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Saturday, July 01, 2006

Losing weight is as easy as 3+3

In my recent article about who were the biggest losers at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games, I began by expressing my horror at the way obese participants in the reality TV programme "The Biggest Loser", were made to go about exercising. It was horrific. The risk of injury was excessive as was the risk of a heart attack or stroke. Early arthritis - roll on! One thing for sure, if these people were not committed on national television and followed and cajoled every moment along the way, they would certainly have given up and never succeeded.

Exercise and diet programmes that are painfully ascetic are ultimately doomed to fail. This failure usually results in a rebound further behind where they first began - less fit and much larger. A far more sensible and less injurious approach is to make enjoyable and less drastic changes to one's life - changes that are more or less immediately rewarding and which can be continued for life. This is the approach that was so successfully demonstrated at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games.

As easy as 3 + 3
Three good meals a day and nothing in between other than a drink of water and maybe a piece of fruit. My gosh! Doesn't food taste great when the tummy is rumbling! I am reminded of my childhood when we went for hours out in the bush and farmland without a fridge or convenience store to be seen. We ravenously ate everything Mum served up.

A big swig of water now and then can fill the tummy a while between meals and the water assists fat metabolism. The herbal Brindleberry formulation can assist fat loss and dulling the hunger pangs for those who need a little assistance adjusting to a 3 meal day. Another trick is to have a tablespoon of Whey Protein in a glass of warm milk between meals. The whey helps to stabilise blood insulin levels.

Three workouts a day is all it takes to stoke the metabolic fires white hot to burn excess fat and tone the muscles. For most people this might begin with an early morning walk around the block, or walking to work. For me, its running alongside my son as he rides his bicycle to school. Then its another brisk walk before lunch. This could be deliberately planning to do a delivery on foot. The third could be walking home, a workout in the gym, swimming, a Pilates class or playing sport with the kids. For me, its a run to school to pick up my son. Its part of my daily "father-son bonding programme". A good tool for convenient exercise anywhere, including at home is the Myotec pocket Gym. Your body loves both set routine and variety.

Now this might seem like a lot of exercise. Well, it isn't really because it is planned and opportunistic exercise that can be easily fitted into a busy lifestyle. Furthermore, these are opportunties to interact with loved ones, friends, workmates and neighbours in a relaxing and healthy way. It gets you well away from the fridge and it will encourage you to select healthier choices for meal times.

Make a habit of it
It takes from 8-12 weeks of doing something for it to become habit. Once it is an ingrained habit, it feels uncomfortable to stop. The habit becomes part of one's lifestyle. So, timing is important: choose a time of year when you are certain that you can keep your new eating and exercising patterns going for at least 8 weeks without disruption. But let's face it; there is no better time than right now!

4 comments:

Wayne said...

how much fat is burnt is more to do with the duration of exercise than the intensity, theres a limit to how much fat you can burn, the more intense the excercise the more sugar is being burnt from liver and muslces, you arent necesarily burning fat faster running than you are walking! few people burn more than three quarter s of a gram of fat a minute, you'll be luck to get 300 calories an hour from burning fat even if you are trained up to burn fat. you could burn that in a brisk walk, switching to running wont make a difference. more intense excercise leave you more hungry once the sugars are burnt, so you're likely to eat more in response negating the benefits of the fat you lost during exercise,

Wayne said...

gotta say I"m not a fan of whey protein, as soon as I take it my weight shoots up rapidly, leads me to believe theres fluid retention gong on, my body fat is at the low end of normal and I dont thing I"m overly scrawney, well not for a runner anyway! I go for soy protein instead, what about whey protein when people are dairy intolerant?

Gary Moller said...

We are talking about relatively small amounts of protein here and I doubt if water retention would ever be an issue. Water retention is probably more of an issue with overconsumption of carbohydrates, since about 2.7gm of water is stored with every gram of carbohydrate that is stored as glycogen.

Gary Moller said...

Oh, the dairy intolerance issue: The culprit is milk lactose. This is removed during the refinement processing of the whey. At the most there are only trace levels of whey. I know of lactose intolerant people who have happily consumed whey with no adverse effects.