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Fun Gadgets To Help You Lose Weight

You look at yourself in the mirror one morning and don’t like what you see.  You constantly need new clothes because the old ones are so tight they show all of your bulges. Members of the opposite sex no longer seem to notice you. And the bathroom scales obviously need replacing because you could not possibly be that heavy.

Whatever the trigger is, something causes you to see the truth.

You have let yourself go. You need to do something about it. But you have been here before. You know that diets don’t seem to keep the weight off. Not only that but diets are hard work and mean months and months of struggle.

There really is only one problem to solve and that is maintaining motivation over the long haul. Slow weight loss is the only way to make it permanent, but what you really need is a coach – someone to look over your shoulder and keep on with the encouragement even when those pounds do not seem to be shifting. But a coach is going to be expensive, so how else can you get that encouragement?

Well, it seems that there are a lot of websites out there that help you keep track of your weight loss and fitness goals. They make it so much easier for you to keep track of progress and maintain your determination to not only reach your realistic target weight, but also to maintain it.

MyFitnessPal is a handy free service that helps you keep track of goals. If you like to count calories it has a database full of foods and a calculator that will give you a pretty good idea of how many calories you are eating. If you tell it how much exercise you do it calculates how many calories you are using and lets you know how much you need to eat to lose weight at a healthy rate. It also has an app that shares your details with your smartphone/tablet so you can keep on track.

Talking of apps there’s a great bathroom scale available now, the Withings WiFi Body Scale. It keeps track of weight, body fat, and BMI and talks to either your web browser or an app on your smartphone/tablet.

Add to that a heart rate monitor so that you get the maximum calorie burn when you exercise and you have given yourself a well-deserved gift that will help to motivate and encourage you long-term.

If you add to that mix a copy of my book How to Lose Weight Easily you will have the perfect weight loss kit. My book, by the way, has loads of useful hints and tips on how to lose weight without suffering as well as a 10-step guide to successful, lasting, weight loss.

Successful weight loss is all about motivating yourself to keep going until you reach your target. So surround yourself with whatever tools, or equipment,  that you need in order to be successful. Take advantage of everything that you need to support yourself. No one else will do it for you and you do not need any one else’s permission to look after yourself the best way you know how.

Remember, it is how far you have come, not how far you travelled yesterday, that matters.

Michael

The links above are for European readers. If you live in the US please use these:

Withings Body Fat Scale

Heart rate monitor

How to Lose Weight Easily

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As Long As You Do It Regularly – You Can Eat As Much Fat As You Want

At least that’s a rough translation of the research by Dr Hadas Sherman et al at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Although the research has only been done using mice as subjects, if it translates to human behaviour, then this is really good news for people who want to lose weight.

The numbers of overweight and obese individuals have only reached epidemic proportions in the last few decades. So this research correlates nicely with a major change in eating patterns that has taken place in that time – snacking.

In my childhood, food was eaten at mealtimes and there were three of those a day, plus a snack for supper at nine every evening. Every day food was eaten around the same time. I was never hungry, and I ate a full meal at lunchtime as well as in the evening. I grew up slim, fit and healthy.

Nowadays people seem to graze, rather like cattle, eating constantly. They eat walking down the street, they eat in coffee bars, and they eat in pubs. They eat in the cinema even though the bucket of popcorn is ten times the volume of their stomach and they had an evening meal a couple of hours earlier. They eat at their desk, and they fill their supermarket trolley with crisps, biscuits, snacks, and chocolate bars so they can continue to graze all evening in front of the tv. But, and this seems to be the problem, there is no regularity to any of this. Breakfasts, lunches and dinners are missed, or eaten early or late, to fit around other activities.  Snacks are used to bridge the space between these irregular meals.

Now, it seems that regularity is one of the ways that the body’s intelligence knows that the food supply is plentiful. When food arrives in the stomach at the same time each day, the body adjusts metabolism accordingly. If it had a voice it would say something like – “ I know that food always turns up at the same times each day, therefore, I know food is plentiful, therefore, I don’t need to store any fat for emergencies. Even if an occasional meal is missed, as long as the next one is on time I know there is no problem.” Food is converted to energy for immediate use or eliminated.

The Hebrew University research found that mice who ate a high-fat diet consisting of regular meals weighed less after 18 weeks than mice who consumed either a high fat diet with irregular feeding, or a low fat diet with irregular feeding. Unfortunately, all the mice, even the ones on a low-fat regular diet ended up heavier than they were. But the interesting thing here is that every single mouse consumed exactly the same number of calories each day.

So, as I suggested some time ago in my article Calories are not Created Equal your weight isn’t just about the Calories that you consume. It seems that you can offset some of the damage by eating meals regularly and cutting out on the snacking. So become a champion for the family mealtime sitting around a table with the tv off, at the same time each evening. Eat breakfast and lunch at the same time each day and forget about all the rest – regardless of what everyone around you is doing.

This, according to the researchers, is going to reset your metabolic clock to a much healthier state. Knowing what times each day you are going to eat and not eating at any other time will leave you fully satisfied – once you develop the new habit – you will almost certainly start to lose weight and the really good news is that you still get to eat whatever you want.

If you would like some more hints and tips on How to Lose Weight Easily get hold of a copy of my book of the same title. It’s available from Amazon in Kindle and paperback at an almost giveaway price.

Michael

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Weigh Loss and the Real World

I read a lot of studies and reports about weight loss. A quick browse through this blog will find my comments on some of them. What happens when a new weight loss study is announced is that the media jump on it and you get headlines like:

How to lose weight while chowing down at work

Team sports help teens stay fit

The secret to weight loss? Pen and Paper

Weight-loss keys: Food journals, eating in, not skipping meals

Artificial sweeteners no silver bullet for losing weight

And the whole thing, whether or not it’s valuable information, is hyped up and made into something much more than it really is. I’ve also noticed that much of the research merely provides evidence for what I’ve known and been teaching for many years now, so I’m not often surprised by the findings.

But let me tell you why this study information sometimes needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

There are four main areas that we need to be concerned with for weight loss:

  1. Non-pharmaceutical weight loss products
  2. Pharmaceutical weight loss products
  3. Behaviour i.e. eating patterns & activity
  4. Fat clubs e.g. Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig…

Non-pharmaceutical Weight loss products

This is the likes of Acai, Hoodia, teas, slimming drinks, patches, and all of the incredibly expensive products provided for people who think the solution to eating too much and not exercising enough is a tablet or a magic drink. This is the territory of the Health-Food shop/web site. Now I have to say I have absolutely no experience with any of these products, so if you’ve had good results using them, and you’ve kept the weight off, then let me know below. My gut feeling is that they are a waste of money and sales owe more to the skill of the advertisers than to any efficacy they possess.

Pharmaceutical weight loss products

There are not a lot of pharmaceutical weight loss products around but two are about to receive FDA approval: Belviq and Qnexa. They are both, in my opinion, attempts by the manufacturers to make $ billions rather than any serious attempt at providing a safe weight loss product. The stock of both the manufacturing companies went up through the roof as soon as they passed the first stage of FDA approval. Qnexa was originally rejected by the FDA two years ago, but I understand that the manufacturer spent a lot of money to convince the FDA panel that they should reconsider.

Both drugs contain components from an earlier weight loss drug that was withdrawn for safety reasons, and so they should be causing serious concern about the side-effects. But it seems the FDA is happy for the long-term safety trials to take place after approval. The benefit of using the drugs (in terms of weight lost) is so small when compared with known safe methods that they are just not worth the risk. Nevertheless as soon as they pass the final FDA hurdle (which they undoubtedly will) they will be prescribed in their billions by overworked doctors who will be grateful that they can spend two minutes printing a prescription, rather than providing counselling, education, and advice; alongside real help, support and encouragement.

Behaviour

Behaviour is the area of interest of most of the studies. Psychological studies (and that’s what they are) require volunteers. Volunteers need to be informed about the subject area of the study. So you know you are signing up for a weight loss study. In order to do that you have probably given up trying to lose weight without help, and you are probably quite motivated because they are going to ask you to do stuff and you are going to have to comply – because that’s what you agree with when you sign up. You are also in it with quite a few other people. You get the attention of the researchers. You get to feel that you are doing something worthwhile and helping others.

All of these things are motivational.

They are also not normal and not found in the real world of people struggling desperately to lose weight.

So, in part, studies are always studying themselves.

They create some circumstances and then test them out.

When you are given a diet plan and told to stick to it for 16 weeks as part of a study – most people will succeed. But give 100 people that same diet plan and never plan to contact them again and you’ll find almost no one stuck to the diet for the full 16 weeks, because that’s human nature. We behave differently when we know no one is watching and no one is checking up on us.

It doesn’t matter what is being studied, we behave differently when we know we are being watched. The most interesting studies are when the participants are lied to. For instance one study pretended to be about testing the flavour of different cookies and that’s what the participants thought they were doing, but they were actually being tested on how much they ate based on a drink they’d been given earlier to fill them up. Participants on a diet ate more cookies than those who were eating normally.

The real question that needs to be asked is ‘does this work in the real world’.

What seems to work in the real world is eating a little less, exercising a little more, and re-learning to listen to your body.

Fat Clubs

Fat clubs are the socially acceptable places where you go when you want company in your attempts to lose weight. They provide a social environment. Everyone has the same problem. They give you solutions. If you follow their guidelines you lose weight. But I get a lot of clients who’ve tried these places and they still come to me for help. Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Slimming World and the like do help you lose weight, but they use a dieting model, and dieting just doesn’t work long-term. You don’t sign up to these places for life. You sign up and stay until you either get fed-up with the classes, or reach your goal weight. Then you revert to your old-style eating patterns and before very long you are overweight again – only this time it’s much harder to shift the weight.

If you really want to know why it’s so much harder to shift the weight regained after a diet, and how you can lose it then read my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever to find out.

Michael

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If You Really Want To Count Calories Then This Will Help

I know that counting calories is a popular way to lose weight – even though I don’t agree with it. What I do agree with is actually cutting down on the number of calories you eat. Now that might seem like the same thing but it isn’t and I’ll get to why it’s different in a little while, because I want to tell you about some interesting news first.

Anne McTiernan from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre ran a 12-month study, with over 120 women, looking at what helped participants to lose more weight. What she found was that women, who kept a food diary over the period of the trial, lost about 6lbs more than people who didn’t. Skipping meals was also a significant factor. Those women who skipped meals ended up 8lbs heavier than those who ate regularly. This fits in quite nicely with what I was saying in my article It’s True… You Can Eat Cake For Breakfast And Still Lose Weight  a few days ago.

Those who went out for lunch just once a week ended up 5lbs heavier than those who didn’t. The more you eat out the heavier you get – even when you are on a calorie controlled diet. But this is because of the I’ve Eaten Too Much – So I’d Better Eat Some More factor.

“For individuals who are trying to lose weight, the No. 1 piece of advice based on these study results would be to keep a food journal to help meet daily calorie goals”

Anne McTiernan, director of the Hutchinson Centre.

Of course keeping a Food Diary only works when you are honest and record everything you eat. So you need to carry it with you. I’ve designed a Food Diary page you can download for free and either print copies or use as a basis to design your own.

So their advice is pretty much: vigilant self-monitoring of what you eat; cook all your own food; and eat regular meals. That’s good advice, but I need to get back to why counting calories and cutting down on calorie intake are not the same thing.

When you count calories you have a daily limit so you have to monitor absolutely everything you eat. You need to obsess over food labels. You need to engage in a constant battle with yourself over whether or not to have something delicious, that you really fancy, but which is high in calories, or lots and lots of much lower calorie stuff. Hunger is a frequent accompaniment to this process, along with a perpetual thinking about food and the next meal. Willpower, that is mental force, is what is essential to succeed and willpower never works when you are tired, fed-up, emotionally exhausted, or just plain feeling sorry for yourself. So this method is bound to fail – or at least take very much longer to attain the target weight. Around half of people give up on their diet in less than 12 months.

 “You can initially lose 5 to 10% of your weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back.”

Traci Mann, Psychologist, University of California, Los Angeles

Cutting down on calories, at least if you follow the guidelines laid out in my book, is very different. You get to enjoy whatever you fancy, but that’s not a recipe for crazy eating, nor a suggestion that you can binge constantly and lose weight. It’s a suggestion that shifts the focus away from food so the obsessive thoughts and cravings have no reason to be there.

It’s a way to lose weight and enjoy life at the same time. I mean, if you can have what you want how can you crave it? Knowing you can have it actually reduces the desire for it, so although you still have it, you eat less of it. In my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever I also show you other ways to consume less while still having what you want. I know it sounds contradictory, but it works and is all based on sound research and my own years of experience with weight loss clients.

Michael

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Is Soda Pop at the Heart of the American Obesity Epidemic?

I don’t know what the attraction is. I find the ‘natural’ sugar ones too sweet, and the artificial sugar ones just unpleasant. In fact the only time I drink any of it is when I mix it with beer – which is about six times a year, and even then I only use organic lemonade sweetened with agave syrup and without any other chemical additives.

But this isn’t a plug for organic lemonade. There is an epidemic of sweetened beverage drinking that some are suggesting is seriously damaging to your health – particularly if you are an American. But that’s largely because the obesity problem seems to be worse in the US than anywhere else in the world.

10,400,000,000 gallons of sugar-filled soda pop are manufactured every year in the US.

Each can contains the equivalent of 10 teaspoons of ordinary sugar. Can you imagine putting ten spoons of sugar into every cup of tea or coffee that you drink? It would be unpalatable. The only reason you can tolerate that amount of sugar in a can of soda is that the soda is acidic and the acidity counter-acts the excessive sweetness. In fact cola drinks are about as acid as vinegar. Would you drink a can of vinegar? Would you drink a can of vinegar with 10 added teaspoons of sugar? That’s effectively what you are doing when you drink cola.

But what exactly is the problem here – apart from the damage the acid does to teeth and stomach, and the damage the sugar does to teeth and the waistline?

The body, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is an interesting thing – especially when it experiences pleasure. But one of the really handy things that the body does is to keep you alive. It does this with loads of feedback mechanisms that allow corrections to be made when the chemical/hormone balance starts to shift away from optimum.

Food is satisfying. It creates a full feeling. As digestion proceeds it allows vitamins, minerals, fats, sugars and other stuff to seep into the system. The body also knows when it’s eaten because of this feedback system. So it knows if it is still in the process of digesting. Consequently, if you eat a big meal, you probably don’t want to eat another big meal shortly afterwards. The body is satisfied.

Sweet drinks don’t have that effect and the body fails to identify the calories as food. So the calories in these drinks are added to your calorie intake without any apparent bodily awareness of them. This is one of the reasons they lead to weight gain. There is also a suspicion that these drinks may stimulate desire for sweet high-carbohydrate foods. In other words they trick you that you are feeling hungry and needing something sweet when you don’t.

“The public now firmly believes that foods containing saccharin are effective in weight control, and has been persuaded by the soft drink industry (through the Calorie Control Council) that these benefits outweigh any possible health risks.”
Samuel S. Epstein MD

You can’t get out of it by drinking Diet versions of these drinks either. Rats who were fed saccharin ended up much fatter than rats who were fed sugary foods. There is a lot of uncertainty about the impact of artificial sweeteners so although they help you cut down the calorie intake from the soda, they may well be stimulating you to eat more unhealthily later on.

That’s not the only bad news.

A study of 90,000 women who regularly drank at least one soft drink a day suggested that they were 40% more likely to develop type II diabetes than women who didn’t drink this much soda.

Colas are high in phosphate. Now the body needs phosphate for bone building and health, but it needs phosphate in balance with calcium. When this balance is upset, perhaps with daily cola intake, the possibility of severe skeletal problems developing is very real.

“It appears that increased soft drink consumption is a major factor that contributes to osteoporosis.”
Michael Murray ND and Joseph Pizzorno ND

A recent Harvard study found that daily consumption of sugary drinks increased the risk of heart disease in men. Drinking two 12oz sugary drinks correlates with a 42% increase in the risk of heart disease. That risk rockets to 69% if you drink three cans per day. The American Beverage Association, as you would expect, issued a statement in response: “Drinking sweetened beverages does not cause an increased risk of heart disease – not based on this study or any other study in the available science.”

I think denial falls more into the territory of psychology than scientific research. Mind you denial is pretty much what you’d expect as the response to any threat to a $40,000,000,000 per year industry.

So there you have it. There is a considerable body of evidence to suggest that sugar-filled soda is seriously bad for your health if you drink it regularly. There is also considerable support for the idea that diet soda may well cause you to endure cravings for sweet sugary foods and so, in the long-run, make losing weight much more difficult than if you drank fruit juices, water, or coffee and tea – without sugar naturally. But if you go down the route of fruit juices as an alternative be aware of the differences. A fruit drink has added sugar and frequently artificial sweetener too. Fruit juice is just juice. If in doubt check the ingredients list.

So the next time you fancy a cola, ask yourself if you really do long for 12oz of vinegar mixed with 10 teaspoons of sugar?

Found this interesting? Please feel free to add your thoughts on this subject below.

Michael

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Weight Loss – Feeling Out of Control?

Did you know that you were being manipulated?

Being overweight is undoubtedly a problem for most people who experience it. It’s a problem, in part, because society as a whole finds fatness easy to laugh at and simultaneously unacceptable. For instance, when did you last see an overweight leading lady in a film, or an overweight model on an advertising hoarding. People don’t want to see overweight women in bikinis or overweight men in shorts on the cinema, or on tv (unless of course it’s a programme where the overweight person is being humiliated or laughed at).

You can argue the rights and wrongs of this all you want – but as members of a society we are programmed with a particular view of ‘attractive’ and that view tends towards slimness. So we can’t do much about those particular preferences, but as long as we are aware that it is just programming we don’t need to buy into it too seriously. This is really important. If you are reading this because you are overweight and are looking for accessible solutions (rather than the faux-solutions the diet industry parades out for you), you really need to understand that any sense of unacceptability that you have for you because of your weight – is simply unacceptable.

By that I mean that if you disapprove of you because of your weight, your disapproval isn’t yours, it belongs to Society. Because it belongs to Society, it isn’t about you particularly, and so it isn’t in any way personal. So let yourself off the hook.

Another problem with our society is the hypnotic power of the images and words that we see around us. I notice the effects on myself of advertising and how names that we see frequently somehow become benevolent institutions within our own minds and thoughts.

Perhaps the hypnotic nature of this influence is a major reason you should consider using hypnosis to counter it – because hypnosis is working at the same level within your mind as the media.

Advertisers know how this works and know that you don’t need to be in any kind of a trance in order to be influenced by these images, sounds, and words. The snack industry, for instance, has as one of its goals, the creation of instant craveability – that mixture of tastes and textures that instantly creates that ‘more-ish’ feeling. It does this by mixing fats, sugars and salts in ‘entertaining’ ways. These are the key ingredients – usually with a carbohydrate base to carry them.

I remember once I was eating a packet of Walker’s prawn cocktail crisps and they tasted different from the way I remembered last time I’d eaten them (I’m not a frequent eater of crisps). They tasted sweet. This puzzled me. Thinly sliced and fried potatoes should never taste sweet. So I checked on the ingredients and sugar was now in the list. Why on earth there is any need to add sugar to what I thought was a savoury snack I’ve no idea, but it was the last time I bought any.

This subtle manipulation of our foods, adding sugar to crisps to make them that little more appealing, spending millions of dollars researching ways to mix fat, sugar, and salt in ways that taste good, has only one aim – to control you and to control what you eat. Sorry, there are two aims. The second one is to create wealth for the snack manufacturers, by selling you something you don’t want and don’t need, but are being manipulated into believing that you do.

And then there’s the soft drink industry. 7% of calories consumed in the US are consumed as soft drinks. I remember, years ago, I’d just finished sixth-form college and was waiting for my A-level results and my Dad got me a job in Jacob’s (the biscuit factory where he worked). I met another student there who was a year older than me and he told me that the previous summer he had worked for Coca Cola. He said that when he was taken on the factory tour he was shown this huge vat which was more than half full of sugar. He was then shown a glass tube full of dark syrup. This tiny tube was the flavour of Coca Cola for this huge vat. He tipped it in, the vat was topped up with water and that was pretty much it. I had no idea that that drink was almost pure sugar. Coca Cola instantly became something that I only drink when there is nothing else available – which is almost never.

You see how easy it is really. I found out some information about the truth about a product. I instantly decided to leave it alone and there is no difficulty about that. I’m not secretly craving a can of coke or some sweet crisps. I decided that what the manufacturers were doing was unacceptable to me and that was the end of it. No effort. No withdrawal. No battle. But I like me, and I do my best to feed my body in ways that are not only enjoyable but also nutritious.

A key aspect of my Diet-Free Weight Loss program is that the very first step that you must take is to accept yourself just the way you are. You see, as the Borg say in Star Trek Next Generation “Resistance is futile”. Or to put it another way that you may have come across if you are into other forms of self-help – What you resist persists.

Resistance is a state of mind that holds in place whatever it is you are resisting. It does this because in order to resist you need to be aware of whatever it is you are resisting. Whatever you are aware of is in your mind (otherwise you would not be aware of it), and whatever is in your mind is what your subconscious seeks to create. Your subconscious works with images and there is no image for not or no. So the thought, or the awareness, of not wanting to be overweight translates into the subconscious as be overweight. And that’s exactly what you get while you resist what you already are.

On another level, invoking the more real-world practicality of physics, if you push against something like a wall – it pushes back at you with equal force. It has to. If it didn’t it would fall over. So if you push against overweight it pushes right back at you, and like with the wall, you stay exactly where you are – stuck.

The instant you accept that, right now, and just for now, you are the way you are, then you free up all the space you need for change to take place easily and effortlessly.

So think about that for a while. Think about the ways you don’t accept you, or the ways that you kid yourself you do accept you. Then think about how easy it would be to decide that, just for now, maybe even just for this minute as you read this, that you are ok. Just decide that you are a good-hearted, warm, loving, caring individual and that’s fine. If you manage that and you want to stretch a little further – look to see if you can see the beauty that lies within you. This can be a little more difficult, but generally all it takes for you to succeed at this is for you to widen your definition of beauty a little. Move beauty beyond mere physical appearance. That, after all is literally only skin deep. See the beauty in the way you move; in your interests; in your compassion; in your gentleness; in the way you parent your children; in your desire to take control of your life; in your thoughts; in your humour; in your willingness to lend a hand; in whatever it is about you that makes you uniquely You.

You are special – you just need to see it. And as you see that more and more clearly so you will begin to reshape your body.

I will write again on this subject and guide you gently and safely through the minefield of developing a healthy relationship with food. But in the meantime if you want more, I’ve prepared some free videos with what I hope are some interesting slides and a narrative. The first one is called Do You Know the Secret to Permanent Weight Loss. Check it out. I hope you enjoy it. Let me know.

Enjoy your food.

Michael Hadfield

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Seven Reasons Why Diets Don’t Work

Diets don’t work because they are based on a false premise.

The false premise is that body weight is purely a consequence of the calories you eat and expend. If you eat more than you use the excess is stored as fat. If you eat less than you use, the body burns excess fat to make up the shortfall.This is a mistaken idea.

We have all seen really skinny people who eat like horses and don’t seem any more active than we are. We have all seen overweight people who say they don’t eat very much (we tend not to believe those people). We also tend to believe what we are told. Nothing we are told by the media helps us to lose weight by severely cutting down on calories. Here is why…

The 7 reasons diets don’t work

  1. They are too much effort.
  2. They cause ‘famine’ mode.
  3. They affect mood – and not in a good way.
  4. Thoughts of food predominate.
  5. Diets lose weight not fat.
  6. Exercise is not included.
  7. Unreasonable expectations

1. Too much effort.

21% of people give up on their diet within two months. 45% of people don’t last the year. All that calorie, or syn or point, counting just gets to be too much work and it’s so much easier just to eat what you like.

2.’Famine’ mode.

The body is an intelligent system. It’s intelligence is primarily geared toward survival. When food is scarce it thinks ‘famine’ and lays down supplies of fat; slows down metabolism to conserve energy; and burns lean muscle for its energy needs, because, when resting, lean muscle tissues burn calories. To the body’s intelligence, a diet looks just like a famine.

3. Mood.

The majority of so-called experts regard excess weight as a calorie problem. It isn’t. But it is an emotional problem. Eating is often an attempt to improve mood. Dieting itself can cause social isolation – hence the popularity of slimming clubs. This can lead to low moods, rebellion against the diet, or even depression.

4. Diets keep you thinking about food.

Meals are no longer spontaneous. They have to be meticulously planned. Recipes have to be followed. Specific items need to be purchased – sometimes even specific product brands. Life is no longer about fun and enjoyment. Life is about food.

5. Diets lose weight, not fat.

Weight loss in diets is almost entirely down to muscle loss. This makes it more and more difficult to lose weight each time you diet because bodies are reluctant to release fat – especially quickly, which is the way most people want it. The only way to release fat instead of muscle is to do it slowly.

6. Exercise.

Exercise is essential. Exercise builds muscle. Muscle burns calories – even while resting. Exercise boosts metabolism. Exercise increases fitness, vitality and lifts mood.

7. Unreasonable Expectations

People have surprising expectations of the amount of weight that can sensibly be reduced. If you are 16 stone (224lbs) an initial weight loss goal of 14 stone (196lbs) would be good to aim for. A 2 stone (28lb) success is easily achievable and when maintained for a while will be the place to decide to shift a little more.

Diets just don’t work.
If you want to discover how to lose weight without the rigid discipline of a diet and still be allowed to eat what you want then check out my website here.

Author: Michael J. Hadfield

Source: Hypnosisiseasy

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Weight Loss, Diets, And Fat

The trouble is fat. Bodies just make the stuff. If fat had never been invented, we could all eat what we like, stay beautiful, and never have to diet or lose weight. Unfortunately some fat is essential to good health. It is a handy insulator that helps regulate internal body temperature, and it really does come in handy when we have flu and don’t have the energy, or the desire, to eat.

“I’m allergic to food.  Every time I eat it breaks out into fat.”
~Jennifer Greene Duncan

However, fat really is necessary and needs to be a part of a healthy diet. The trick is to have just the right amount.

Far too many people consider that whether or not you accumulate fat is down to simple maths. If you eat more calories than you use then you get fat. If you use more calories than you eat then you lose weight. This is the basis of all the calorie reduced diets for weight loss.

For people with an active life, this isn’t too bad. If you spend your work day sitting on a chair and your evenings and weekends sitting on a couch, then calories in have to be reduced to almost zero to make you lose weight.

Yo-Yo diets

But thousands of people use this simple maths to create the Hell of yo-yo diets; the Hell of being unable to eat what they want when they want; the Hell of social isolation because they don’t have enough will power to eat lettuce when all their friends have huge plates filled with steak, fries, onions, mushrooms… and desserts filled with cream.

And thousands of people use this simple maths to watch the pounds fall off for a week or two, then slow down, then accumulate, then fall off again and they fight a constant battle with themselves and their diet. They can even end up hating who they are because their bodies won’t do what they think their minds are telling them to.

Diet clubs

I visit a coffee bar that has a meeting room where Weight Watchers and Slimming World diet clubs hold meetings. I feel a little sad when I see women arriving for their weigh in and nipping into the toilet to relieve themselves of those few desperate ounces so they might just tip the balance and clock up a loss rather than a gain. Because, of course, the public humiliation of having gained a pound, never mind two, is more than can be tolerated. I feel sad because there is a much better, much easier way to lose weight without public weighing or a gimmicky diet.

This is no way to live.

This is not happiness.

I know how to lose weight without dieting.

And this is all down to that simple maths…

…simple maths that is just plain WRONG.

Dieting fights the body’s own intelligence

You see bodies are intelligent. Your body is an intelligent system. I bet that when you were a child you cut yourself. And I bet that within a few days there was almost no trace of a wound. This is the intelligence I am talking about. You did not have to tell the body to start vasoconstriction to reduce blood loss. You did not have to send the message to rush platelets to the damaged blood vessels to start to shore up the hole. Nor did yo have to tell the body to form fibrin to hold the platelets in place and eventually form the protective clot. And I bet you didn’t have anything to do with then rushing white blood cells to gobble up any invading micro-organisms to prevent infection.

And then there’s the whole process of making an invisible, or almost invisible, mend that follows on from this initial reaction to bleeding.

Supply & Demand

Fat is survival. When food is in short supply, fat is deposited. Now you would think that fat would be laid down when food is plentiful. So consider this: from the days when our body systems evolved. Plentiful food would have been frequent small meals (fruits & berries eaten while they were gathered). Eating would stop once the stomach was full – because there was plenty more where that came from. In these circumstances there is no need for fat deposits.

But infrequent meals and very large meals when eating is continued after the stomach is full (a successful hunt after several days without game), is a very strong message to the body that food supply is uncertain so fat deposition would be helpful.

Most people who are overweight eat past fullness. This tells your body food shortage.

Most people who are overweight get little exercise. This tells your body that there is no food to find, so conserve energy.

Most people who are overweight go on diets. This tells your body that food is in short supply.

And what your body does when food is in short supply is to LAY DOWN FAT and conserve energy.

Energy conservation

Now I mentioned the simple maths that is the basis for the calorie reduction diet plans designed to help you lose weight. Because your body is intelligent, when food is in short supply and it needs energy (Calories) it does something quite brilliant. It burns up lean muscle rather than burning up fat. The reason it does this is that lean muscle tissue uses up calories by simply being there. Take two people in the same room sitting watching tv, one very fat, the other very fit. The fit one is burning up many times more calories than the fat one. This is because lean muscle tissue burns calories just by existing. A fit individual will use up 500-700 Calories a day just lying in bed. So the intelligence of the body says – we need to get rid of lean muscle because food is in short supply and we will stand a better chance of survival if we save our fat calories for real emergencies.

The consequence of this of course is that, as you diet, your muscle/fat ratio slowly shifts in the direction of more fat. The effect of this is that your body’s metabolic rate is lowered (your intelligent body’s energy conservation planning). Making it ever harder to lose weight the next time you start a diet. So next time you start a diet you will give up sooner because each time you repeat the cycle – it gets harder to lose weight.

If you diet regularly all you are doing is accumulating more and more fat, making it harder and harder to lose weight – because the weight loss is largely from muscle loss and you have less muscle to lose.

You cannot fight this.

You cannot effectively lose weight, long-term, like this.

Lose weight without dieting

If you want to lose weight, you have to work with your body’s intelligence, not against it.

You may not appreciate that you don’t have to diet to lose weight. You just have to eat differently. But you can still eat what you want. It sounds too good to be true. And it gets better. It can be fairly effortless. No more fighting. No more will power battles.

More details are available on my website.

Author: Michael J. Hadfield

Source: Hypnosisiseasy