Having worked in health and fitness since 1996, I have worked with hundreds of clients looking to lose weight.
I have learned through thousands of hours of education and thousands of hours working with my clients what is required to achieve long term sustainable weight loss.
Long term weight loss is not just about exercising more and restricting calories! THAT DOES NOT WORK for most!
Reducing calories beyond which your body needs is the general recommendation to lose weight, right? We are told, “To lose weight you must consume fewer calories than you use”. For sure, in the short-term, you are likely to lose weight if you continue to restrict calories. But what happens in the long term?
After eating a calorie reduced diet for long enough, the body will begin to breakdown proteins from your muscles for energy. This slows down your metabolic rate and you will begin to increase weight on a reduced calorific intake. So you’ll be eating less, yet putting on weight. So, do you restrict your calories even more? If so, where do you draw the line?
When you restrict calories, the body becomes very efficient at storing body fat, because your body thinks it is starving to death and needs to survive the famine! It does this by increasing the amount of lipogenic enzymes. At the same time, the body reduces its ability to use fat as fuel by reducing its lipolytic enzymes.
Not only that, but when you restrict good dietary fats, especially saturated fats (no they’re not dangerous) your body’s delicate hormone balance will be disrupted. I will discuss this in more detail later.
When you restrict calories and are hungry all the time, your blood sugar drops, you can’t function properly, you can’t think straight, you become agitated and aggressive. Is this the way you wish to live your life?
The only way to achieve a lean body is to optimise your health. You cannot carry excess body fat and be healthy. Symptoms (excess body fat is a symptom) are signs to your conscious mind that something is out of balance in your fundamental homeostatic control systems and needs to be put right.
In order to be healthy and have a lean body, 10 factors need to be addressed.
Tune in next time, when I will uncover the 10 secrets…