Whether your goal is to lose weight or just “tone up,” your objective should be the same: to lose fat without sacrificing muscle. Otherwise, you’ll just end up as a fat thin person. In past issues of ETR, we’ve told you exactly how to do this: Base all your meals around a healthy source of protein and add resistance exercise to your workout routine. Recent
research published in the Journal of Nutrition confirms this approach. Researchers at the University of Illinois divided 48 obese women into two groups. One group was put on a higher-protein diet, while the other group consumed more carbohydrates. (Both diets contained the same number of calories.) All of the women walked several times a week, but the “high-protein” group added two sessions of
resistance exercise. When the study concluded, the high-protein group had lost an average of 22 pounds -
almost all of it from fat. The women on the high-carbohydrate diet lost only 15 pounds, and more than two pounds of that was muscle. In other words, 15% of their weight loss was from muscle!
Read the rest of this entry »
A few ideas that I’ve gathered from reading, from fellow travelers, and from trial and error:
• Other than a glass of wine or beer with dinner, don’t drink on the plane. It will dehydrate you, which may give you a headache. (And besides, only obnoxious, loud people drink heavily on planes.)
• Force yourself to exercise while you’re away from home. Although I exercise like crazy when I’m in my regular routine, I find it very difficult to exercise when traveling. I’ve gotten better recently by making it easier. My new routine is 10 minutes of yoga movements in the morning (before showering), and 10 minutes of Hindu squats and push ups in the early evening (before dressing for dinner). By asking less of myself, I’ve been able to do more.
• Eating well is another challenge when traveling. Between the rush, the junk food that’s being pushed at you during meetings, and the tendency to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner meetings, I tend to put on weight. The only solution I’ve found is to stick to a zero-carb diet until dinner. It doesn’t work all the time (it’s tough to keep saying no to those cookies), but when I fail I don’t worry about it. I know I’ll take the extra pounds off right away when I get back.
• Get some sunshine. It’s easy to get into a routine where you are out of the sun for a
week when traveling for business. That’s not good for you. Schedule some time to get
out and walk in the sun every day.
During the past two decades, the number of people who use artificial, no-calorie sweeteners has more than doubled. At the same time, the prevalence of people who are overweight and obese has also increased dramatically. Here’s even more evidence that diet drinks can make you fat:
The International Journal of Obesity published a study showing that when a group of rats drank an artificially sweetened liquid, they consumed three times more calories than another group of rats that did not get the sweetened liquid. Both groups had the same access to food.
If your goal is to lose weight this year - whether 5 pounds or 50 - you should NOT go on a diet. Dieting fails for more than 9 out of 10 people - for two very simple reasons.
First, most “diets” focus on restricting the amount of food you eat. And unless you enjoy being in a perpetual state of hunger, you won’t stick with it. Plus, by restricting calories, you send a signal to your body that you are starving. This sets off a survival mechanism that slows down your metabolism and causes your body to hoard what you eat and store it as fat. With a decreased metabolism, you’re bound to regain the weight - and then some -when you begin to eat normally. If you want to lose weight - and keep it off for life - you should eat smaller meals more frequently. And you should focus on eating more of the right foods. This will raise your metabolism naturally. It will send a signal to your body that there is no emergency - that it is okay to release fat.
So ditch the foods that add to your belly and detract from your health, and keep your kitchen (and your workplace) well stocked with nutritious foods and snacks. I make it a point to always keep fruit, yogurt (unsweetened … I just add a little stevia and berries), almonds, sardines, peanut butter, and celery around. I also spend some time every few weeks to make healthy meals that I can freeze in individual portions. That way, when I don’t have time to prepare a meal, I always have a healthy lunch or dinner ready to go.
If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to lose weight, don’t plan to do it by dieting. Stop starving yourself … and lose the weight forever by eating more of the foods that Mother Nature intended for you to eat.
