Friday with Heidi: Winning at fat loss

After training courses, my biggest weaknesses is books. I only have to have a sniff of someone saying they liked a book and it’s either on my Kindle app on my phone (least preferred) or winging it’s way to me in paper form.

I have a thirst for learning, reinforcing my learning and wheedling out nuggets of information from other people’s lives and experience that, to me, is worth the investment in time and finance.

At the moment my interest is back to an area I love, which is nutrition for health and optimum fat loss.

There are many, many diet books out there.

But books that really get to the heart of how we function best, what we need to do to continue the health of the species, and how to unlearn what we’ve been told for years as bunk, tend to appear more contentious and not mainstream. This means that the message struggles to get out above the noise of ‘low fat for heart health’, ‘high fibre for lowering cholesterol’ and ‘eat less, work more’ for weight loss.

This month my theme is How to Win When You’re Losing and I thought I’d share with you the 5 basics you can use today to give yourself the best chance for easier fat loss.

1. Recognise that it’s fat loss and not weight loss you’re after. IGNORE the scales (see my Wednesday video below) and use other measures like your clothes, body fat composition and health markers as indicators that you’re doing the right things.
2. Keep water up. If you are cutting calories by whatever means to shift some fat you must keep your water high. Your primal brain equates dehydration with imminent famine. No water = no food. No food means that your body would prefer to promote your survival by holding onto your fat and dumping the metabolically demanding muscles you lug around. Keep water up.
3. Ensure you have 5-6 hours between meals. It sounds counter to everything else you’ve heard. But eating little and often means that your body never has time to rest and repair and fat burn. You can be digesting for up to 3 hours after eating, so you don’t want to start eating again straight after that. Give your body chance to recover, rebuild and use your fat stores for fuel.
4. Eat to satisfied. When you eat to full there’s a chance you’ve eaten up to 1000 calories more than you needed to. And if you eat to stuffed there’s a chance it could be over 3000 calories more than you need. I covered this in this video a few weeks ago. This one thing alone could make a huge difference to your progress.
5. Cut the carbs. Even the supposedly good ones. If you’ve not got an active job. If you exercise for lifestyle reasons rather than sport. Cut the carbs back. That’s the bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, cakes, biscuits, cereals, crackers, pastries…yep, the nice stuff. But it’s what makes us gain fat pounds, keeps us sluggish, drains our energy and fogs our brains. Replace with more fats. An avocado with your salad rather than a pasta side. Cheese with an apple for afters rather than a cereal bar and leafy green veggies with butter instead of pasta.
6. Stop thinking that exercise alone will help you to lose fat. Exercise for your fitness and for your mental health and because you like it. But using exercise exclusively for fat loss with no changes to diet or other lifestyle choices will be a journey to frustration. Exercise will indeed lift your metabolism and burn some calories. However it will also make you hungry. And being hungry after exercise makes you want to eat all the items in point 5. Combine the right exercise with the right foods and then you’re talking. I’ll cover that next week.

Give that a go and let me know how you get on!

Tomorrow I am off to look at a potential venue for one of our Weekend Events that I’ll be running later this year. I am hoping to do two this year and am in the early stages of preparing for these.

If you’d like to know more about what we’ll be doing, where and when please pop your name on this list and you’ll hear about it first. It means that I can let those know about it who want it rather than a mass email to all.

I’ll be updating you with schedules, timetables, venues and costs over the next week or so.

https://goo.gl/forms/XwEhC6C9flrW9KWR2

Here’s the jolly crowd from our event at Avon Tyrrell in the New Forest in 2016.

Finally, here’s my ranty video this week. It’s in line with my theme for the week about Winning at Losing (you can see how my book fetish is coming along right there!)

Have a great week.