Categories
Uncategorized

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

Categories
Uncategorized

Frying Pans Make Your Children Fat

Well not just frying pans. Any pan with a non-stick coating, according to recent research, has the power to impact the way your child’s body metabolises fat in later life. Now I have to say that the research has not yet established cause and effect beyond any doubt, but there is a significant correlation with the levels of PFCs (polyfluoroalkyl compounds) found in the blood of pregnant women and the weight of their children. PFCs get into pregnant women via non-stick pan coatings.

The study looked at medical information from around 450 women who were pregnant in the early 90’s. What they discovered was that the women with the highest levels of PFC in their blood had babies that, on average, weighed 5 ozs less at birth. However, by the age of 20 months these same babies weighed, on average, 1.3lbs heavier than the children of mothers with the lowest levels of PFC.

This confirms the results of a Danish study revealing that girls exposed to PFCs in the womb were much more likely to be overweight by the time they reached the end of their teens.

PFCs are endemic and most people already have them floating around in their bloodstream, though they are not as prevalent in the environment now as they were 20 years ago when those blood samples were taken.

Still, this research does make you wonder. There is a ‘fat’ epidemic, and while a lot of it is caused by eating much more food than is needed, this epidemic does match the rise in the use of non-stick cookware. I had a quick look around my local hardware store today and although there was an extensive selection of pans there was no shiny metal anywhere. Every single pan had a non-stick coating.

Non-stick pan coatings are a source of PFCs. Now I know from personal experience (largely because I use pans until the handles fall off) that non-stick coatings don’t stay on the pans.  I had a set of pans for around 30 years and they started off non-stick and ended up aluminium. What that means is that some particles of the non-stick coating must come off into the food every time the pan is used. The coating just got thinner and thinner. So I ate it and my family ate it.

Now I know the amounts are miniscule but these chemicals interfere with hormones and hormones operate at microscopic concentrations.

After realising that I’d probably eaten the pan coatings, my next set of pans were plain stainless steel. Interestingly I find that I don’t miss the non-stickness at all and rarely have a problem with sticking food. I remember reading somewhere that non-stick coatings were a by-product of the space programme and probably something we all ended up using because of clever marketing rather than any real need.

Now if it was just pans all it would mean was a little more work with the scourer, but PFCs are used to coat all sorts of things – many of which are food related. Our bodies, nowadays, ingest a huge amount of PFCs from the plastic containers and films that cover food – particularly those designed for microwave heating.

So it might just be time for another revolution – one that means a little more work. Using things like glass or ceramic containers to heat up food, rather than the packaging they come in. I know that’s too much effort, but if you consider the amount of energy you exert into going on diets and trying to lose weight, then using shiny metal pans and dispensing with packaging before microwaving is probably a lot less. Not only that but you get to do without all the guilt and suffering too.

Now if you want to lose a little more weight than non-stick pans will give you, and you’d like to make it really easy and not have to bother with all that dieting stuff,  then get hold of a copy of my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever.

Michael

Categories
Uncategorized

It’s True… You Can Eat Cake For Breakfast And Still Lose Weight

I think researchers have the best job in the world. It seems all they have to do is dream up some crazy idea, find a bunch of people willing to try it out, and then publish the results. Cake for breakfast is one of those ideas – but it seems that this time it’s not such a crazy one.

The people at Tel Aviv University managed to find 193 obese volunteers who were willing to take part in a 32 week trial. Half of them had a 300 calorie breakfast, the other half had a 600 calorie breakfast that included dessert.

By the 16 week mark both groups had lost an average of around 33lbs. But the really interesting stuff happened in the second half of the study. During the remaining 16 weeks the tiny breakfast group had regained around 22lbs, but the Big Breakfast bunch had lost another 15lbs each.

The daily calorie intake of both groups was designed to be the same, so those with the smaller breakfast made up for it later on in the day. But those same participants were the ones who felt hunger and cravings and frequently gave in to the urges to ‘cheat’.

The reasoning behind this finding is that your metabolism is at its most active in the morning and its power to burn off excess energy drops throughout the day. So, by eating those extra calories in the morning, you not only have all day to burn them off, but you also shut down production of the hunger hormone ghrelin. This is the reason those participants in the cake-for-breakfast group experienced little in the way of cravings for sweet foods later on in the day even though they were following a calorie restricted diet

But the most interesting thing appears to be it took 16 weeks before any difference was measured between the two groups. However, this was just the way the experiment was designed. Participants had to follow the diet strictly for 16 weeks. After this time they were permitted to eat extra food if they felt hungry. So I suspect that the differences in the two regimes would have shown up much sooner without this restriction.

There is a problem with this research, and it is highlighted by this fact that both groups experienced the same weight loss when they stuck to the diet. So cake for breakfast makes absolutely no difference when you stick rigidly to a calorie-restricted diet. The cake only made a difference once hunger and cravings were allowed to be satisfied. So what it seems the cake does is to remove this problem. So if you are on a calorie restricted diet and you need some respite from the craving then schedule in some cake for breakfast. But if you want to lose weight the easy way then just check out my easy weight loss book.

Of course another one of the problems with research is that you tend to have highly motivated individuals and there is a world of difference between doing something uncomfortable for 16 weeks and doing it forever.

The results of this research are entirely consistent with my own experience with my weight loss clients. Those who have the most difficulty losing weight are the ones who habitually skip breakfast. I go into the problems this causes in my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever, so I’m not going to repeat that here, but I’m pleased that this research supports the ideas that I have been promoting with my weight loss clients for many years now.

Michael

Categories
Uncategorized

Worrying Women Worry More Than Men Who Don’t Worry Enough

Researchers at Michigan State University have evidence that suggests that women who worry, worry more than anyone else. Women who don’t worry are ok. Men who worry don’t worry as much. It seems that when worrying women engage in tasks a part of their mind is constantly assessing how well they are performing and whenever a mistake is made or something isn’t quite good enough then the worrying kicks in.

This anxiety interferes with task performance and uses up energy causing tiredness and exhaustion which again interferes with task performance. So if you are a worrier, doing anything is much, much harder for you than for anyone else, but if you are a female worrier – then life is really tough. It’s as if you have a super-critical overseer constantly looking over your shoulder.

Worry, anxiety, stress – whatever you want to call it is a huge problem in our society. 60 million people in the US receive tranquillisers each year. That figure is 12 million in the UK. That’s 20% (1 in every 5) of the population in each country. And the interesting thing is, that despite the popularity of medicating it – medication does nothing to change the situation. All it does is ease the symptoms.

That isn’t a solution.

The only lasting solution that I’ve found is to deal with the problem where it is. Where it is is the mind. Notice that I say mind and not brain. The problem is the thoughts you think, the reasons you think them, and your identification with those thoughts.

Because thoughts tend to appear within our own minds, and they tend to make sense to us, (and there are so many of them we don’t have time to question them) we go along with whatever they are saying. We might not act on them, but we do tend to agree with them.

“So and so’s a right b****, just look at what she did.” The thought is there, and we are in total agreement with it, as we smile sweetly when so and so walks past and says ‘hi’. We might not act on them, but we are in agreement.

So when we are engaged in a task, and we make a small mistake, thoughts like: stupid, careless, idiot, and worse may pop spontaneously into our thought space. Because they appear of their own volition and what they are saying fits with our reality – we believe them.

But we don’t like them.

So we become more vigilant. This takes more energy, so the task becomes more difficult and possibly slower (another cause for critical thoughts) and so starts a vicious cycle of self-defeating, energy-sapping thought activity.

There is a solution. There is a way out. It isn’t medication.

Michael

Thanks to:

http://sl.farmonline.com.au/news/metro/national/general/worrying-impairs-female-brains-study/2612897.aspx