The Loop Guide to Clubbing, Drinking, plus West Essex and East London living.

“I want to lose weight and tone up”

As a fitness trainer I am so used to hearing these immortal words on a daily basis. We are living in a very weight conscious society where we are surrounded by images of ‘healthy’ Here Brett Sizeland of Concept Fitness in Epping discusses 7 tips to healthy weight loss. 

1. STAY OFF THE SCALES!

Using ‘Weight’ is one of the worst ways in which we can monitor a fat loss program. It is better to focus on your shape, or how you look and feel rather than a number on a set of scales. 

*When you begin training often weight will increase due to an increase in lean muscle mass. However your physical appearance will seem more slender and you will no doubt have a reduction in body fat %

2. You cant spot reduce

Doing hours of sit-ups will not flatten your tummy. FACT.

The best way to lose body fat is to do large ‘compound’ exercises that use more than one muscle group at once, thus requiring more energy and burning more calories!

*Try squats, lunges, dead-lift type exercises. Any good instructor or personal trainer will show you how.

3. Don’t be scared of freeweights!

Stay off the ‘fixed’ weights machines that line the walls of your gym. These are usually single muscle group machines that don’t require any core muscles to work and therefore does not work your body in a functional or ‘real life’ way. Get a personal trainer to work with you on some body weight or freeweight exercises to help you strengthen and tone your whole body. 

4. One mans food is another mans poison…

As already acknowledged there is wide-spread confusion about how and what we should eat and drink. Most of the information we receive as general public is through the media. Whether it’s a supermarket selling their new range of health food products, or a celebrity touting their new diet book (or even surgical procedures!) we are constantly being told how we should be feeding. 

Unfortunately there is no one ‘way’ to eat healthy. We are all individuals and therefore our bodies differ from person to person. The best and safest way to achieve optimum nutrition is to eat right for your metabolic type. 

By finding your metabolic type (i.e. the foods that best suit your genetic requirements) you can personalise your diet without having to follow a rigorous structure of a ‘planned diet’ and slim down without feeling any of the negative effects that most diets bring e.g. hunger, tiredness, irritability etc. 

Visit http://www.mercola.com or see ‘The Metabolic Typing Diet’ by William Wolcott

5. Water, water everywhere…

Lean muscle tissue contains about 75% water. Blood contains 83% water, body fat contains 25% water and bone has 22% water. Your body needs water to function properly. Being properly hydrated is the first step toward any healthy eating and body fat loss plan. Below is a sum to work out how much water intake per day your body requires, this is MINIMUM requirement!

0.033 X Bodyweight (kg) = Litres per day water consumption.

We are designed to drink water. Fruit juices and other soft drinks often contain high amounts of sugar or caffeine, which inhibits your body’s ability to efficiently burn body fat as a fuel source. 

6. Cut down on refined grains

We all need a certain amount of carbohydrates, of course, but, through our addiction to grains, potatoes, sweets and other starchy and sugary foods, we are consuming far too many. The body’s storage capacity for carbohydrates is quite limited, though, so here’s what happens to all the excess: they are converted, via insulin, into fat and stored in the adipose, or fatty, tissue.

Any meal or snack high in carbohydrates generates a rapid rise in blood glucose. To adjust for this rise, the pancreas secretes the hormone insulin into the bloodstream, which lowers the glucose. Insulin is, though, essentially a storage hormone, evolved over those millions of years of humans prior to the agricultural age, to store the excess calories from carbohydrates in the form of fat in case of famine.

Insulin, stimulated by the excess carbohydrates in our overabundant consumption of grains, starches and sweets, is responsible for all those bulging stomachs and fat rolls in thighs and chins.

Even worse, high insulin levels suppress two other important hormones - glucagons and growth hormones - that are responsible for burning fat and sugar and promoting muscle development, respectively. So insulin from excess carbohydrates promotes fat, and then wards off the body’s ability to lose that fat! 

7. Lift weight to lose weight

Many people believe the best way to burn fat is to run on the treadmill for hours on end. However, one of the best ways to shape up and burn fat is to lift weights as part of your workouts. When you lift heavy weights your heart rate increases and so does your metabolism. (Thus burning more calories in your workout) The result being not only a leaner more compact physique, but more muscle means higher metabolism which leads to you burning fat even when your out of the gym!

*For those ladies who think that lifting heavy weights will make you look like Arnold Schwarzerwasshisface, you are WRONG! Women do not have the testosterone required to build significant muscle mass. 

8. Don’t cut too many calories

Dropping your food intake down to one lettuce leaf a day will not help healthy body fat loss. Your metabolism will crash as a result and your body will go into starvation mode, thus holding onto body fat instead of mobilising it for energy. Try to eat little and often (small meal/snacks every 3 hours) to keep your metabolism high and your energy levels up. This is important to do because you need energy to work and play, plus without energy you will become rundown and emotional, which will leave you de-motivated from your fat loss programme!