Before you think this sounds like a tabloid article or a story to sell women’s magazines. There are many articles that claim to have the answer on how to lose weight fast. The diet industry is a 40 billion dollar a year industry. It is not in their best interest to help you. They try to hook you with auto shipment of products and maintaining you on meal plans.
I speak to many patients at Health Core Clinic (Streamwood, IL) who are afraid of putting on weight after being on a shake or packaged food diet plan. They live in terror with every morsel they put in their mouth. I hate to see people living in fear.
No one I ever speak to is completely satisfied with how their body looks. My goal in writing this article is to share with you the keys to the city of weight loss and health. Where you exist not living in fear that your meal or shake did not arrive on time. I will outline some simple strategies that help weight melt off and keep off.
The power of breath
When we breathe, we burn calories. When we burn calories, we lose weight. When we exercise to lose weight we are forcing our bodies to breathe at a different pace which speeds the calorie burning process. The power of deep breathing acts as an extreme oxygen builder to stoke your body’s furnace to lose weight.
By taking ten simple breaths before you eat each meal you can create the same effect of turning up your body’s furnace to lose weight. Simply inhale through your nose for 10 seconds. Hold your breath for 40 seconds. Then, exhale slowly through your mouth for 20 seconds. This may take some practice. Breathing in what is called a 1:4:2 ratio (10sec/40sec/20sec) by inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth works just like exercise.
The power of breath can help you lose weight. When you try this, notice how your heart speeds up and you are breathing more fully just like you worked out.
The power of eating early
Research has shown meal flipping to be an effective way to lose weight. By consuming a greater part of your calories early in the day, you are able to burn off your meals early before being sedintary at bedtime. This is executed in two ways. The first way is to have your biggest meal early in the day by having a big breakfast, then light lunch, and light dinner. The second way is to alternate to having a light breakfast, then have lunch be your biggest meal, followed by a light dinner.
Eating too late before going to sleep only piles on pounds. It is best to eat earlier in the day where you have enough time for your food to digest and burn off through your daily activity. Most people make this simple adjustment and notice the weight loss in their first week.
The power of food combining
Proper food combining helps you digest food faster. There are certain foods that do not go together. It is a bad idea to eat meat with potatoes or bread. Meat is acidic in nature and potatoes are alkaline. Meat is best digested when eaten solely with vegetables. This helps speed the digestion and calorie burning process of your meal. Potatoes are best eaten with vegetables. Fruit is best eaten first thing in the morning or two hours after dinner. Fruit does not mix well with meat or vegetables and can cause a digestive slump that delays the calorie burning process. Cheeses, breads, and pasta clog your digestive system and are best eaten every three days. It takes three days to burn off the carbohydrate content in two slices of bread or a bowl of rice. Our bodies do not thrive well on eating breads and dairy daily when you are trying to lose weight. When you lose the weight you desire you can slowly re-introduce breads and dairy in moderation.
The power of no sugar
Notice how I did not say “sugar free”. If you Google the ingredients in sugar free products you will have to assess if the intake of sugar free additives are worth the health risk. I interviewed several people who simply cut their normal sugar intake to 50-75 mg per day total (including all food and beverage) and lost a whopping 20-30 pounds in one month. The average person consumes a little over 100 grams of sugar per day in their diet. Overweight individuals consume 400 or more milligrams of sugar in one day. I have written in other articles that back in the early 1700’s and 1800’s the average person consumed less than 25mg of sugar per day. With today’s convenience food it is a big challenge. If you reduce your sugar intake, your weight will melt off, guaranteed. Out of all the steps I outlined. This is by far the fastest and most effective. Once you reduce your sugar intake, your body will start tapping into your fat stores for energy and you will burn fat and become lean. The hardest part is getting used to the taste of missing sugar.
I will also guarantee once you get off sugar for one week and you try tasting it, your mouth will cringe because you will have become sugar sensitive and what you used to enjoy will now taste too sweet.
Ways we can reduce sugar is by eliminating juice and high sugar fruits from our diet. You can eliminate soda. You can try a lemon or lime wedge with sparkling water. You can try tasting iced or hot herbal teas that taste good without any sugar or honey (for example, berry teas, peppermint tea, orange blossom teas).
Before you eat a packaged food , look at the sugar grams. Try having snacks and beverages in their more natural state. There is a food glycemic index list (http://www.glycemicindex.com/) where you can check the amount of sugar in food items. All foods contain some form of sugar through carbohydrate content or glucose, fructose, or sucrose. Your goal is to first be aware of how much sugar you currently consume and then decrease it by substituting for better alternatives. Reduce your sugar and you will see the results happen.
