Have you ever noticed how easy it is to gain weight? You know, the way
it creeps up on you until you notice one day that your favorite shirt
just doesn’t fit as well as it used to or how you can’t play with your
kids for as long without feeling tired and sluggish. I ended up gaining
almost 40 pounds during 2006 exactly like this
The truth is simple: You can lose some weight on almost any of the fad diets that you see advertised if you try hard enough, but the real challenge is keeping the weight off one it’s gone. The thing is most people end up gaining back most, if not all of the weight they’ve lost on the different fad diets out there because these programs fail miserably at addressing the underlying cause of weight gain and obesity. Many times they actually make the problem worse in the long run.
How?
When you lose weight some of the loss will be comprised of things like water and some fat, but a portion of the weight lost will be in the form of lost muscle mass. That’s exactly what you don’t want! The reason why is simple:
Muscle mass = Metabolism
While this list isn’t intended to be exhaustive, here are 4 causes for weight gain and some strategies to address them.
Low Metabolism – One of the main differences between someone who is skinny and someone who is overweight or obese is the rate at which their bodies burn calories. The higher your metabolism, the easier it is to lose weight (or to put it another way; the harder to pack on excess pounds).
Studies have shown that a pound of lean muscle mass burns approximately 30 calories at rest per day, so when people end up losing muscle mass while dieting alone, they are actually making it easier to gain the weight back in the future when they go back to eating “normally”.
This is the underlying cause of the yo-yo effect you see with most weight loss programs!
One of the best ways to increase your metabolism is to eat 4-6 smaller meals throughout the day (especially starting with a light breakfast). Easy enough, right? When you skip meals, your body’s natural response is to try and store energy in the form of fat because it thinks it’s starving! You may know that you’re going to be eating later in the day, but your body doesn’t. So in response to your body thinking it’s experiencing a famine, it slows down your metabolism while trying to hold on to its “precious” fat reserves for as long as possible.
Eating Poor Quality Food – This is one of the major causes for overeating, in my opinion. When the majority of someone’s diet is made up of processed, refined, unnatural, nutritionally devoid food, they tend to eat much more than your body actually requires, because their body is trying to get vitamins and minerals that just aren’t present in the food.
The good thing is that knowing what you’re putting into your body isn’t nearly as difficult as it sounds. When you’re shopping at the grocery store, ignore what’s written on the front of the package. This is marketing. Its purpose is to get you to buy the product by throwing around buzz words and half truths (“Look, it says No Trans Fat!”), so ignore all of that and flip the package over to the nutritional informational. If it reads like college-level chemistry text book, put it down!
A great article with some excellent tips on how to decode food labels was recently printed in Experience Life Magazine and can be found at http://www.experiencelifemag.com/issues/april-2009/healthy-eating/how-healthy-people-decode-labels.html.
Sluggish Digestive System – When your digestive system isn’t operating properly, problems can occur like gas, bloating, and improper nutrient absorption to name a few. One of the easiest ways to tell if you might have a sluggish digestive system is to use your nose. Unpleasant, I know, but one major cause for particularly foul gas and bowel movements is undigested rotting food in the colon.
A few things that can help avoid this issue are taking digestive enzymes before eating large meals, not drinking a lot of liquid before or while eating (this dilutes natural digestive enzymes and stomach acid), drinking a lot of water, and adding probiotics to your diet. This can be accomplished by eating foods like yogurt and cultured vegetables or through a high quality probiotic supplement (one that guarantees the billions of friendly bacteria will still be alive once they reach the colon).
Emotional Eating – We, as humans, tend to have a deep emotional connection to our food as something way more than just sustenance required for survival. Some thank God for providing our meals, some people use food as a means to spend quality time with friends and family, but some people eat as a way to deal with emotional things like stress. I know I used to. I was so busy with work, and life in general, that I’d find myself eating more than I needed because it felt like something I could actually control.
One of my favorite ways to address this is a form of personal acupressure called the Emotional Freedom Technique or “tapping”. I’ve personally found it to be effective in addressing the negative thoughts and emotions that cause emotional eating, and best of all it’s simple to learn and very quick to do. For more information, you can go to www.tapping.com. For serious issues, it’s always a good idea to seek the services of a qualified mental health professional.
Lastly, when trying to achieve your permanent weight loss goals it’s important to have a strong support structure to keep you on track. It can be in the form of a friend that is going on your weight loss journey with you or even an online system that includes thousands of people who can offer words of encouragement as you go through your transformation.
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The truth is simple: You can lose some weight on almost any of the fad diets that you see advertised if you try hard enough, but the real challenge is keeping the weight off one it’s gone. The thing is most people end up gaining back most, if not all of the weight they’ve lost on the different fad diets out there because these programs fail miserably at addressing the underlying cause of weight gain and obesity. Many times they actually make the problem worse in the long run.
How?
When you lose weight some of the loss will be comprised of things like water and some fat, but a portion of the weight lost will be in the form of lost muscle mass. That’s exactly what you don’t want! The reason why is simple:
Muscle mass = Metabolism
While this list isn’t intended to be exhaustive, here are 4 causes for weight gain and some strategies to address them.
Low Metabolism – One of the main differences between someone who is skinny and someone who is overweight or obese is the rate at which their bodies burn calories. The higher your metabolism, the easier it is to lose weight (or to put it another way; the harder to pack on excess pounds).
Studies have shown that a pound of lean muscle mass burns approximately 30 calories at rest per day, so when people end up losing muscle mass while dieting alone, they are actually making it easier to gain the weight back in the future when they go back to eating “normally”.
This is the underlying cause of the yo-yo effect you see with most weight loss programs!
One of the best ways to increase your metabolism is to eat 4-6 smaller meals throughout the day (especially starting with a light breakfast). Easy enough, right? When you skip meals, your body’s natural response is to try and store energy in the form of fat because it thinks it’s starving! You may know that you’re going to be eating later in the day, but your body doesn’t. So in response to your body thinking it’s experiencing a famine, it slows down your metabolism while trying to hold on to its “precious” fat reserves for as long as possible.
Eating Poor Quality Food – This is one of the major causes for overeating, in my opinion. When the majority of someone’s diet is made up of processed, refined, unnatural, nutritionally devoid food, they tend to eat much more than your body actually requires, because their body is trying to get vitamins and minerals that just aren’t present in the food.
The good thing is that knowing what you’re putting into your body isn’t nearly as difficult as it sounds. When you’re shopping at the grocery store, ignore what’s written on the front of the package. This is marketing. Its purpose is to get you to buy the product by throwing around buzz words and half truths (“Look, it says No Trans Fat!”), so ignore all of that and flip the package over to the nutritional informational. If it reads like college-level chemistry text book, put it down!
A great article with some excellent tips on how to decode food labels was recently printed in Experience Life Magazine and can be found at http://www.experiencelifemag.com/issues/april-2009/healthy-eating/how-healthy-people-decode-labels.html.
Sluggish Digestive System – When your digestive system isn’t operating properly, problems can occur like gas, bloating, and improper nutrient absorption to name a few. One of the easiest ways to tell if you might have a sluggish digestive system is to use your nose. Unpleasant, I know, but one major cause for particularly foul gas and bowel movements is undigested rotting food in the colon.
A few things that can help avoid this issue are taking digestive enzymes before eating large meals, not drinking a lot of liquid before or while eating (this dilutes natural digestive enzymes and stomach acid), drinking a lot of water, and adding probiotics to your diet. This can be accomplished by eating foods like yogurt and cultured vegetables or through a high quality probiotic supplement (one that guarantees the billions of friendly bacteria will still be alive once they reach the colon).
Emotional Eating – We, as humans, tend to have a deep emotional connection to our food as something way more than just sustenance required for survival. Some thank God for providing our meals, some people use food as a means to spend quality time with friends and family, but some people eat as a way to deal with emotional things like stress. I know I used to. I was so busy with work, and life in general, that I’d find myself eating more than I needed because it felt like something I could actually control.
One of my favorite ways to address this is a form of personal acupressure called the Emotional Freedom Technique or “tapping”. I’ve personally found it to be effective in addressing the negative thoughts and emotions that cause emotional eating, and best of all it’s simple to learn and very quick to do. For more information, you can go to www.tapping.com. For serious issues, it’s always a good idea to seek the services of a qualified mental health professional.
Lastly, when trying to achieve your permanent weight loss goals it’s important to have a strong support structure to keep you on track. It can be in the form of a friend that is going on your weight loss journey with you or even an online system that includes thousands of people who can offer words of encouragement as you go through your transformation.