Hi David,

Really appreciate your response. I knew it would be hard to evaluate my situation without knowing all details, but I suppose you have to have a starting point!

I have always worked my core muscles. I work my upper body using free weights on a Monday. Tuesdays is a session for stomach. Wednesdays is leg strengthening, ie squats, lunges
etc. Thursdays is stomach again. I do these in the morning or at lunchtime, as I run in the evening. Fridays, Sat & Sun I just do my normal training without these additional
sessions.

Perhaps I should shave a little bit off my meals? Here is example of my diet, being totally honest :

Breakfast – 1/4 bowl of porridge with tbl spoon all bran, few shredded wheat, topped with tbl fresh fruit – skimmed milk & tbl spoon of honey. Small glass fresh fruit juice.

Mid morning Рcaf̩ latte with skimmed milk and 1/4 tsp sugar.

Lunch : 1 x slice bread with low fat spread with cheese or lean chicken. Small tub natural yogurt with tbl spoon fresh chopped up fruit, sprinkled with sesame seeds. Handful of grapes.

2pm – apple or other fruit.

4pm РCaf̩ latte with skimmed milk & 1/4 tsp sugar + 2 x crispbread

On route to training – handful fruit gums.

Evening training 6pm

Cereal bar on way home after training.

Evening meal – Chilli con carne with brown rice

Small glass port or red wine + couple of handfuls of nuts (naught!)

During the day, I sip water, but I know I should drink more. On a good day I’ll get through 1 litre of water.

I have trained for lots of years and I’m wondering if my body has just adjusted to this. Need to know what to do to kick start my metabolism so to achieve my 5lb weight loss. I did think about eating my main meal at lunchtimes as I thought eating quite late may not be helping, but think I
might feel too sluggish during the day if I try this.

Appreciate your comments.

Thankyou & kind regards.

Linda

MY REPLY

Hi Linda,

Yes, those details are a little more helpful.

Right off the bat, I see two problems with your diet.

You are not drinking enough water. Most experts agree that drinking TWO liters a day is bare minimum.

And My biochemistry teacher in school was very adamant about drinking a full gallon a day.

sounds to me with the amount of working out you do, plus your consumption of alcohol, which dehydrates the body further + your latte (coffee also dehydrates the body) + only getting a liter a day is probably slowing your metabolism a bit.

In addition, that amount of water intake is probably causing your body to function less than optimal.

***********
sidebar note :

You can join my weight loss email list and / or get more weight loss info

***********

One of the biggest factors that determine athletic
performance is lack of adequate water. This is serious
stuff.

Drinking adequate water can actually help you lose weight,
have more energy, look and feel better.

Since you are working out a lot plus the other factors that
I mentioned above, If I were you, I would drink at least
three liters of water per day.

It’s hard to drink water, I know. I’ve found that I drink
more water when I add some minerals to the water. I like to
use concentrace minerals which you can find at any health
food store. Two drops is plenty for an entire liter. You
will find it easier to drink the water.

The second problem that I see, is that you are not getting
enough essential fats in your diet.

Eudo Erasmus, an expert on essential fats talks about this
in one of his books. I don’t remember the exact figure and
I’m too lazy to look it up, but I think if you increase your
total caloric intake of essential fats, you will actually
help yourself lose weight. Again, it sounds
counterintuitive, but there you have it.

Maybe you could replace those nuts with Eudo’s formula for
essential fats – you can also find that in the health food
store.

I hope you find this reply helpful.

Once again, my disclaimer:

This email is for information and entertainment purposes
only. You are advised to NOT follow any of my advice and
instead you should consult with a doctor. That goes for if
you have any health conditions or think you might have, or
if you are changing you diet or exercise level.

All the best,

Dave

Tags: running, water, essential fats, eudo erasmus, water intake, exercise weightloss

 How can I lose 5 more pounds? 

 

 

 

David,

Thankyou for your e-mails.

Yes, they are motivating.

I am a competitive runner. Although I know quite a lot about keeping fit and nutrition etc, I am finding it difficult to lose 5lbs. I am not overweight, but feel that my running would improve a little if I lost a few 1lbs. I want to do this sensibly, as I don’t want to lose muscle mass.I train every day, two of the days being light recovery work. I eat little and often, and quite healthily. However, my weight just stays the same.

My only sin is I like a glass of wine most nights (only one, maybe 2 at weekends). Also, I have a thing for nuts, and unfortunately sometimes the salted variety. Other than that, not sure what else I can do.

Any suggestions??

Thankyou.

L

My Reply:

I’ve recently created a new page on fat loss as opposed to weight loss. Don’t get me wrong, I think weight loss is fine but I want to make a subtle distinction.

Weight Loss and Fat Loss can be two different things but they don’t have to be. For example if you lose water weight, that is the kind of weight loss that has nothing to do with fat loss.

So it is possible to lose weight without losing body fat. Unfortunately, what we want to lose is fat and not much else.

Water weight loss is temporary, it will come back. Fat weight loss is entirely different.

There are so many concepts that go along with fat loss that it would be hard to discuss them all here. You can sign up for my weight loss email list to learn more about fat loss.

One major concept to fat loss is that you want to be aware of your body’s short term energy supply. When it is full to the brim, there is little chance of burning off fat.

Therefore, you want to deplete that short term energy supply before working out. Once you have depleted it, the body will look to its fat reserves for energy. That is exactly where you want to be.

However, if you eat carbs before working out, your body will have plenty of short term energy reserves and will see not reason to tap into your fat storage supply.

Consistently tapping into the fat storage supply is one key to fat weight loss. Here are two simple ideas to help. After sleeping all night, your body has used much of its short term energy up, it will be easier to get it to burn fat at that time. The second idea is to walk for about 45 minutes before a workout. That will help burn through the short term energy supply.

No time for walking? How about getting out in the yard and raking leaves or something like that? There are plenty of alternatives. I think you get the idea.

There are many aspects to weight loss, this is just one of them. The more you learn, the better equipped you will be to succeed. It may not be enough to get a gym membership. If you have a burning drive to lose weight, just getting a membership may be enough. But, most of us need to know why we are doing something to get motivated in the first place. Once we know the why, we can do it from there. Spend time finding your why.

The reason I think you should join my fat loss / weight loss email list is that you will get a daily dose of fat loss / weight loss talk in your email. You can read a little every day. The key concepts will be hit upon day after day until you are able to burn them into your long term memory.

You can save the emails in a file and refer back to them for motivation or inspiration. You can also revisit your favorites that way. Once you go through the whole series you could resubscribe and go through the series again.

This is a good opportunity for you to get started. Best of all the cost to join the email list is FREE.

This article is for information purposes only. It is not intended to provide advice on weight loss. See your doctor for advice on weight loss and before you change your diet or take up any form of exercise.

David Snape – copyright 2006 all rights reserved (no copy)

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Technorati Tags: fat+loss, weght+loss, fat+lose+weight, lose+fat, lose+body+fat, fat+weight+loss,

One of the key concepts in weight loss is that one wants to lose fat and not just weight. Losing fat is the goal while preserving other types of body tissue. In particular, we want to maintain as much of our muscle tissue as possible.

One reason to conserve muscle tissue is that it burns the most calories in the resting state. So if we are sitting around and have good muscle mass we will burn calories or energy off at a higher rate than someone with less muscle mass or tone.

The second reason is that weight loss causes a loss of muscle tissue, so we want to counteract that as much as possible by actually lifting weights or doing muscle taxing activities such as isometric resistance or something of that sort.

Again, we want avoid a lot of weight loss at the expense of muscle tone or tissue. If we want to lose weight, we also want to look great. So losing muscle tissue could cause us to look gaunt or under nourished and we don’t want THAT look, do we?

We need to pay attention to our muscles. There are two things that can help our muscles during weight loss.

One is the intake of enough protein or amino acids. The reason for this is that our bodies need a fresh source of amino acids (in combination they are called proteins) once every 8 hours or so. If the body does not have this amino acid supply once every 8 hours, it will start to take the protein straight out of our muscles, causing a loss of muscle mass.

The other consideration with this is that if we do take in a protein, it needs to be a complete protein. A complete protein is one in which all of the essential amino acids are present.

‘Essential’ in nutritional terms means that it is something our body cannot synthesize on its own. In the case of amino acids, a human body uses 22 amino acids, 13 of which it can produce on it’s own from other sources. The other 9 are essential, meaning they absolutely have to come into the body via eating. ( or intravenously, but we aren’t there, are we? ) If they aren’t in our food, our bodies will not be able to build new muscle proteins.

Technically speaking there are only 8 truly essential amino acids. One is semi-essential in adults. That means that there are only certain conditions when it becomes ‘essential’.

Anyway, you need a complete protein, one that has all of the essential amino acids in it. I mention this because we can’t just look at a food label and think we are getting what we need just because it says it has protein in it.

Animal meat and milk, including skim milk, have all of the essential amino acids in them. Soy milk does NOT have all of the essential amino acids. Keep that in mind. It is not a true replacement for cow’s milk for that reason.

If one is a vegetarian, he need not fear. There are food combinations that can help one get all of the essential amino acids at one meal. (I know some people don’t think they all need to be present at one meal, I disagree.) Anyway, as vegetarians, we ought to already know about food combining.

Weight bearing or strengthening exercises are necessary during weight loss to maintain muscle tone and mass. All of the essential amino acids must be present in our food approximately once every 8 hours. Eating should actually be more frequent than that for another reason.

Here are two additional sources for weight loss information aside from my free weight loss list:

Weight Loss E-Book         Weight Loss on Audio

This article is not meant to give advice. It reflects the author’s opinion only. Consult your physician if you need advice on weight loss or any other health issue.

David Snape writes for ToBeInformed.com. You can join his weight loss email list to have more weight loss articles sent to you.

Copyright 2006. All Rights Reserved (do not copy)

 

Tags: weight loss, weightloss, fat loss, complete protein, amino acids, essential, nutrition, muscle mass

I ran into a person at work who told me he lost 100 pounds in about 10 months. Since weight loss is something that interests me a great deal, I asked him to tell me his story.

Bill, not his real name, told me that when he left the military he weighed 210 pounds which wasn’t bad for his height and frame. The problem came in when his civilian work became a more of a ‘desk’ job. Working at a desk causes one to get less calorie burning exercise.

In a short period of time, Bill weighed over 300 lbs. Much like Morgan Spurlock’s experiment with eating nothing but fast food for a month, Bill’s ‘bad’ cholesterol level was through the roof. His doctor told him he needed to do something immediately. The doctor gave him a basic diet to follow. The diet was a common sense, low fat, nutritious diet.

Bill doesn’t remember everything that was on the list, but basically he learned to look at food labels and stay away from foods that were high in fat. He also ate a lot of lean meat like chicken as well as salads, fruits and vegetables. He was on a mission. He quickly dropped weight, so much in fact that his doctor told him he needed to eat an occasional piece of pizza.

Bill said that he got down to about 175 pounds eventually, which was too thin for his height and frame. At that point he began eating foods with a little more fat. But he also promised himself he would never get that bad again.

Today Bill is at a healthy weight with healthy cholesterol levels. Weight loss is not impossible, others have managed it. Let this story serve as a bit of motivation. It can be done!

Bill didn’t need a magic formula, he just got an ‘eat and do not eat’ list from his doctor and followed it. He said that he even continued to drink beer during that time.

One key component to this story is that Bill worked out like crazy. He didn’t do any traditional weight lifting but got lots of aerobic activity in. Bill was in three bands and he would play drums for 3 or 4 hours straight per night. That was his exercise. And it worked for him.

Exercise doesn’t have to be what you traditionally think of as exercise. Typically, people think that exercise has to be boring and tedious. Things such as weight lifting, running, treadmill, and exercise machines are what come to mind when I think about working out. As Bill’s example shows, exercise can be something you love to do, like playing drums. He just did more of what he already liked to do.

There is one thing that should be considered here. It is indeed great to engage in calorie burning exercise, but you will lose some muscle mass while losing weight and to counteract that it is a good idea to do some form of weight lifting or muscle working exercise. Doing something that is constructive to muscle growth is a really good idea anytime that you are losing weight.

See your doctor before taking up any form of exercise or attempting weight loss. This article is not intended to provide advice. Your doctor will provide that to you.

David writes about weight loss at ToBeInformed.com Sign up for his weight loss emails. You can also find more weight loss articles and information on his site. (do not copy)

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