Listen Up... Here's How To Supercharge Your Metabolism!
[7 Days To Permanent Weight Loss - Day 3]
In the last lesson I talked a bit about how you can adopt simple habits to turn your metabolism around. In other words, to change your "fast-asleep" or "snoring" metabolism into a system that actually helps you lose weight. No tricks, no false promises - just a working, effective and most importantly, natural system of eating habits will put you well on the path of losing extra weight and getting your ideal body.
I'll start with the basic principles we discussed in the last article.The key culprit to our weight problems (not only as a society, but as a race) is the evolution of our eating patterns - as we have evolved from hunters to farmers, our eating habits and our diet has changed, but not our basic metabolism or its functions.
The result - our metabolism is in a state of permanent hibernation. My job here is to teach you how to remove this evolutionary "programming" and instead of allowing it to conserve calories, you'll learn today how to bring your natural metabolism back to the fore and allow it to help you burn your calories (thus helping you lose weight).
Here's what you need to keep in mind:
* Our bodies are not used to eating so infrequently (3 meals a day).
* Each meal is now "heavier" - that is, we are eating more in each meal (even though we are taking fewer meals).
* Our bodies are not used to eating such hi-carb diets - it is a drastic shift from a natural diet of proteins and fats (with little carbohydrates, except in fruits).
* Our bodies are not used to being inactive. An important fact to remember is that "lack of exercise" is just one of the four factors affecting our metabolism - the other three factors directly contribute to the "slowing down" of our metabolism. Not only that, but the primary purpose of exercise is weight loss is to burn more calories, and not just to increase the "burn rate" of your metabolism.
So even if you don't exercise and still manage to change your eating habits, you will be able to reverse a lot of the "negative" influence on your metabolism. Let's look at the specific steps that you can use to do just that.
The Weight-Loss Mindset
Building a proper mindset towards a healthy lifestyle is like creating your own personal foundation for long-term changes into your eating habits and subsequently, giving your body and yourself the opportunity to maintain your ideal weight for as long as you want to.
Notice that I said "healthy lifestyle" and not losing weight. This is because if you concentrate only on losing weight, it becomes a short term goal - something that every other diet under the sun promotes. Once you've lost weight (by starving or working out a lot), you don't know where to go. It becomes difficult to maintain that weight without having a specific mindset in place that allows you to effortlessly transition from being over-weight to being healthy and comfortable with maintaining your new (ideal) weight.
However, the mindset that we are after in this weight loss program is simple (yet with very far-reaching and profound implications). There are two core principles:
* Give your health a very high priority.
* Commit to building a healthy lifestyle, and stick to it. Now that may sound like a load of crap to you, but those two principles are the answers to most questions asked about this weight-loss program. The key is to be flexible enough in your routine to realize that you can manage your priorities well enough to give yourself time to eat properly. I'll talk about this in detail in a future lesson, but for now the answer is to prioritise your health (not over everything else, but high enough so that it is swamped out by work, family or fun) and be flexible in your routine to accommodate your new eating patterns.
The second principle is a commitment to building a healthy lifestyle. Like I said before, this program isn't just about losing weight - that is merely a means to a greater end (a healthy lifestyle). This is why there will always be an emphasis on creating a long-term, permanent commitment to the process. You may be able to lose weight by following the ideas listed here, but without maintaining the commitment, you'll lapse back into your "dangerous" eating habits - in short, your metabolism will snap back into the same old routine and once it slows down again, you'll regain all your lost weight.
Eat More Frequently
Earlier (in this lesson and in the previous lessons as well) we discussed that eating fewer meals in a day (3 instead of 4 or 5) programs our metabolism to "think" that food is scarce. This in turn causes our metabolism to slow down, burn fewer calories, make you less hungry and eventually, have a dampening effect on your daily energy.
The cure here is to reverse the process and return to a more natural eating pattern - i.e. instead of eating according a "socially defined" structure (it is easier to schedule daily work routines around 3 meals rather than several breaks for eating during the day) of breakfast, lunch and dinner, you should instead switch to a 4 or 5 meal plan.
Usually, people get confused when I pitch them this idea - and their questions usually run along the lines of:
* How will we be able to fit in 4-5 meals in our work schedule?
* Wouldn't eating more make me gain weight instead of losing weight?
* I barely manage to get 2 meals a day with my busy schedule - how will I manage 4?These questions can be easily answered by yourself if you think of the two main things that I've said in the previous section, "Develop a Weight-Loss Mindset". Basically, the ONLY reason we are not able to stick to a 4-meal eating plan is because we are not able to "prioritize" our health high enough. Instead, you might be focusing too much on work, or your education, or your family. For me, it was always a juggling task between working and my family, until I realized that not only was I putting my health at risk, I was also damaging my productivity at work AND spending less quality time with my family.
However, eating more frequently is just one part of the whole process. It wont be complete (or helpful) unless you follow the rest of the ideas presented below (and later on in this series).
Eat Smaller Portions
Eating smaller portions is an integral part of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Not only does it answer the "how will I lose weight if I eat more portions?" question, but it also reprograms your metabolism to function more efficiently.
Eating large portions (basically just stuffing yourself until you have a full stomach) tells your body that food is scarce, which is why you are eating as much as you can (because the next meal is not guaranteed). In response, your metabolism responds by slowing down and burning calories at a very slow pace. This would not harm you if it happened once or twice, but if such a habit is built into our social fabric and part of your eating pattern for all your life, it will eventually cause you to gain weight - if you eat the same, but your metabolism gets slower, you will be burning less calories and so on.
Healthy Eating
Congratulations - you've completed a major section of this process. Learning the "how" in weight loss / building a healthy lifestyle is a very important part of actually losing weight. However, you also need to learn what you can eat, and crucially, what you can't eat, in order to make the whole process effective.
In the next two lessons we'll cover exactly just that. We will revisit the "evolution" of our eating habits to understand what types of food make us gain weight and learn about what can help you lose weight.
Till then, I'd suggest that you revise today's lesson - for best results, print out a copy and highlight the main points - it will be your blueprint for losing weight over the next few weeks.
All the best,
Brad Callen
Health and Fitness Consultant
http://www.dietplannerplus.com/
