Healthy Weight Part 4

If I could distill down my reading on the subject of dieting to few basic points these would be them.

Whole foods are best. To put it quite simply the more natural, unprocessed and for that matter how little cooked the food is the better it is for you. Obviously there are some exceptions to this but it is not a bad filter to run your food preparation and consumption decisions through.

Wheat is now bad for you. This doesn't just apply to just celiacs or people with a gluten intolerance but to just about everyone. Flour has, since the the 1950's, been genetically modified to the point where if you compared it to wild varieties of years gone by it would be virtually unrecognisable. A by product of this is that it now acts as an appetite stimulant. If you eat whole foods to quench your hunger you would normally feel satisfied for about 4 hours. Because so much of our food contains genetically modified flour, that is stimulating your appetite, it causes you eat more, and therefore you do just that only more often. Its the same principal that crack dealers use, get the customer hooked and get them using more product.

Fructose, which makes up about 50% of basic white sugar, is bad for you. When your body processes sugar it doesn't  recognise the fructose and it gets past the pancreas and much of it becomes fat. Before the age of processed, sweetened food our only source of fructose was high sugar fruit, which was seasonal, meaning our bodies might only get 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) a year. Nowadays because it is cheap and sweet it is used in many foods (in particular corn syrup) we can get the same amount of fructose in a couple of weeks. Lay off the fructose and you will lay off some weight. 

Diet food normally isn't. Over the past 4 decades the diet industry has been increasingly teaching us to eat low fat foods. You will go to the supermarket and see "diet" this and "lite" that. As anyone knows who has cooked a piece of meat, if you kill the fat you kill the flavour. So what has the food industry done to counter the flavour loss. They have upped the sugar or artificial sweetener content.

Artificial sweeteners will help with weight loss, but they may also help with giving you cancer. If you must use it only do so as part of the process to ween yourself off sugar. If you need that sugar hit try using pure glucose, at least your pancreas knows its there and will tell your body when its had enough. Glucose can be hard to find at the shops, if you cant find any try looking in the home brew department for dextrose. Its just glucose in disguise. Its about half the sweetness so you will need to use more. 

Trust your body. After an initial change of diet it was only a matter of days before my body began sending me different signals. If I had a steak and two poached eggs at 8.00am for breakfast I often wouldn't feel like lunch until 1.00pm. If I felt full here was a revelation I pushed the plate away and stopped eating. That was harder than it sounds. If I felt like a snack it was nuts or berries or coffee with cream. 

Don't worry about measuring quantities of food and starving yourself. If you're hungry eat and if you're not don't. Trust what your body is telling you. 

So what about exercise, do as much (or as little) as you want. There is no doubt that from a health perspective exercise is a good thing, but don't stress if you cant do any. Exercising will help you burn off the weight but its more about what you put into your mouth than anything else.

And as last tip, if you want to get the most out of your weight loss regime, exercise in the morning before you have eaten. 12 minutes will be plenty. Here is (sadly) the only geek gadget you may need. Get yourself a heart rate monitor. Figure out what your maximum heart rate should be (the formula is simple its 220 minus your age). Then calculate what 65% and 80% of that figure is. 

Exercise for 4 minutes with your heart rate at 65%, followed by 4 minutes at 80%, then another 4 minutes at 65%. That's its, it doesn't matter what exercise you do and you don't need to do any more. Now that middle 4 minutes will be the killer, so when you start out just go for 15 seconds and keeping adding intervals of 15 seconds as your stamina permits until you get to 4 minutes. Remember this is weight loss exercise and nothing else, so you can choose whatever part of your body you want to work on. You wont need expensive gym equipment and you can do it just about anywhere. Its a great way to kick start your day.