| Health tip: Are you a human yo-yo? |
| Step away from the diet |
A wise person once said, "Do what you've always done and you'll get what you've always gotten."
Somewhere along the way many of us got our hands on enough information about health, diet and exercise to be dangerous and we have applied this information with limited "success" over the years.
We contort diet and exercise to accommodate our new plan - only to find that eventually it has no relevance to anything else in our lives. So we drop it and regain our weight or stop our exercise plan completely.
Unbeknown to ourselves we've actually been sabotaging our metabolism in the process so that every time we try to lose weight it actually gets harder and harder. And we feel bad about our lack of will. The thing is, it doesn't have to be
that hard.
Do you feel like you have a chance at winning a competition like this? Read this week's Do It Yourself Healthy Lifestyle (below) for more....
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| Snow Bunny Boot Camp |
| Get ready to shred some powder. |
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| DIY Healthy Lifestyle |
| Getting fit should be fun; staying fit, easy. |
What about if we change the conversation a bit? Most of us reflexively think of getting fit as wholesale restriction of calories, bland food and grueling workouts.
The human body is EXTREMELY complex. Simple theories of calorie balance and exercise that some diet plans and gyms promote just don't give you enough of the right information - they help you see short term results which support their
product. 95% of dieters regain their pre-diet weight plus some.
Most diets and workout sprees don't take into account the real world (you know: kids, fast food joints, social pressures to eat, work, life) and how to adapt good science in the complex framework of our lives in such a way that we can keep
up the good work - forever.
They also get us fixated on the short term instead of the long term goal. Why? Because given most our natural propensities, the short term is the only place where those methods (binging on exercise or heavily restricting calories) can
have any impact.
That is NOT to say that there are not people who genuinely enjoy living this way (there are whole scads of people who LOVE to run and train for marathons). That's great for them, but what about the 84% of us who will never
join a gym? Or the 60% of us who are having a heck of a time just accumulating 2.5 hours of exercise a week? Or the nearly 80% who don't eat enough fruits, vegetables or fiber because we think it tastes bad?
Well. We have to come up with a better way than diets and exercise binges because those just aren't going to work for most of us in the long run.
So let's look at what the long term might look like:
There are approximately 3500 calories in a pound of fat. Let's say that you think you have gained 2 pounds after a work party where you ate a bunch of ice cream. Then that means you would have had to eat 7,000 extra calories (above and
beyond your daily metabolic rate). In one day. Somehow I doubt it.
The truth is that weight gain doesn't normally happen in a day unless it is the normal fluctuations in the water that makes up about 60% of our total body mass. True "fat gain" happens over time. So it isn't one little slip up that does
it - it is the constant accumulation of little overages over a period of time.
Given this fact, the accumulation of tiny shortages over time produces the opposite result - gradual and safe weight loss, without freaking out your body enough that it slows down your metabolism and sends you right back to square one.
This could mean saying bye bye to half and half in your coffee, or, if you have mayo on your burger then skipping the cheese - whatever you are most likely to do time and time and time again.
So, one needn't freak out about this whole diet affair. Do you find yourself binging after work? Don't. For many people it doesn't mean you have an extremely weak will, as you might suspect, but that you are probably doing things like
skipping breakfast or not eating nutritiously.
These snafus trigger physiological mechanisms in the brain and body that urge you to satisfy the craving for the calories you missed or the nutrients you need. Starting by eating breakfast and small, healthy, but filling snacks before and
after lunch and a sensible dinner will go a long way toward ameliorating "cookie monster" syndrome.
Do you want to be healthy and to manage your weight on your own for life? Then you have to endeavor to understand the body as a system, think in terms of the big picture and learn not to freak out if you gain or lose a pound or two. A
healthy body can fluctuate by as many as 5 pounds on a DAILY basis.
What's more poor understanding of balance and the role that plays in the body has led many of us to some weird ideas about food and exercise. Instead of helping our body to achieve balance, we fluctuate wildly from one extreme to
another
Some action steps:
1. Log your food and drink for 4 days/month for 6 months.
Are you eating enough whole grains (Quinoa/Oats/Amaranth/Whole and sprouted grains) vegetables, fruits? Or are you eating refined grains like white rice, regular seminola pasta, or white breads?
Do you follow up very intense workouts with a high carbohydrate snack like a small handful of dried fruit or a small glass of fruit juice?
Are you spreading your meals throughout the day and balancing protein and fat with carbohydrates like fruits, vegetables and whole grains dominating?
Are you eating a balanced breakfast EVERY SINGLE morning?
2. Log your exercise patterns for a couple of weeks, or, buy a pedometer.
Do you try to accumulate a little bit of moderate intensity movement into your day every day? Even if you can only get in a five minute walk or a bike ride to the store?
Do you give your muscles proper time to repair when you start a new workout regimen?
Try a couple of these things for a month or two and see if a change emerges. Think of this as a program for life and that this is but 2 months of experimentation. If it doesn't work you can always go back to being the human yo-yo.
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