80/20
- Monday, 05 December 2011 16:59
Maximising your good intentions for real, sustained fat loss – diets don’t work
Now the bit I want to place emphasis here is fat loss. As a trainer I constantly have clients trying to tell me that they should be doing more long slow aerobic cardio because it is good for weight loss, but as Charles Poliqiun once put it, so is AIDS.
If they don’t want to do more cardio than is good for their body, then they want to eat less and exercise more, because that is bound to work. It says so on TV and everything!
All of the aforementioned strategies are going to only do one thing to your body, increase stress hormone production, throw your blood sugar levels all over the park, stimulating gluconeogenesis and muscle wastage in an attempt to stabilize the nervous system. There are much faster ways to lose weight, like cutting off a leg – it’s a guaranteed long-term strategy for dropping pounds, but is just as credible. Add to this the chronic levels of inflammatory processes that are a known byproduct of either abuse of cardiovascular exercise, or strict calorie or low fat high-fibre diets and you are left with a thin, sick, tired unhealthy body.
So as we approach the New Year, what can we do differently to get that body that you always want to commit to, but constantly fail to achieve?
- Eat a healthy diet. Start by removing anything that isn’t a food (like breakfast cereals) and replacing it with something that is a food (like meat, vegetables, fruit, good healthy fats like butter).
- Drink plenty of water. As Paul Chek says “The best solution for pollution is dilution”. The body knows how to detox itself, and even small levels of dehydration will slow your metabolism, and actually stimulate fluid retention, that has weight to it.
- Lift weights. The many benefits to good free or even body weight resistance training are well founded. If you are worried about how to structure this best for you, contact us to teach you everything you need to know to get the most benefit for your hard fought for good intentions!
- Rest, get to bed on time, take time out in the fresh air whenever possible, laugh, smile, do something that brings you unbridled joy.
- Breathe deeply, from the belly, through the nose.
- Remember why you wanted to do this in the first place. Everyone struggles to make changes to their diet and lifestyle, this will aid as a strong anchor to harmonise your actions with your good intentions.
- Allow yourself to fail! No one lives like a monk 100% of the time, and if they do, they aren’t much fun to be around in modern times. If you do the six simple things listed above 80% of the time, then it will give your body a fighting chance to deal with the other 20%. I live for my 20%, shamelessly. Slip ups can be a great way to remind you of how crappy you felt before you started doing it better (read point 6).
Weight loss, better health, increased energy levels, and your vision of who you want to be are all possible. But it takes a commitment to do it for the long term, because health is for life.
Diets expect you to fail, because they know that they aren’t sustainable in the long term. They only leave you sick, tired, inflamed, weak, prone to injury, and desperate for that thing you have been depriving yourself all these weeks! Doing it 80/20 is a long term strategy for life.
