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Our greatest health risk is overweight, but it’s not complicated to become lean, if you know how your body works.You might have tried commercial weight-loss systems or fad diets, or bogus slimming aids, which only set you up to become fatter. You can save yourself the cost of professional visits, psychological counseling or complex behavior therapy,as most of such intervention is hurtful.The National Institutes of Health expert panel on weight loss showed that behavior therapy and counseling get worse long term results then people who are losing weight by themselves. The amount of fat you carry around is not determined by your genes, but by what you do and what you eat. Recent scientific studies has shown that neither the number of fat cells nor their seize is genetically fixed, but body fat is dependent on lifestyle. Your body has no internal reference for a permanent level of fat, only for a habitual level. When you remain at a particular fat level for a year or more, your body develops all the adipore cells, capillaries, enzyme counts, peripheral nerves,hormone levels and connective tissues to support it. It becomes to recognize that level of fat as self and will defend it strongly. That’s called your fat point. Your body constantly monitors its fat point with hormonal messages,such as glycerol, which warns the brain to take defensive action if even the smallest quantity of fat is suddenly used for fuel. That’s why usual forms of dieting can’t possibly work. By slowing metabolism, increasing fat storage and increasing appetite, your body’s fat point defenses will defeat you every time. But how do you treat it? It’s not hard to do. Reliable studies show that it takes years of overeating to grow fat. Body fat accumulate very slowly, an ounce or so per day, a pound every two or three weeks. In a year you are 20 lbs over. In 3 – 4 years you gain 60 lbs of flab. As your body shifts its habitual fat point up very slowly, you have to operate down the same way,very slowly. Otherwise your body will cannibalize your muscle, excite your fat storage enzyme and boost your appetite to ravenous. It’s important to reduce you total daily calories by no more than 20%. That’s 400 calories off a 2000 calorie diet. That’s 2800 calories or 0.8 lbs of fat per week. Because of increases in body efficiency, you will not lose 0.8 lbs of fat but only about half a pound. That’s the most you can lose without triggering body defenses. Step 1.: Lose no more than half-a-pound of fat per week. Get your body composition measured once a month, including fat weight, lean weight and body water. A newly available alternative to underwater weighing are the inexpensive skin-fold calipers for self-use at home. These calipers have a tension device on them to ensure you get the same pressure on the fat each time you measure, provided you take the measurements in exactly the same spot every time. Step 2.:Measure your body fat once a month. The calories you cut from your diet have to be the right calories,importantly from all kinds of fat. Contrary to the calorie-counting strategies of much of the weight-loss industry,we know that fat calories are fatter. When excess carbohydrate or protein are eaten, the body makes complex metabolic adjustments to promote glycogen storage in muscle and increase the use of protein or sugar for fuel. It also has to use a lot of energy to convert these foods to body fat. Hence you have to eat a bigger excess of carbs and protein than you do of fat before they end up on your hips. But when excess fat is eaten, metabolism remains unchanged. Virtually all the excess is promptly layered onto all the wrong places. Now you know why calorie counting doesn’t work. Numerous recent studies show that you put on much more body fat by eating fat than by eating the same number of calories from carbs or protein. Fat calories pack on more body fat than calories from any other food. Step 3.: Eat a low, low fat diet. Look on the nutrition facts label when you buy food. Divide the total calories by the calories from fat. If the answer is less than 5, don’t buy the food. In a diet of 2000 calories, that’s a maximum of 400 fat calories. Step 4: Don’t eat foods that contains more than 20% fat calories. Many dieters think that they are on healthy, low-fat nutrition, when in fact they are miss leaded by false food labeling. Many apparently dry foods like cookies, baked goods, crackers & chips are higher in fat than ice-cream. Even low-fat milk is really high fat. How does low fat milk get away with its name? By jiggery-pokery lobbying power,the dairy industry got an exemption from the new labels. Nevertheless, an 8 oz glass of low-fat milk (2%) serves you a hefty one-third of its calories from fat. Food industry lawyers have filed exemption claims for all kinds of foods.So if you want to avoid hidden fats, don’t trust anything on food labels except the Nutrition Facts panel. That has to be accurate if it’s legal. Especially beware of “reduced fat” products. Under the label law “reduced fat” means 25% less fat than the original product. So it goes with everything from reduced fat bologna, high can still be 60% fat, to “light” and “lite” variants of foods, that have to be one-third less fat than the original, but can still be 40 – 50% fat. Step 5 : Trust only the Nutrition Facts panel on food labels. Next, you should cut down on simple sugars. Chocolate,cookies, candy and table sugar are obvious,but raw sugar, brown sugar, refined honey, corn syrup, fruit juice concentrate and date sugar are bad as well. Look out for fruit juices, orange juice contains more sugar than Coca Cola. What’s the reason that sugar increase body fat? Because quick absorption into your bloodstream causes an excess insulin burst from the pancreas. When it reaches the liver, excess insulin, which is toxic, is converted to neutral triglycerides. Triglycerides are exactly the form of fats that are stored in all your adipose cells. Sugar not only causes excess calories that turn to fat, but it also causes the body to make even more fat from its own insulin. Replace as much as the simple sugars in your diet by complex carbohydrates, like whole grain and vegetables. Step 6. Cut down on sugar, eat complex carbohydrates instead. If you think you can lose weight by skipping a meal, forget it. It wouldn’t work because this results in insulin bursts as soon as you eat again. The excess insulin that will be turned into fat will compensate for the skipped meal. If you want to lose fat, you have to fast for a longer period, at least 24hours. It’s important to keep your insulin output level steady for the whole day. For optimum fat loss, reduce the size of your meals and eat five small meals per day. Step 7. Don’t skip meals, eat five small meals per day. Almost all popular diets are deficient in essential nutrients. Don’t fall in the trap of eating only grapefruit, bananas and milk or only salad. By doing so you become nutrient deficient, it increases your appetite and makes you fatter. Instead, eat a large variety of foods. Step 8. Avoid all fad diets. Most of our foods has become deficient in many vitamins and minerals. As a result, your body turns up your appetite and makes you to eat more in order to supply the missing nutrients. You have to eat far too many calories to make up for the missing vitamins in your diet. A single nutrient deficiency is enough to make you fat like a hog. The best solution to this problem is to take a full range, high quality multi-vitamin supplement plus a multi-mineral supplement every day. They act as a regulator to your appetite and naturally curb your desire to eat. Step 9. Take a high quality multi-vitamin and multi-mineral supplement every day. The US National Academy of Sciences believed that chromium was great for car bumpers, but useless for human nutrition, till Dr. Walter Mertz of the Human Nutrition Research Center in Beltsville., MD. showed that chromium is essential for your body to use insulin. Now the latest RDA handbook recommends 50 – 200 mcg of chromium every day to maintain insulin metabolism. Because of the large number of diabetes, folk are well aware that insulin enables the body to deal with sugar.What they usually don’t know is that insulin also controls fat and muscle. However, unfortunately nobody gets even the minimum recommended level of chromium in their degraded food. Studies show that 90% of the self selected diets contain less than 50 mcg of chromium per day. The average chromium intake is only 29 mcg. As a result, this poor nutrition causes your insulin metabolism to barely limping along and your body fat piles up. Dr Gary Evans developed a new form of chromium: chromium picolinate. More than 20 studies show that it improves insulin metabolism, reduces body fat and increases muscle mass. Pigs, who have similar insulin metabolism to men, when fed chromium picolinate, increased their lean mass by 7% and reduced their body fat by 21% . That’s a much healthier animal. Your daily multi-mineral supplement should contain 200 mcg of chromium picolinate. For fat loss you should use an additional 200 – 600 mcg of CP per day, in conjunction with an exercise program. Don’t use any other form of chromium. Hexavalent chromium or chromate, for example, is highly toxic. Step 10. Use a chromium picolinate supplement every day. Dr. Leonard Storlien and his colleagues from the Garvin Institute for Medical Research in Australia, were the first to prove that omega-3 fatty acid found in fish oils and also made by our body from Alpha-linolenic acid in flax oil, improve insulin efficiency, by using carbohydrates and fats for fuel. Most Americans are deficient in omega-3s. It’s important to get it to combat body fat. Step 11. Take a flax oil essential fatty acid supplement every day. The body fat stored in adipose cells is carried by a nutrient called l-carintine, to the mitochondria (furnaces) of muscle cells, where it is burned for energy. By increasing the level of l-carintine by means of supplementation, more body fat is transported and burned. Your body makes l-carnitine, but if you are overweight and yet don’t eat a lot,your body doesn’t make enough for optimum use of fat for fuel. To improve fat loss,take 2-4 grams of l-carnitine per day in conjunction with exercise. Make sure you get l-carnitine, not racemic- or dl carnitine, which is cheap and toxic and interferes with l-carnitine metabolism and consequently increases body fat. Don’t except cheap l-carnitine. Step 12. Take an l-carnitine supplement every day. Make sure to take 30 – 50 gram high-fiber per day to prevent disease and to create slow and even food absorption from your intestines, keeping your insulin level steady and also promote the use of food for energy rather than for the building up of body fat. The average American don’t get more than 10 – 20 gram of fiber per day, which promote a lot of diseases and put on body fat. Fiber is essential to prevent colon and rectal cancer. Step 13. Eat 40 gram of mixed fibers per day. I recommend visiting www.nutrobalance.usana.com to get the best dietary supplements on the market.
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fat loss, low fat diet, fat point, nutritional supplements,
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