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This post is part 2 of a 2 part series. In part 1, Starvation is Not the Answer, we talked about how under eating can slow down your metabolism and make you fatter.
Here’s a piece of information that some of you will be glad to hear – Eating enough food each day will help you to keep fat off of your body. You are going to have to forget the idea that cutting fat comes from just eating less food; it’s simply not the truth.
This is the part that is hard for many people to accept when you are trying to cut some fat. Switching to smaller and more frequent meals throughout the day will actually cause your metabolism to stabilize.
You might be eating more food overall throughout the day, but eating even amounts of food throughout the day will help you to keep your metabolism higher. The key will be to make the following things happen:
1. Feed your body: Like we discussed before, the amount of food you give your body will affect your metabolism. If you don’t want your body to go into survival mode and save all the fat on your body, don’t starve it.
Keep that metabolism burning like a roaring fire. This doesn’t mean that you should overeat, but you will need to eat the right kinds of foods in the right amounts. Keep it within the healthy range – not too full and never too hungry either.
2. Don’t trust the weight scale: Unless you are measuring your body fat percentages and know how much weight you are losing is fat, the scale can’t be trusted. Just because the needle on the scale went down by 10 pounds doesn’t mean that you lost 10 pounds of fat.
All the scale tells you is that you lost something. Losing something can be a bad thing or a good thing depending on what you lost. If you lost fat, it’s probably a good thing (within reason). If you’re losing lean body mass, you’re going to be hurting yourself in the long run by slowing down your metabolism.
3. Lose fat through exercise: Doing a combination of weights and cardio is simply the most effective way to keep the fat off of your body. Running at a high intensity and lifting weights will also help you to burn more fat when you are at rest. The key word here is intensity.
4. Keep the muscle: It’s the same for men and women. Having more muscle on your body increases your metabolic rate. You’ll have to avoid starving yourself so that you can keep the muscle on your body and keep burning more.
Lifting weights for thirty minutes three times a week at minimum will help to keep the muscle on your body as you lose fat. Focus on the YWWASWT exercises.
5. Use a positive mental focus: Think about what you can do to get in shape, not what you need to avoid. This is why all the diets and calorie cutting programs are so popular. They all ask you to do less.
They tell you to just eat less food and avoid certain foods. Even though we like to eat, most people would prefer to avoid something enjoyable than do something that they don’t enjoy doing.
Don’t get caught in this trap. Instead of just avoiding the negatives, begin to seek out the positives.
Don’t think in terms of all the negative things that you need to avoid, but instead think of the positive things that you should start doing. You need to start exercising, lifting weights, becoming more social, preparing the right foods, actively seeking to make your life better.
That’s what makes all of this so difficult to do. It requires us to be actively doing and thinking instead of just avoiding. Even though we might be losing fat, this process requires us to make ourselves into something more instead of something less. It requires us to be active in pursuing our goals and dreams.
So instead of just trying to avoid all of the bad things life, make the decision that you will begin to actively seek out and embrace the positive things in the world. Getting into this frame of mind will do more than just change the way you look.
It will change you.
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Tags: diet, food, metabolism
January 8th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Do you think that yoga is an effective tool for weight loss if done consistently? I’ve recently started it and the instructors insist that it is even better than weight lifting for women because it doesn’t make you bulky, just lean. any tips? thanks for the post.
January 8th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Thanks, and I’ll be honest, I’ve only tried yoga once because I liked a girl in the class. It was really hard and I was sweating buckets, and it was great for flexibility.
Adding muscle increases metabolism for men and for women. This can be done through yoga, but weights are generally more efficient for this purpose. Women generally have to really try hard to become bulky like men. Read more about it here. Best of luck!
January 16th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
that you went to yoga for appreciated it. I think it’s harder for men because I think that women are just generally more flexible. But to each their own.
Thanks for the link.