Archive for December, 2008
How to Lose Weight with Refeeding
Written by success on Friday, December 19, 2008 | 2 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized Tags: burn body fat, burn calories, leptin, lose weight, refeeding
Have you stagnated in your weight loss? Do you feel like you are merely depriving yourself and not getting anything out of it? You are not losing weight so you thought you need to burn more calories but no matter what you do they weight stays. Sound familiar? If it does then read on.
You may need a refeeding. What is a refeeding you ask? Simply put it is a period in which you eat more than you normally would. How does that sound? I am telling you in certain instances you can help your pursuit of weight loss by eating more.
Let’s step back in time to your high school biology class (you know the class that you thought had no real world bearing on your life). Back in high school, whether you remember it or not, you learned about leptin.
The human body is a wonderful thing. It has built in mechanisms that provide for self preservation. Without getting too technical and boring you leptin plays a significant role in regulating hunger and energy expenditure. If your leptin levels fall you begin to crave food. And most of the times these foods wouldn’t fall into what we would call the healthy food category.
This is your body’s way of keeping you from starving. So when you find yourself craving certain foods, it is not by accident. You are not somehow being unsuccessful in banishing improper food thoughts from your mind, it is merely a physiological response of the body.
Now along with making you crave food, leptin also reduces your metabolism rate to a crawl. In case you were wondering both of these things are not advantageous to you achieving your weight loss goals. You see your body is merely saying it doesn’t think you are getting enough calories so it is going to grind your metabolism to a halt so that it can run your body on the little calories that it does get.
So the upshot of the matter is that is you want to continue to lose weight to reach your goals you don’t necessarily have to figure out how to burn more calories you need to figure out how to raise your leptin levels.
One way to accomplish this is to either have a binge meal or binge day. Yes you heard me right. I want you to eat a lot of food. Have seconds, even thirds.
Leptin will rise much more if you are binging (refeeding) on carbohydrates. An excess in protein won’t have the same effect. So if you had planned on eating a whole beef roast I hate to disappoint you.
Now how often will you need to do this? Well that will differ for every person. The less body fat that you have the more that you will need to refeed. If you still have quite a ways to go you don’t need to do it too often. So put that piece of pizza down. And by the way if your diet has been very intense and calorie restrictive the larger your refeed will need to be. This is because the more restrictive your diet has been, the lower your leptin levels are and the more calories you will need to get your levels back up.
So how many calories should you consume in a day? Again this will be different from person to person but and easy rule of thumb is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% above your maintenance level. In other words if your maintenance level is 1800 calories per day then feel free to eat upwards of 2700 calories.
Now I am not going to mislead you. You may gain a little weight during your refeed. However, you have put your body back in balance and once you resume your normal dieting and exercise you should find that the weight comes off easier.
And a side note to males. A bad side effect of low leptin levels is a decrease in testosterone. This will lead to a decrease in sex drive and will make it difficult to maintain muscle since testosterone is necessary to muscle growth.
So the higher the leptin levels the higher your testosterone levels and the higher your human growth hormone levels and the less you will get of that lovely hormone called cortisol that is trying to back on fat to your belly.
For females, leptin is incredibly important since low leptin levels will lower your reproduction hormones. You can screw up your menstruation cycle. This can have serious side effects such as osteoporosis. So women in particular need to be refeeding often enough not to cause a problem.
So there you have it. If you want to be able to continue burning calories and losing weight like you did in the beginning of your diet this means that you will need to look into the concept of refeeding. Go ahead, have a binge meal on me.
The Most Efficient Way To Burn Calories and Lose Weight
Written by success on Saturday, December 13, 2008 | No Comments
Categories: Uncategorized Tags: burn calories, burn calories efficiently, Burn Fat, fat burning, good nutrition, lose weight, most efficient way to burn calories and lose weight, Weight Loss
What is the most efficient way to burn calories and lose weight? This is a question that is asked by many people. They want to know if there are things that we can do that will put us into a state where we are more likely to burn calories and lose weight at a faster rate than normal. The answer is yes. There are a number of things that we can do that will enable our bodies burn calories and lose weight more efficiently.
The first has to do with our nutrition habits. There are three things that I would point out in the nutrition arena.
The first idea in the nutrition area is to eat the way you are supposed to. We are struggle to do this. Most of us do not eat healthy. I just got up a few minutes ago and grabbed a handful of M&Ms because I heard my wife put some in the candy dish. I do not recommend doing this is you are hoping to burn calories and lose weight efficiently. But beyond not eating junk you need to eat the right things: vegetables, fruits, etc. We don’t get the right types of food in the right amounts. Now I am not going to pretend to be an nutrition expert but I can tell you who is. If I were you and I was desirous of better nutrition I would look one place and one place only, Precision Nutrition. Dr. John Berardi is the real deal and he know his stuff. His program is well designed. You can follow the previous link in your spare time.
The second idea in the nutrition arena is to eat smaller meals more often. One of our biggest downfalls is eating imbalanced meals. If you eat two small meals during the day and one large meal at the end of the day we do our bodies a disservice. If you want the most effiicient way to burn calories and lose weight then eat 5 – 6 small meals during the day (each about the same size). This will keep your body at a constant state of burning calories.
The third area is too drink alot of water. It is recommended that you drink at least 8 ounces of water each day. Most of us do not do this. I am not sure how all of it works, however, I know that when I continually drink a lot of water the weight comes off easier. I think part of it has to do with the fact that I am not as hungry since I am somewhat full of water. The other actually has to do with burning calories. If you drink about 64 ounces of ice water then your body will burn calories trying to heat that water to your body temperature. It may not seem like much but if you can burn an extra 500 calories each week it is a bonus. The would come out to about 26,000 calories per year. That is about 7 pounds of bodyweight.
On top of improving your nutrition you must be involved in an exercise program. And not just any type of exercise program. You need to be doing some sort of exercise that puts your body into a calorie burning state and some form of exercise that is dedicated to building muscle. Now I am not a fan of cardio which you will quickly learn if you read much of my writings. I understand the benefit of cardio but I believe there are other things that you can do that will get your heartrate into a fat burning zone just as easily such as bodyweight exercises. I have a site dedicated to body weight exercises that you can stop over and read sometime. However, there are a number of exercise programs that are dedicated to burning calories and burning fat quickly and efficiently. Two that I like a lot are Turbulence Training and Warp Speed Fat Loss. Both are written and designed by highly respected experts in the fitness industry. Craig Ballantyne designed Turbulence Training and much of the program is designed to burn fat through bodyweight exercise. Warp Speed Fat Loss is designed by Alwyn Cosgrove and Mike Roussell and uses weight training and interval training to dramatically remake your body. You cannot go wrong with either one. You can try to put together a program yourself but why mess with it when it has already been done by experts.
If you choose to build your own program make sure it involves a weight training portion. You need to build muscle. Muscle in and of itself is a fat burning and calorie burning machine. The more muscle you have the more efficient you will be at burning calories and losing weight. It takes more calories to maintain one pound of muscle than it does one pound of fat. If you do build your own weight program focus in on the core compound exercises such as squats, bench presses, deadlifts, military press, etc.
You can also be more efficient in burning calories and losing weight if you exercise in the morning. This is sort of out of the question with me since I leave for work at 6 AM. As much as I enjoy exercising I am not getting up at 4:30 in the morning to do it. However, if you have the ability and the time available in the morning before you eat then I would exercise then. Your glycogen stores are the lowest in the morning. Your body taps these as a source of energy when exercising. Since they are low in the morning you will quickly exhaust your glycogen stores and your body will attempt to find another source for energy. Guess where it goes? If you guessed fat you are right. So exercising in the morning will cause your body to be more efficient at burning calories and losing weight.
These are a few good ideas for enable your body to be more efficient at burning calories and burning weight. I hope they help. Good luck.
You Need to Burn Calories to Lose Weight
Written by success on Tuesday, December 09, 2008 | 8 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized Tags: burn calories, Burn Fat, burpees, exercise protocol, exercise to burn calories, exercises to burn fat, heart rate, interval training, lose weight, losing weight, plyometrics, sledgehammer training, tabata protocol, ways to burn calories
Let’s be honest with ourselves. If we want to lose weight we need to try to find ways to burn calories and hopefully burn fat as well. Now it would be ideal if we could burn calories and lose weight by watching television. After all, I am a big sports fan and and I do get rather worked up during certain games, so shouldn’t it be enough to watch others burn calories. Unfortunately, watching sporting events won’t help me lose weight. Maybe it has something to do with the bag of chips sitting to my right.
So the question is what are some good ways to burn calories, lose weight, burn fat or whatever else you want to call it? I have a few suggestions and some of them are a little different. Each one will stoke the fires of your fat burning machine and have you losing weight in no time. That is if you stop eating a bag of chips while you watch a football game.
Plyometrics
Some of you are asking, “What is plyometrics?.” To put it simply it is basically jumping your butt off. And if you have a butt that needs a little reduction then plyometrics is one way to burn calories at a fairly rapid pace. I am not going to go into an extensive discussion of plyometrics in this post. I will reserve that for a future one. But suffice it to say plyometrics will speed up your ability to lose weight.
Plyometrics involves explosive jumps. Often times it involves jumping onto a plyometric box. If you have never done this you don’t know what you are missing. Broad jumps, squat thrusts, side hops are all forms of plyometric exercise. Each will get your heart rate elevated and place you squarely in the fat burning zone. Stay tuned in the near future for an extensive post on plyometrics. However, for now focus on side hops, broad jumps and jumping in place.
Tabata
The Tabata Protocol is an exercise protocol named after Dr. Izumi Tabata of the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Tokyo, Japan. The Tabata protocol is 4 minutes of exercise alternating between short periods of intense exercise and rest. It consists of eight rounds of 20 seconds of exercise followed by 10 seconds of rest. This as I said is repeated for 8 rounds. Four minutes later you will be done. You may be asking yourself how tough can that be and how will this type of exercise ever burn calories and help me lose weight? Well, it is amazingly tough. I like to refer to it as a four minute trip into hell.
Now what you are going to do is to take 5 mini trips into hell back to back. Twenty minutes later you will have burned more calories than you can imagine. You can do a variety of exercises in a Tabata fashion but here are some that I would recommend: push-ups, body weight squats, pull-ups, sit-ups, box jumps, jumping in place, dumbbell overhead press, dumbbell curls, and handstand press. You can mix and match them to come up with 5 exercises to work into your Tabata Exercise Protocol. You will be pleased with the weight you lose and the fat that you shed.
Sledgehammer Training
Alright, I know this is an odd fitness tool. If you need to break up some concrete this is good but to exercise with? Swinging a sledgehammer is exhausting. Your heart rate will climb, your will burn calories and ultimately lose weight.
You can stop by a flea market or go to a used tire store in your area and come up with a larger truck tire. Take it home, lay it in your backyard, break out your sledgehammer and go to work on the tire. I would recommend swinging for 1 minute at a time and then taking a 1 minute break. If you cannot swing it for one minute then break the time periods down into more manageable segments.
It does not have to be a 12 lb sledgehammer. Start with a 6 lb one and then work your way up and your are better able to handle it. If you scour yard sales, garage sales, flea markets, etc you can probably come up with a sledgehammer (or should I say calorie burning, fat burning, weight losing fitness equipment) pretty cheap.
Burpees
For my money Burpees are the best fat burning exercise around. If I could only do one exercise for the rest of time then this would be it. It is truly a full body workout. And if you haven’t figured this out yet allow me to let you in on a little secret. Full body workouts burn calories and prompt you to lose weight at an incredibly quick rate. If you are unsure of what a Burpee is then you can view the video below. That is enough said about Burpees. You need to incorporate these into your fat burning workouts. They are a must.
Interval Training
Interval training is a must is you want to lose weight and burn calories at a rapid pace. Interval training has proven itself in studies to be much more effective than “steady state aerobics.” Inteval training is similar to to tabata in that it is a period of high intensity exercise followed by a period of low intensity exercise. An example woud be sprinting for 30 seconds and then walking for 30 – 45 seconds. Then you will repeat the cycle over and over again. In a future post I will go into the science behind the effectiveness of interval training. But for now understand that you need to incorporate it into your workouts if you hope to burn fat, burn calories and lose weight.
If you work all five of these ideas into your fitness program it will have a dramatic effect on your health and your weight loss. Try them out. But as always, (especially due to the high intensity nature of the suggestions above) seek out your doctors approval.