

 

Only if you can sustain a very low calorie diet with an excellent vitamin profile (think fruits, vegetables, nuts and berries). For many people, this is ideal, but others cannot stand it. If it sounds like a good fit, give it a try. If not, read on.

 

I will now discuss what to eat to lose weight if the above approach is not for you.

 

Foods to Avoid When Losing Weight

First, let us consider foods to avoid when you are losing weight. As I have said in other articles, if it comes in a box, bag or can – avoid it. Substitute for something that is natural and fresh instead. Cereal bars, despite their attractive packaging, are not full of living vitamins and nutrients – they are what are called “dead calories”. Dead calories do not help you much, and are all too easy to over-consume.

 

What To Eat To Lose Weight

Having lived in a second world country, I think the main reason for the American obesity epidemic has to do with the convenience of calorie dense foods. In developing countries, food has to be cooked and cleaned from scratch for the most part which means that there are few snacks easily available, and everything comes from fresh, raw ingredients which are generally much more filling and more expensive. The result is that people eat less food because it is harder to make and healthier food in general. Combined, that makes for a thinner population.

 

We often “don’t have time to cook” which usually means a highly processed, quick meal with little to no nutritional value and a very high calorie count. Take a lesson from the developing nations (that are getting fatter the more developed they get), and make meals from raw ingredients that take time to make.

 

This could end up being the best piece of advice you get for making foods that help you lose weight.

 

Weird Ways to Lose Weight

There are all sorts of weird ways to try and lose weight to avoid the heavy lifting of actually adopting a good diet and exercise regime. Do not waste your time on these because they are usually just as much work, if not more, and will often deliver less than acceptable results.

 

Heed the advice in this article; put more time into the food you make, use better ingredients, and stop going for the fast fix, and you will lose weight. Avoid the calorie restriction trap that often leads to yo-yo diets that make you worse off than you started. Finally, if it sounds appealing to you, give fasting and a raw foods diet a try. Although I no longer use this method because I require large amounts of calories for my power lifting workouts, it is very suitable for people that are less active, and I loved how I felt.

 

Best of luck to you and I look forward to hearing about your success in the comments below.

 

 

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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.

 

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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.

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Fast Ways to Lose Weight in a Week

On January 2, 2011, in Weight Loss, by admin

As you probably know by now, there are no shortage of weight loss tips or fast ways to lose weight in a week on this blog. Today I will talk about the importance of when you consume your calories, and how eating at the right times can help your weight loss efforts. In this article I will talk about something that is somewhat of a hot topic these days called “calorie shifting” as well as meal timing and carbohydrate cycling.

The basic premise for all of these methods is keeping the body off its guard. When weight training, you go through something called adaptation if you just do the same exercises every week. Your body adapts and you quickly hit a ceiling. That is why all of the people over at Westside Barbell use something called the conjugate method. In essence, all this means is do the same thing every time, but different. So instead of narrow-stance squats to depth with a two rep max weight every session, you vary the width, throw in a box, use different bars, add bands, chains, or weight releasers, do different sets, different rep amounts, and may even do bottom-ups or reverse band work. The options are almost limitless, but these are all the same exercise; the squat.

Well, the body does pretty much the same thing. If it knows that it will get two thousand calories every day, it will adapt to this. If it does not know how many calories it will be getting, it will store fat differently and process its nutrients differently as well. This can mean weight loss, once again, without actually changing the foods you are eating, but rather timing their consumption better.

Before describing any of the methods, let me be frank; this can be programmed very scientifically based on several factors which may include your current fitness level, body composition (fat to muscle), age, resting heart rate, usual calories consumed in a day, and even type of work. However, most of these factors do not mean much. People package them so that their book is different from the next guy’s; at the core of these programs is what I will outline below (without specific calorie counts):

1) Calorie Shifting

The premise behind this is quite simple. Eat like you normally will for say two days in a row, then eat the same number of meals on the third day, but cut the calories in half, then return to your normal diet. Rinse and repeat. Your body will get fewer calories than it is used to, but it will not down regulate its metabolism because you are not going long enough on a calorie restricted diet. In other words, it is better to diet two days a week (fewer calories) than seven. Pretty simple concept, but the difficulty comes in returning back to the normal days. Many people are likely to eat too much on the day after their low calorie day, so beware and find foods that will work for you.

2) Carbohydrate Timing

This is not exactly a diet tip, but more of a cheating tip. If you really want to have a bunch of carbohydrates (something I do not usually recommend), then the best time to have them is after an intense workout at the gym. Your body will suck up the insulin after your workout and those calorie dense carbs will not do as much harm as they normally would. The morning is the second best time to have them, and before bed is the worst. A big bowl of cereal may be OK for breakfast, but it is the fat man’s bane before bed!

3) Carbohydrate Cycling

Carbohydrate cycling is the bodybuilder’s best friend, and could become yours too. I say bodybuilders because almost every bodybuilder will do it, and because not everyone else is doing it, it may be a bit harder for the average Joe to master. Basically, the only carbs you eat come from vegetables on low carb days. Your normal day is a low carb day, and then every three days you get a high carb day (this should also be a workout day). Since you are not getting many carbs on your normal days, your body will become more insulin sensitive, and soak them up on your high carb days. Meanwhile, on your normal days, your calorie intake will be lower since you have eliminated a high calorie group of foods. If you keep your protein intake high on normal days, you can stay muscular and lose fat at the same time; this is the Holy Grail of fat loss.

I have talked about a few ways to time your eating / foods to help you make the most of them, whether it be when to eat junk food, or when to cut back. Just cutting the calories is a lesson in failure, and a no-carb diet is not as sustainable as a carb cycling diet. Everything in moderation, but not all at once; it is usually better to cycle foods / calories / weights / sets / reps in some planned way to avoid accommodation. Eat smart, train smart, and good luck.

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Fastest Way to Lose Weight in a Week

On January 2, 2011, in Uncategorized, by admin

You have come to this blog looking for the fastest way to lose weight in a week, and I will tell you exactly how to do that. Losing weight comes in many forms, and for fastest weight loss, you need to attack all of them. At the top of the list is water weight. Usually, when people lose weight quickly, it is all water weight. When competitive fighters and powerlifters have to weigh in before a fight, they often cut twenty pounds in a day of water weight. The next most effective kind of weight loss is muscle loss. If you do not eat, you lose fat and muscle, but usually more muscle than fat. The body keeps fat as its final reserves, and that is why it is so hard to lose it.

Before I go into a plan, let me first warn you that I do not recommend this plan for anyone. Doing any one of the three things mentioned to excess can cause death, so do not do it. This is purely a hypothetical example to look at what might be achievable for the best theoretical fat loss. Do not worry, I will give some real tips after our thought experiment.

Putting these together, here is what your fastest natural weight loss plan would look like:

1) Go on a fast; eat nothing and drink water for the next week.

2) Exercise as much as possible. On the first day I would train heavy, complex movements and run sprints. On the second day, I would walk for a few hours. On the third day, I would do circuit training until I get dizzy then do a bunch of walking. On the remaining days, I would lift very light weights and do do as much walking as possible. After a few days without food, exercise is very difficult.

3) Dehydrate yourself on the last two days of the week. Once you have depleted as much muscle and fat as possible, you drop all the water weight.

Now, with this method, assuming that you lived and depending on your bodyweight, I think it would be possible to lose between forty and up to one hundred pounds in a week for someone with more than fifteen percent body fat. Once you start eating again, if you do not get sick and vomit everything back up because you weened off the fast improperly, you would gain all forty to one hundred pounds back in a matter of days.

Clearly, the goal then should not be the fastest way to lose weight in a week, but rather the fastest good ways to lose weight in a week. Forget in a week altogether if you can. Instead, you should think about:

“The fastest ways to lose weight and keep it off with as little effort as possible.”

Few people come to search engines with such a good definition, but it would serve them well if they did. In my blog I give many weight loss tips, but fast is often counterproductive. So I will now share a few new sustainable habits that can really help you out that are not that hard to do.

First off, do not check the scale often. All you are doing is checking your daily fluctuations in water weight. Check once a day at a fixed time (preferably when you first wake up and before breakfast), and only check it once every two weeks. If your weight goes down over the next two checks, congratulations! Whatever you are doing to lose weight is working. However, we have not yet decided which type of weight loss you are having. You may be losing muscle, fat, or both. Likely, it is both, and if you do not care which it is, ignore the next paragraph.

If you are interested in fat loss, you need to lose fat while gaining or retaining muscle. The only way to do this is through a high protein diet and heavy weight training (or lots of steroids and a small amount of weight training). You simply cannot retain muscle while losing fat unless there is a reason for your body to keep the muscle.

Now, if you are only interested in losing weight (fat and muscle), this can be done through calorie restriction alone (though it is more effective when combined with exercise). For today, I am going to recommend two new habits before every meal:

1) Drink a tall glass of water

2) Eat a handful of unsalted nuts

What this will do is get you past the twenty minute time-delay for fullness so that when you start to eat, you are not extremely hungry. Fats are slow digesting, so you will feel more full when you have some good fats (nuts) with your meal than if you just ate carbs or protein alone. This new habit will make you more full while eating less, which means fewer calories in. It will also probably help get some extra fiber and healthy fats in your diet which have many benefits in themselves (fat loss and improved mood among them for healthy fats).

Eating fat is not the bad guy, having food turn into fat is the bad guy. The worst thing you can do is eat a bunch of simple carbohydrates (sugars) together with bad fats (trans-fats). This prompts a big insulin response from your body that all turns to fat if unused, and it will not be used unless you are weight training or doing crazy sprinting / biking before you consume them. Instead, a handful of nuts before a meal will actually help you eat less and lose weight. Never be afraid of natural foods; nuts, fruits, vegetables and berries in their raw form. Nobody ever gets fat if they eat these good foods alone, it is only in conjunction with bad foods that fat gain happens (unless they have a very rare medical condition).

I hope this article has been enlightening on several levels, from weight loss philosophy, to a few useful tips and nuggets of wisdom along the way. It is not about the fastest way to lose weight in a week, but rather the fastest and easiest way to lose weight and keep it off. Good luck and stay tuned!

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Quick Weight Loss Tips

On January 2, 2011, in Weight Loss, by admin

Today I am going to cover a topic that I quickly mentioned in the past in more detail. This article will focus on the art of substitution. I say art because it is a skill that is learned slowly over time, and the more you do it, the better it becomes. I call this article quick weight loss tips because really, there is nothing much faster for weight loss than simply choosing the right foods. Truly, this skill has the capacity to completely change not only your body composition, but your entire lifestyle as well. However, in this article I will focus primarily on how you can use substitution to effectively help you lose weight.

The first, and perhaps most obvious use of substitution is to eat good foods instead of bad ones. If you feel like a coke, choose a healthier option like non-sugared tea. If you must have something with a bit more flavor, go for milk or fresh fruit juice. However, most fruit juices that you buy in the store are no better for you than the coke, do do not believe the claims on the labels. I recently bought a package of swiss miss; it talked about all natural ingredients on the label, but the first ingredients were sugar and high fructose corn syrup. This is far away from what the labels lead you to believe if you do not look at the ingredient list; the power of advertising and good marketing in full force.

Now, if you get used to substituting the worst foods with something a bit better, this is a great start. What are the worst foods? Well, it will differ from person to person. Make a list of the ten worst foods you eat and brainstorm some substitutions for each. Choose the best substitution and stick with it for the next few months.

One example of this in action was my usual trips to the Outback restaurant a few years ago. It was the favorite place for many of my friends, and I absolutely love the Aussie cheese fries. Now, since I was eating there quite often, I had to do something about that heart attack on a plate, so instead of ordering them as an appetizer, I ordered the chicken salad instead with extra chicken fingers. Still not great, but much better. Do this for your ten worst foods, and the amount of calories consumed will be far less opening the way for fat loss.

So, you now know the basics, so I will move on discussing the next stage of your substitution habit; replace calorie dense foods with calorie sparse ones. Now, I can never part ways with the lactose free whole milk that I found, but for those of you that can, skim milk instead of whole milk is a great substitution. Likewise, anytime you are considering starchy carbohydrates like breads, cereal, pasta, substitute with legumes, beans, and vegetables instead. This will cut a huge amount of calories from your diet.

The above technique is used by professional bodybuilders almost exclusively. They will eat lots of calorie dense foods, but usually only on a high carbohydrate day or around their workout window. Otherwise, it is strictly beans, legumes and vegetables. This helps them stay lean and are a good source of fiber. Another thing they often do is substitute all calorie containing beverages with water or green tea. Imagine drinking nothing but water or green tea and how many calories this would eliminate from your diet. This is relatively simple once you get used to it, but may be very scary at first to take the plunge.

Finally, the supplement industry wants you to think that you need to gulp down handfuls of pills everyday to stay healthy. This has always been the case, but on the whole, unless your doctor has told you that you need to take something for health, you probably do not need it. Following this, my final suggestion for substitution is to substitute whole foods for all of your supplements. If you take fish oil, just eat fish every few days. I will go through periods where I eat fish several times daily for months when I live in a region with fresh seafood. At other times, I will find a great deal on canned tuna and will buy boxes full of cans. If you are taking a multivitamin, these are largely a waste of money. Just be sure that you are getting a healthy variety of meats and all of your vitamins will be covered unless you have some sort of special deficiency; always listen to your doctor (if they are a true Ph.D and not some “alternative medicine” fruit loop). I say meats instead of vegetables because meats are far higher in the essential vitamins than vegetables. Animals eat vegetables, you eat animals. Carnivores do not get vitamin deficiencies, vegetarians do.

I hope this article has made substitution a bit more clear. Start with the big things first, identify and substitute for the ten worst common foods in your diet. From there, move from calorie dense to calorie sparse foods, and finally, get your vitamins and minerals from whole foods instead of supplements. This will save you lots of money in the end and make you healthier overall. These substitution tips can be applied to your life and bad habits as well, but this is beyond the scope of this article. I hope you have found these weight loss tips helpful and informative. Good luck!

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Easy Weight Loss Tips

On January 2, 2011, in Weight Loss, by admin

In today’s article, I am going to share some easy weight loss tips. If you thought eating more frequently was a treat, today’s tips will blow you away. In some senses, they may be even easier and equally effective. So in today’s article I will highlight how sleeping more is good for weight loss (and a host of other things) and another tip for eating to lose weight.

In my how to lose weight in a week post I mentioned the twenty minute rule, so let us begin with a quick recap. The twenty minute rule says that your body will not start to feel full until at least twenty minutes after you start eating. So the second recommendation, rather than to eat slowly or to pause before seconds, is to eat before you are very hungry. If you have already taken my weight loss tips article’s advice on eating every two to three hours, this is just a wolf in sheep’s clothing. If you have not made the two to three hour eating rule a habit, then at least shoot for eating before you become very hungry. If you wait until you are very hungry and then eat, you are more likely to be ravenous and devour more food than you need, and fall in to the twenty minute rule’s trap. So always aim to eat before you are hungry, and you will actually end up consuming fewer calories quite naturally.

Now, how can you lose weight by sleeping? This is not some infomercial nor is it a gimmick. There are a few things that happen when you sleep more, and after we look at them, you might be able to guess how weight loss is possible before I say it.

First, when you sleep more, you are awake less. You cannot eat while you are sleeping (unless you have some very special talent or are on some kind of IV drip), so sleeping more means you are awake to eat less. Therefore, sleeping more has the potential to decrease calorie consumption.

Second, the quality of food you eat at night is generally much lower. You reach for the potato chips, popcorn, beer, and other calorie dense foods because they are easy, and your self-regulation is down. I do not blame you because I am the same; after a long day at work, I want to kick back and relax a bit. A bit of comfort food makes it all the sweeter. However, comfort food before bed is one of the worst things you can do for weight loss. It is like trying to remove a sliver from one thumb by stabbing it into the other thumb; when you say you have a goal and then do anything counter to that goal, do you really have a goal? It is much better to have all the cards working in your favor, so be aware that your defenses are weakest before bed.

Finally, I have read a few studies stating that your metabolism is higher (burning more calories) when you sleep than when you are awake watching TV. If you are vegging out in front of the tube every night before bed; try this. Set a bedtime, let us use eleven at night for our example. Set your bedtime for eleven and reserve an hour before bed to read fiction or do some stretching. I say fiction because the whole point is to get your brain out of stress / work mode. This will get you relaxed and in a mood to sleep. Go to bed at the assigned time and lay there until you fall asleep. Do not worry about sleeping, just relax and let it come naturally.

Do this for a week and see how much more energy you have. If you are a regular television watcher, you may realize that you wake up with much more energy and an improvement in mood. When you are sleep deprived, your metabolism slows down, your mood gets worse, and life is more stressful. When you sleep plenty, your mood improves, your metabolism speeds up, and you lose weight from not eating junk at night. Feeling well rested is one of the best feelings I know, but it is easy to forget what it feels like after years of worthless hours spent in front of the tube.

Sleep is far better than soaps. I will go so far as to say that soaps are a gross waste of life. Have we really forgotten about hobbies and socializing to the point that we must be mindless vegetables waiting for the next mildly interesting thing put in front of us to appear to amuse us? What happened to seeking adventure, excitement and meaning in our lives? We expect everyone else to do it for us. Oh, wait. Many of us never had any to begin with… but that is a rant for another day.

As a little encouragement, after I lost about seventy pounds and learned to control my weight, I went from a single, overweight and under traveled college kid to a happily married, powerlifter who has since been to seventeen countries outside of the United States in the last five years. Learn to do one thing well, and you can learn to do many things well. Taken together, all of the weight loss tips on this blog can make a big difference in your weight loss efforts.

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How to Lose Weight in a Week

On December 29, 2010, in Weight Loss, by admin

Today I will talk about how to lose weight in a week through some novel methods. To begin, weight loss should not just center around one week’s worth of dieting in general because you will always gain the weight back once the diet is finished. Instead, think about losing weight in a week as something you do fifty two times a year. The weight loss tips that I will cover in this article include how to eat (not what to eat), and how this can help you shed the pounds. If you are like me, smarter is preferable to harder. Let’s begin.

If you have not heard about the twenty minute rule, let me introduce you to the concept with a few short stories. Currently, I am a powerlifter. I have been doing this for two years and go to the gym regularly between six and eight hours per week (three to four two hour sessions). When I finish my workout, I know that my metabolism is very high, so I want to eat as many calories as possible because my body will use them very efficiently to repair the muscle damage caused by my workout. In other words, eating a lot after intense workouts is one of the keys to getting very strong as a powerlifter.

As soon as I am done with my workout, I drink a high carb shake immediately and order a pizza. By the time I finish showering, my pizza is ready for pickup and is just down the road from me, so I will pick it up on my way home. After I arrive, I will devour the whole thing as quickly as possible, often drinking a glass of milk with it, and then have some ramen to fill me up a bit more. This all weighs in at about two thousand calories, what most people will eat over an entire day.

How is it possible to eat so much? It is all due to the twenty minute rule which my friend introduced me to when we were teenagers. Basically, after you start eating, you have twenty minutes before your body says, “I am getting full.” Ever seen a hot dog eating contest? There is a reason they eat and chew as fast as they can because once they pass the twenty minute mark, they literally cannot eat anymore.

We used to buy a family meal from Kentucky Fried Chicken and see if we could finish it off, and gradually increased the size until it was just silly to continue further. I did lots of stupid stuff as a teenager, and it is part of the reason I was very fat when I graduated from college. However, this binge eating did far less damage than my usual dietary habits, so I will teach you how to make the best of the twenty minute rule; not for self destruction, but for self preservation!

If it is not already apparent, practice eating slowly. If you take your time, your food will have time to digest properly and you will feel full when you should. This is why Europeans can take several hours for a meal and not be close in body size to the fast eating, obese Americans. They are much better at enjoying their food and taking time to chew well. I lived in Europe for a year, so this is not just word of mouth, it is first hand knowledge. Also, chewing well increases nutrient uptake and it is easier for your stomach acids to dissolve the food.

It may take a while to get into the habit of eating slowly; especially if your are famished! In this case, the next tip will come in handy: wait ten minutes for seconds. Even if you think you are eating slowly, take ten minutes before helping yourself to seconds. Usually, the fullness will set in and you will either forgo seconds entirely, or help yourself to a smaller amount.

I went to the buffet with co-workers the other day and saw the twenty minute rule in effect. After twenty minutes, the initial rush for food slowed down. A few more people continued to stuff food into their mouths (to get their money’s worth no doubt), and they felt full to the point of excess afterwards. Those that took more time to eat, slowly enjoyed a bit more; they enjoyed their food and conversation more fully, and actually ate longer than those that gorged themselves. However, they ended up eating less total food altogether.

There are two more tips related to eating that I would like to leave you with before concluding this article. If you absolutely must eat fast due to a short lunch break or some other such time constraints, make a new rule; do not have seconds and only eat eighty percent of your normal portion size. If you do not have time to enjoy your food and chew properly, you are better off without some of it. Eat a bit less or make time to eat well (slowly with lots of chewing, preferably with a few friends you enjoy spending time with).

The final tip is to always eat before you are hungry. As I mentioned in my first post on weight loss tips this may mean every two to three hours. Now, if you are eating this often, the quantity of food should be less. If you do not get hungry for five or six hours, just follow the previous guidelines about slow eating, waiting for seconds, and chewing well.

Congratulations, you have reached the end of this article. You should now know how to lose weight in a week, perhaps every week for the next several weeks, and then maintain your new bodyweight by keeping to the weight loss tips described above. You should understand the twenty minute rule, take breaks between second servings, chew your food well, eat less if you do not have time to eat well, and always try to eat before you get hungry so that it is easier to avoid gorging.

I hope this article has been helpful, informative, and that you successfully implement these new habits. Good luck!

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Quickest Way to Lose Weight in a Week

On December 15, 2010, in Weight Loss, by admin

Many people are looking for a quick weight loss fix. If you are like me, throughout your life you have tried tens or maybe even scores of diets to always have the same result. You lose weight from diet alone or coupled with exercise and all seems to be going well. It is hard but you stick with it and are content with the results. After some time, eventually, the weight loss stops, and you did not lose as much total weight as you hoped. You are glad to be thinner, but the diet is now not as satisfying because you are no longer losing weight, and it is somewhat of a nuisance. You look to the next magazine rack after your will has weakened and you have gained back every pound you lost, and then some. The next diet promises to do more, and be better, so you work up the resolve to try the next one. Fail, rinse, repeat. If you are looking to lose weight in a week, you are just entering a faster black hole of failure; do not go there.

Let us pretend that you think losing fifteen pounds in a week will make some huge imagined change in your body composition. You think with fifteen pounds of fat, fifteen pounds of mayonnaise jars less that you are carrying under your skin, that your six pack will be visible, or those love handles will disappear. This is wishful thinking and nothing more. Competitive bodybuilders prepare for months for a competition with strict and ever increasing diet restriction, special exercises in the gym, and loads of hormone manipulation that can kill the person that does not know what they are doing. At best, you will succeed in you weight loss, only to look like a slightly smaller version of yourself. You body does not burn all of the fat from its abdominals because you want it to; fifteen pounds of fat loss will come from removing both fat and muscle throughout your whole body; it may knock a notch off your belt size, but it will not do much more.

I lost eighty pounds, and went from two hundred and thirty five pounds down to one sixty five. Did I look better, you bet, but it was from six months of basically starvation and daily exercise. Even then, I was what is known as skinny fat. I was skinny, but not muscular. My muscles got smaller with my weight, so I still did not have a six pack at one hundred and sixty five pounds. If you think fifteen pounds of weight loss due to diet alone will make you look buffed, unless you are already a world-class strength athlete, it simply will not happen.

Now, all of the weight you lose in a week may not be fat and muscle, much of it may be from water. Eat a few salty foods after your diet and you may gain as much as ten pounds back in a day. This is not real fat loss, and can easily be duplicated. Elite level bodybuilders, fighters, and powerlifters regularly cut twenty or more pounds in one single day through dehydration. It is a dangerous practice if you do not know what you are doing, but it is something that allows them to make their weigh-in requirements and compete at their normal weight. The person who can dehydrate and rehydrate better (gaining all of their water back within a day), has a huge advantage because they are essentially keeping all of their muscle but competing against people that do not know how to dehydrate themselves as effectively. Again, this is of no concern to you because you are looking for some kind of visible change in appearance in the long run, not the look of a fat and dehydrated person for a day.

Whether you lose weight and make a smaller version of yourself for a small time and gain it all back, or dehydrate temporarily and gain it all back, the common theme is that you will not look any better in the long run. Luckily, I will not leave you hanging. I will conclude with two solid tips that will improve your body composition for the better in the long run.

Tip #1: Learn how to substitute foods. This comes from the science of habit setting, and a very successful model used to help people quit smoking. In order to change a habit, most people cannot simply stop doing something. There will be a time and activity gap if they stop. They will fill this gap with something else, so instead of possibly letting some other vice creep in, set yourself up to succeed. If you want to eliminate ice cream, for example, decide to make a smoothie every time instead. Instead of buying ice cream at the store, but ingredients for a healthy blueberry smoothie instead; fresh or frozen blueberries, nonfat yogurt, and some bananas are much better than a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. Instead of having cereal for breakfast, substitute fruit and yogurt. Instead of a McDonald’s cheeseburger, opt for their chicken salad with vinegar and oil instead of the thousand island dressing. Make substitutions one at a time and realize how easy they are to adopt. Stick with them for thirty days each and they will be much easier to maintain. This can result in rapid and permanent weight loss because you develop healthier habits and become a healthier person.

Tip #2: Push yourself five minutes, five seconds, or five pounds at a time. If you already do exercise, this translates to increasing duration by five minutes per session, doing the same amount of work in five fewer seconds, or increasing the weight by five pounds on every new set. Of course, you cannot keep this up forever, but until you are moving more than your bodyweight with complex movements like the squat, bench press, overhead press, and deadlift, you should be able to keep up the momentum. Do not worry about reps when you increase weight. If you do not currently exercise, it is time to start. This means five minutes of walking per day and increase until it is more efficient for you to go to the gym than to walk for two hours, then follow the above protocol.

These two surefire weight loss tips will help you lose weight that will stay off in the long run. There is no temporary fix unless you manipulate your hormones or get liposuction, and you will need to repeat these over and over again anyway, so I recommend following the tips rather than wasting your time, money and health on the latter.

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About

On November 21, 2010, in , by admin

 

Welcome to BendTheBar.com, a blog focused not only on weight loss tips, but a winning psychology as well. We all want to be happier, healthier people, but with the amount of junk floating around on the Internet, our heads can get quickly filled with rubbish.

 

 

Put enough rubbish in there and we start to think it’s true. This is how brainwashing works. Well, I’m here to make that brain of yours dirty again with empowering ideas and helpful tips that will help you become what you want to be.

 

How can you trust me? Well, I think a picture is often worth a thousand words:

Me in 2005, not my fattest

Me in 2007 after losing the fat

 

Now, this is not a picture of a bodybuilder who fattened himself up for a photo op – bodybuilders do not look like I used to! I was a genuine fattie, and had a great personality, yadda yadda yadda. I would love to show you some pictures of my leg and arm definition (this was before I became strong), but since I am a teacher – it is not appropriate to post anything more revealing than the above. And if my students saw my fat picks… how embarrassing! Note, I’m not a model – I did not shave off body hair for the photo, use tanning oil, pump iron or use Photoshop. If I did, I could look like the model on a magazine cover, and so could you! I know this because I do use Photoshop and have learned many tricks of the trade – but that is not what this blog is about.

 

It’s the candid truth about losing weight, and that’s why it’s valuable – from someone who has actually done it, and kept it off for over 6 years now.

 

Had I not lost the weight and kept it off, I guarantee that I would not have met my lovely wife or done half the things I have done in the last 6 years. I have since been to 18 countries, been married for 4 years to a smart, sexy and wonderful Korean woman. I also only work 25 hours per week. Before I lost the weight, I had been to one country and worked 3 jobs. I look like a new man, and trust me, it makes all the difference.

 

At least for now, I will not focus on the benefits of how being physically powerful has its advantages, but these benefits have had unexpected rewards as well.

 

Don’t believe the lies they tell you about it being OK to be overweight – they’re meant to keep you from becoming what you want to be. If you suddenly get fit, your fat friends will feel threatened and likely ostracize you and try to sabotage your efforts. Don’t let them. You will feel healthier for the rest of your life, be able to do things you could never do before, and you will make better, more capable friends who can enjoy these activities with you.

 

As you can guess, there are many topics that I wish to cover on this blog. These include, but are not limited to losing fat and eating better. I admit that many of my article titles may not be very revealing, but they are at least pertinent to the title and are to the point. I don’t write a title for one thing then talk about something completely different, at least most of the time. Nor do I use newspaper titles to lure your interest and then waste your time. I also hit the same topic from several different angles, and I direct you to different posts often.

 

For example, I may tell you how to get rid of belly fat in one article, and how to reduce tummy fat in another. There are many ways to lose weight fast, but I will talk about how to lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks several times. Protein shake recipes sound an awful lot like meal replacement shakes for weight loss? They are! However, I have different things to say about each, so pleas just bear with me.

 

I blog because I enjoy writing and making resources available for friends, family and my Internet followers. However, I hate organizing everything. If I had to do this, I would have less time and motivation for writing. I hope you can lose weight quickly and keep the weight off thanks to these posts. It is just the beginning, but I plan on writing hundreds of posts on weight loss topics that are relevant to you.

 

I recently decided to expand the blog to include food because I decided to start cooking a bit. Therefore, I will talk about what to eat to lose weight including chicken breast recipes of course (every bodybuilder’s favorite), as well as at least one healthy vegetable soup recipe, and probably a lot more to follow.

 

If the fancy hits me, I may also cover weigh loss fallacies and methods which are unsafe, and unsustainable. There is no point in losing weight temporarily unless you are a bodybuilder preparing for a competition, or a sick person preparing for an operation. Therefore, I will focus on sustainable weight loss; teaching you how to naturally lose weight and keep it off.

 

Finally, my pen name (and not my real name) is Nicholas Giles because some of what I write and picture I post may not be appropriate for my young students, like the one below (a bit drunk in France with both a Champagne bottle in one hand and a watter bottle in the other!) . If I am no longer a teacher, I will likely share my identity and other projects with you. Thank you for understanding.

 

Come back often to see what new health posts I’ve made and always feel free to leave comments and share tips of your own! I look forward to continuing my improvement with you.

It feels great to lose weight, but sometimes you gotta to bend the rules!

 

 

 

Sincerely,

Nicholas Giles

 

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