Shanghai Fitness Training Article #2: How to Lose Weight
March 18, 2009
Judging by the frequency of front page articles in fitness and lifestyle magazines, there is no shortage of people wondering how to lose weight. For most of us, our current body weight was not arrived at dramatically over the past month, but has come to be relatively steady over a longer period of time. This is because we all fall into a particular lifestyle where work, play, and diet are relatively consistent.
This can make weight loss difficult, not because your body is predisposed to carrying extra weight, but because you will actually need to change your lifestyle, and thus breach your comfort levels in terms of diet and exercise in order to make consistent progress. Many people associate weight loss with abstaining from comfort foods and fighting hunger pains. And for those who are accustomed to a sedentary lifestyle, fear of the gym or looking foolish on an elliptical machine may be a governing thought. But weight loss, if approached intelligently doesn’t need to be painful.
In order to better understand how to lose weight, we need to understand why we weigh what we currently weigh. Humans adapt. We grow. We are constantly changing. What causes these changes? Stimulus. If you have been over weight for any length of time, take a look at your lifestyle. Do you have consistency in the types, frequency, and quantity of foods you eat? Do you have late dinners or skip breakfast? Are you eating fast food to get through the meal as quickly as possible and get back to the office?
If you answered yes to any of those questions then its likely your body has adapted to your lifestyle and found a comfortable state of equilibrium. It will require something external, exercise, or internal, diet, to stimulate a change in the way your body stores and burns fat. Your body’s metabolic rate has been programmed to keep you where you are. This can be changed by increasing your metabolism, decreasing your caloric intake and refining your diet, or both. Let’s look at each piece individually.
If our metabolic rate, or the quantity of energy we need to consume to maintain our bodyweight, is constant, then it stands to reason that if we reduce the amount of food calories we consume our bodies will have to find the energy from elsewhere in order to maintain energy needs. Where does this extra energy come from if not from food? You guessed it, fat. Our bodies are forced to use fat for energy resulting in weight loss. The caveat here however is that just as our body adapted to our previous lifestyle, so too will it adapt to our new lower calorie diet, resulting in a lower metabolic rate and a new plateau in the struggle for weight loss.
The mistake that many people make when they reach this plateau is to further reduce their caloric intake, and when they plateau again, they reduce it again, until their metabolic rate is a fraction of what it once was. Now, when they deviate even for a day or two from their low calorie diet their body puts fat on immediately. This is a dangerous dieting cycle that can be avoided through proper dieting methods.
Many kinds of dietary fads have put negative stigmas on carbohydrates and fats that cause us all to feel guilt when we’re eating something we love to eat. Here’s what they don’t tell you. Carbohydrates are good for you. Fat (certain kinds) is good for you. They should not be avoided, and for some people, fat intake actually needs to increase in order to lose weight. When our bodies get used to a low fat diet, they retain body fat as protection from starvation. When we consume adequate fat, our bodies release excess body fat and use it for energy, assuming our carbohydrate and protein consumption is not excessive.
There is no shortage of information on the internet about which kinds of fat and which kinds of carbohydrates are best for fat loss, so I won’t take the time to detail them here. But I do want to point out that simply not eating things is not going to result in sustainable fat loss. Not eating high glycemic carbohydrates and trans and hydrogenated fats will result in long term weight loss, as well as eating sufficient high quality protein.
Most people don’t realize that fruits and vegetables are not very calorie dense. You can eat them to your hearts content, all day long, and still find yourself losing weight. If your diet is predominantly fruits, vegetables, and meats you really needn’t calorie count. Fat loss is not a simple calculation of calories in versus calories out. A natural diet like this, aside from offering a lower calorie alternative to junk food, causes our bodies to produce muscle building and fat burning hormones that keep our body in a constant fat burning state.
Furthermore, eating smaller meals more frequently can keep your metabolism high and constant (as well as preventing insulin surges which keep your body from releasing fat), so that you’ll burn fat continuously throughout the day, rather than forcing your body to work through large meals and excess calories before it considers your healthy stores of body fat as energy. And for most of us, huge gains can be made if, in conjunction with smaller, more frequent (6 times a day) meals, we eat an early light dinner of the basics, fruits, vegetables, and fish or chicken. Going to bed on a full stomach is one of the worst things you can do.
That said, we should all set one or two days a week aside where we don’t observe our diets and eat freely, even excessively. This is not only good for our mental health; it also keeps our metabolic rate from adjusting downward to meet the average reduction in calories. Ignore those die hard diet plans. The truth is there are very few of us that can stick to them for any length of time. And the more important truth is they rarely result in long term weight loss. We’re surrounded by temptations and why not enjoy life a little? Enjoy your cakes and cookies; just don’t enjoy them more than one or two days a week.
Now that we’ve dealt with diet let’s look at fat loss from the outside in, exercise. Just as reducing our caloric intake will cause us to burn fat for energy, raising our metabolic rate through exercise will force us to burn fat for energy. Just how much exercise is needed to stimulate fat loss? Well that entirely depends on your current activity level. For a sedentary individual, a half an hour a week would be enough at first. For someone struggling to lose each and every pound at the gym, it may require a little more, or different, exercise than they are used to.
The best kinds of exercise for fat loss, contrary to what many believe, are resistance training (weightlifting), and interval training. While an hour of aerobic training will burn more fat in that hour than one hour of weightlifting, our bodies tend to revert back to our previous metabolic rate after aerobic training. A proper weightlifting regimen on the other hand will stimulate a higher metabolic rate that causes you to burn fat for the following 16 hours, not to mention the added energy needed to sustain more lean muscle mass once its been created.
Interval training, which can be done on a rowing machine, a treadmill, an elliptical, or my personal favorite, martial arts or kickboxing pad work drills at your home or local park, is the other highly effective method for fat loss. Interval training is a combination of aerobic and anaerobic training, whereby the trainee alternates between moderate (50-70 % of max intensity) and high (90-100% of max intensity) intensity levels.
So, if using a treadmill, your workout might look like 5 minutes of light jogging, followed by one minute of sprinting, followed by two minutes of moderate jogging, one minute sprinting, etc. The 1 minute sprint, 2 minute jog formula can be considered one set or interval, repeat 3 to 6 times depending on your skill level. But these sessions, like weightlifting sessions should be short, less than 30 minutes for best results (longer than 15 minutes including warmup). These are also the same two components in lean muscle gain.
There is no secret formula for ‘How to Lose Weight’. Try to stick to natural foods (not processed) and get in a few days of moderate to intense exercise each week. Eat right and exercise, and with time you’ll find the body you’ve been looking for.
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