Diet
Along with physical fitness, ultimate health and wellness hinges on a healthy and balanced diet. People who eat well experience a variety of health benefits, better weight maintenance, lower chances of developing diabetes or heart disease and lower instances of illness. I follow ‘No GPS’ – that is No Grain, Potatoes or Sugar.
Before you look to cut things from your diet, work on adding healthy choices to your meals and snacks. Take a proactive positive approach as you make changes to what you eat. Drink a non-carbonated beverage instead of a pop or soda; you can choose unsweetened herbal tea which still provides flavor, lemon water or plain water. Select brown rice instead of white rice with your meals. Just as with exercise, small changes add up to a complete transition to a more healthful lifestyle.
Keys to Success
•Choose one or two small changes to incorporate into your diet each month.
•Experiment – Eating healthy needs to be enjoyable for you to make it a part of your lifestyle. Try foods and a variety of ways to prepare them and enjoy the ones you like.
•Keep your daily menu varied so you don’t get bored with your food choices and go off track.
Mind-Body Connection
Our emotional state can affect our food choices, our level of physical activity and our ability to maintain positive social engagement. Foods high in sugar and fat satisfy the pleasure and reward centers in our brains. If we are stressed or unhappy, many of us reach for rich foods to make ourselves feel better. Sometimes this is a conscious decision; many times it is not. Also, feeling angry, unhappy or depressed saps energy, making it more difficult to exercise or pursue some other physical activity; we just don’t feel like it.
There are many ways to combat this cycle. Physical activities like yoga, pilates, tai chi and many others expressly cultivate a healthy mind-body connection for practitioners. Each of these activities use movement tied to breath awareness to focus and calm the mind and the nervous system.
Yoga includes breathing exercises and meditation as well. These activities build fitness and relieve stress. Some mind-body activities, breathing exercises, visualization and meditation, do not involve whole body movement; they focus on channeling mental activity and relieving stress.
It is important to keep the body healthy and the mind in a state of equilibrium to experience a sense of well-being. Equilibrium in this context means you do not experience unrealistic highs or debilitating lows (depression). Being even tempered makes it easier to deal with stress, adapt to change and maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Keys to Success
•Choose a mind-body activity to include in your schedule which suits your lifestyle and temperament.
•Practice it consistently for the best results.
Make it a Habit
It takes 21 to 30 days of consistent application to make a simple action a habit. More complex accomplishments like establishing an exercise routine, daily meditation and dietary changes can take significantly longer.
The rate of accomplishment for more complex changes can be highly variable; do not end your quest for ultimate health and wellness if you are not seeing immediate results. The key to changing established habits and acquiring new ones is consistency and persistence. You can reach your goal!
Men & Women are NOT Created Equal when it Comes to Weight Loss
Men and women have to deal with different issues when it comes to many aspects of their body and weight loss is no exception.
This is because the hormonal environment is different from man to woman. For starters testosterone and estrogen are dramatically different from man to woman and even more specific to weight loss leptin levels are also different.
Leptin (from Greek leptos or ‘thin’) – the ‘satiety hormone’ – is a hormone made by adipose cells that helps to regulate energy balance by inhibiting hunger.
Leptin plays a vital role in the control of appetite, metabolism and the signals involved in weight gain and weight loss. Leptin levels rise when you eat and fall when you’re not eating. This helps control your sense of hunger and your metabolic rate to keep you from gaining or losing weight. As long as they don’t rise too high or fall too low you’ll remain weight stable and feel fine.
When attempting to diet ‘hard’ leptin levels can fall too far too fast and you will find it very difficult to lose weight. In fact you can eventually crash and experience big rebound weight gain.
This effect seems to be worse in women than in men and it’s because women have higher leptin levels. In other words, women have higher ‘highs’ and lower ‘lows’. It’s these dramatic swings in leptin that can lead to the crash and rebound weight gain that so many women experience on standard restrictive diets.
In contrast a man’s leptin levels rise and fall very predictably and within a relative small range. The high’s aren’t too high and the low’s aren’t too low, and as a result men can follow a pretty mundane, straight forward calorie restrictive diet and make it through to the end without a major crash or rebound and essentially lose all the weight they want.
This explains why men seem to have an easier time losing weight than women. Or to say it another way, weight loss for men is pretty straight forward and doesn’t require much creativity when it comes to the diet.
Women on the other hand experience dramatic swings in leptin that require a more intelligently designed diet to minimize these big swings in leptin levels. One of the techniques that has become popular is the idea of adding in a ‘cheat day.’ This is a day during your diet program where you’re instructed to eat more food and more carbs specifically to attempt to bring your leptin levels back up after days and days of dieting and lowering your leptin levels. Knowing that leptin drops further and faster in women it stands to reasons that the ‘cheat day’ is a more useful tool for women as well. But the concept of ‘cheating’ may seem a bit problematic and needs some adjustments.
I don’t like the word ‘cheat’ as it implies you’re doing something wrong :) and it implies that you should be going ‘all out’ on junk food and whatever else you can get your hands on. This leaves the door open to really overdoing that day.
I would rather call it a strategic ‘eat-up’ day.
Women need these strategic ‘eat-up’ days throughout their weight loss program to prevent their leptin levels from crashing and rebound weight gain from happening. And they need these days more often than men.
For example a man could probably make it two or even three weeks eating very low calories and minimal carbs without having a serious crash in leptin levels and thus no major consequences to their weight loss progress.
Women, on the other hand, need a to add in these ‘eat up’ days weekly to keep leptin levels consistent and keep the fat burning
