Who wants to look fat? I don’t think anybody does. The dieting industry is flourishing. We are all awash with hints and tips as to how to lose weight. Do more, eat less being prime. Eat no fat. Eat only protein. Eat only grapefruit. Eat only cabbage soup. Follow this weird tip for weight loss. If all this worked, we would all be as skinny as we liked. Yet a quick glance around shows that many are clearly struggling with a bit of excess blubber. So why don’t diets work? For the long answer, see my page Why weight loss can be so difficult. For the short answer, here are a couple of things to mull over.
To lose weight we need to look at what we are eating right now. This is what has made us fat. And so we need to change that.
Many believe that exercising more will make us lose weight – and many hope that exercise alone will help us lose weight, no matter what we eat.
Lets deal with the second point first. Will exercise alone help me lose weight? Yes. But, my goodness, that exercise has to be HARD and at least 5 times a week. Even better, short, very hard bursts throughout the day – five days a week. And we have to do this exercise on top of everything else that we do during the day. So if the job involves shift work or unsociable hours, we still need to get out of bed and shift ourselves with great meaning.
My experience tells me that not many people over the age of about 30 will have enough umph to be able to lose weight by exercising alone. And so we come to the first point: we need to change what we are eating. When we eat, we eat for 3 reasons: hunger, emotion and addiction.
- Hunger: the high carb, low fat diet we are all encouraged to follow makes us very hungry for more sugary carbs.
- Emotion: comfort eating, eating as a reward, eating for compensation, eating because we are bored or tired and so on. Emotional eating derails weight loss.
- Addiction to foods, an unacknowledged problem. The most addictive foods: sugar, wheat, dairy and oats. Easy weight loss eliminates these completely from the diet. They are all very fattening foods which demand to be eaten unless we get to grips with our addiction to them.
Therefore we are all trying to lose weight with insufficient energy – or too much pain – to be able to exercise hard. We are trying to control our eating whilst prey to different emotional reasons for eating, for addiction to the foods that are making us fat, and the final most horrible reason: the way government and nutritionists insist we eat: low fat, high carb, with emphasis on whole grains. And we still reach for the hair shirt after a binge in the biscuit barrel.
As a personal trainer, after years of struggle, I have come to realise that we put the cart before the horse. We just focus on losing weight. It seems to me that a more sensible thing to do is either reduce pain or improve performance – same thing, if we think about it – so we can exercise more effectively. And I do this using my wonderful Z health, an individualised way for everybody to make their body work better. I also use the highest class of vitamins and minerals to restore energy levels and improve sleep. Then we can have a discussion about changing the diet and exercising more, because by now we are feeling just so much better. The dream of both feeling fabulous and looking fabulous we realise, is an achievable goal. It will happen, and the change will be permanent.
