Healthy Action Australia > Natural Weightloss
Reducing Calories Alone is Not Enough
Written by Dr Mercola
These interesting new findings suggest that when you start to consume fewer calories, your body automatically responds by reducing your
activity levels. In generations past, when finding your next meal was not as easy as opening your fridge, this
mechanism could help your body to hold on to valuable energy stores and survive longer in times of famine.
In the modern day, however, this innate process may backfire, causing you to hold on to excess weight if you do
not consciously make an effort to increase or at least maintain your activity levels.
Further, although low-calorie diets have been highlighted as a strategy for lengthening your lifespan, if you simply cut way back on calories
without meeting your body’s nutritional requirements, it can send you into starvation mode. This will actually
slow down your metabolism and make it more difficult to lose weight.
Exercise alone may also not help you lose weight, especially if you’re “rewarding” yourself for working out by
eating an order of French fries accompanied by a chocolate shake.
The key to healthy weight loss is to use a combined approach of both diet
and exercise together. This is the strategy that will lead to gradual weight loss and a healthier lifestyle that
you can actually sustain and live with.
A Lack of Activity is Detrimental to Your
Health Whether you’re trying to lose weight or not, regular physical activity simply must
be a part of your life if you want to stay healthy. This is true even if you’re eating a stellar diet, and whether
you’re overweight or not.
In fact, one study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that women who were at least somewhat active were less likely to develop heart disease than those who were not, and
this was regardless of their weight.
Another revealing study also found that both diet and fitness levels are crucial for lifelong health. After
analyzing more than 115,000 nurses, results showed that being overweight or being sedentary increased your risk of
death independently:
•Women who were obese and inactive had a 2.5 times higher mortality rate than women who were lean and active
•Those women who were active (despite being obese) were twice as likely to die a premature death than those who
were lean and active
•Lean women who exercised under 3.5 hours a week increased their risk of premature death by 55 percent, compared to
those women who worked out more often
•Obese women who worked out for at least 3.5 hours a week experienced a death rate that was 91 percent higher than
lean women who exercised similarly
•The premature death rate was 142 times greater for obese, inactive women
So while being overweight or obese certainly increases many health risks, those who were lean and inactive also had
their share of risks. And as you might suspect, the most significant risks apply to those who are both
overweight/obese and also sedentary.
The moral of the story, of course, is that you want to carefully tailor both your dietary and your exercise
habits in ways that will support your health and well-being.
Why Many Forms of Exercise Don't Work Very
Well As many of you know, I have been an exercise fanatic for the last 42 years. Life is
a journey and I certainly made a load of well intentioned mistakes over those years. It is my goal to help you
understand some of those mistakes so you don't have to make the same ones I did.
My major mistake was that I focused nearly exclusively on cardio. I focused on running and actually did fairly
well competing as I ran a 2:50 marathon and a sub 5:00 minutes mile. However, even though I was aerobically
fit I virtually ignored anaerobic training after I stopped competing 25 years ago.
Turns out that is what most people do. They stop doing speed work when they get older. Most exercise works just
fine for most people so long as they are under 30 years old. At that time one’s growth hormone dramatically starts
to drop.
A better name for growth hormone would be "fitness" hormone. It is the strongest influence on increasing
your muscle mass and reducing your body fat. That is why many people inject it illegally. Fortunately
with the right type of exercise, your body can produce it naturally.
Super Fast Muscle
Fibers It turns out that nearly ALL exercises that are typically done in this country by
those over 30 do not generate growth hormone. This is because they are not exercising the super fast muscle fibers.
Cardio, aerobics and even most all strength training do NOT increase growth hormone. The only way to do that is by
using anaerobic exercises or speed work. You have to push REALLY hard and work intensely for brief periods of from
10 to 30 seconds.
These are typically sprint type of workouts but they don’t have to be done by running. You can do them on many
pieces of aerobic equipment such as a treadmill or bike. One of the best is a recumbent bike.
The principle is simple. You warm up for two minutes then increase your intensity level to as high as you can
and pedal as hard as you can for 30 seconds. If you can pedal for 45 seconds you are not working out hard enough.
You simply have to push it very hard.
After your 30-second workout you pedal at a comfortable intensity and relaxed pace for 90 seconds to recover,
then you repeat this 7 times for a total of 8 cycles. If you are doing it correctly you will be sweating profusely,
and it will likely be one of the best workouts of your life. Remember you have to work out intensely as you
possibly can. If you aren't sweating very profusely and really gasping for air at the end of the workout you aren't
cycling fast or hard enough.
The beauty of this approach is that it only requires FOUR MINUTES of exercise and only a total of 20 minutes of
your time. If you do it properly I can assure you that it will improve your health far more than HOURS of regular
cardio.
For the two hours following your exercise you will radically increase your level of growth hormone too, as
long as you avoid sugar. This will tremendously help you to lose fat and gain muscle.
This really is some radical new information that can change your life. Once I started doing this I was able to
easily drop extra weight I had picked up and could not lose despite doing my standard cardio. You can even apply
this to strength training and rather than exclusively exercise your slow muscle fibers, like all cardio does, you
can use explosive lifts and exercise your fast muscle fibers.
This is a bit challenging to describe in text so I hope to shoot a video on it soon so I can actually
demonstrate it for you..
The master educator who taught me this was Phil Campbell and his term for it is Sprint 8. I recently met him at
a fitness camp in Mexico. He has a book where you can get more information on this phenomenal form of exercise;
it's called Ready Set Go.
I plan on introducing more detailed articles on this in the future.
Other Tried-and-True Weight Loss
Tips Everyone’s metabolism is different, but you can speed it up or slow it down within a
reasonably short amount of time by making the following commonsense changes to both your diet and lifestyle:
•Eat according to your nutritional type to ensure your
body is getting the right fuel it needs
•Avoid sugar, especially fructose and grains as they are the leading cause of insulin-
andleptin-resistance, which affects your hunger
levels, your weight, and your risk of any number of diseases
•Listen to your hunger, and eat a healthy meal or snack when hunger calls
•Implement a well-rounded exercise regimen that includes strength training to build muscle, as well as
interval training, which has been demonstrated to
significantly increase fat loss
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