In today’s society weight issues are big news. More and more of us are becoming overweight and this has been scientifically proven to lead to all kinds of pretty horrible health complications.
Yet the really amazing thing is the confusion surrounding this issue.
This is why I became a registered fitness instructor with The World Amateur Body Builders Association. I am not a body builder though! However, the techniques that body builders use are superb if you want to have a strong, lean physique that serves you very well.
Its important to appreciate that weight control is more than just a set of training techniques and a great eating plan. Its an attitude which can be adopted. Its a set of behaviour patterns which can be learned.
I specialise in one to one sessions for learning to adopt these patterns as well as building confidence, positivity and other positive states and general state management. For a private consultation at my practice in Muswell Hill, North London, please call me on the numbers provided on the contact page.
I want you to explore with me some of the most common misconceptions around training and exercise and then together discover why these commonly held beliefs end up getting us exactly the very opposite of what we actually want to achieve.
Misconception number 1. “My main objective is to lose weight”
2. “In order to lose weight I need to cut the frequency of my eating, I need to eat less meals”
3. “In order to lose weight, I need to eat less fat”
4. “In order to lose weight I must starve myself and I should feel hungry all the time”
5. “In order to lose weight and get into shape, I need to go to the gym or do some other exercise until I am absolutely exhausted. If I am not working really really hard then its a waste of time.”
6. “Cardiovascular exercise is really the only way. If I exercise using weights I will not get the results that I want and I certainly do not want to end up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger ”
7. “One meal a day is good for losing weight. I can cut out breakfast and have a light lunch and have a proper meal for dinner. It does not matter that this makes me feel tired and irritable.”
8. “I need to be on a low calorie, low fat diet”
9. “Carbohydrates are bad. I need to stay away from all carbs.”
10. “Healthy food has natural things in it. Home made, or food made from natural things in is OK to eat with abundance”
Lets look at and deal with misconception number 1.
I have called this page “ for weight issues” because that is the common parlance around this problem, when in fact this is the very first misconception or misnomer and here’s why.
People do not necessarily need to think about losing weight. What they do need to think about is their bodies composition. That is, how much stored body fat a person has in relation to the amount of lean muscle that they have.
Muscle weighs three times as much as fat does. So if you start taking more care of what you eat and go and do some exercise then after a month you should have lost some weight, right?
Then you go and weigh yourself and you have not lost any weight at all and so you think to yourself, this is hopeless, what is the point? I am wasting my time and its impossible to lose weight. Has this happened to you?
What has happened?
In that month that you started taking more care with what you ate and combined that with some regular sensible exercise. After a few days of this your body started to change its composition. That is, it started to use some of the body fat as energy and in so doing reducing the percentage of stored body fat.
At the same time because you have been exercising your muscle tissues have been broken down and so your body uses energy in the form of food that you eat to rebuild this muscle tissue.
So over that month you have built a small amount of muscle and lost some body fat. But here’s the thing, because muscle weighs more than fat, your weight remains the same! Yet is has been shown that the less body fat you carry the better your health will be.
Look at it this way. It is better, healthier, to be heavier, yet your body is lean, that means not carrying lots of extra body fat, than weighing less yet carrying more body fat.
You may not need to lose weight, you may just need to shed some excess body fat. Its a different thing. When you start to think like this you get more specificity about achieving your goal and spend less time standing on the scales because your weight is no longer the most important factor.
So why is carrying too much body fat a bad thing?
The answer is because excess fat wraps around your vital organs, particularly your heart and makes the job of pumping blood around your system much harder. It leaves fatty deposits on your arteries which can become blocked which in turn may lead to high blood pressure, putting further strain on all your organs and especially your heart.
Blocked arteries may lead to heart disease. The type of diet that leads to lots of excess body fat tends to be low in nutrition so that your body is getting a poor source of fuel and running poorly.
This type of diet may be very high in refined sugars. Over time this can make the body unable to process sugars well, leading to diabetes, a very difficult and debilitating problem to live with.
Carrying lots of excess body fat may affect some people’s confidence.
Misconception number 2. “In order to lose weight I need to cut the frequency of my eating, I need to eat less meals”
This is one of the most common misconceptions that I hear regarding getting into great shape, and nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth is this: In order to keep your body fat low, you need to eat very regularly and the optimum level is eating every three hours. Five or six small meals a day is ideal. So how would that work?
Lets say you rise at 8 am, have breakfast. Then a small light meal at 11am, lunch at about 2pm, a light snack at 5pm and then some dinner at 8pm.
Why does this work?
In order to understand this we need to look at what is meant by your metabolic rate.
Your metabolic rate is the rate at which you burn energy when you are resting. That is, while you are just sitting around watching telly, you are burning energy in the form of calories just to stay alive.
When you drop your frequency of your eating, your body notices this. It takes action to ensure your survival. Your body drops your metabolic rate so that you are spending as little energy as possible because the frequency of food is low. It guesses that you are in a time of famine. This may make you feel sluggish, low energy and your body hangs on to stored fat.
When you eat frequently, this makes your metabolic rate increase significantly. Your body notices that there is food coming in frequently. It raises your metabolic rate which gives you a feeling of high energy. Your body realises that it does not need to hang on to body fat because there is lots of good fats in the diet coming in regularly. You feel energised, lively and you start to shed unnecessary stored fat.
Eat regularly. Five or six small meals is better than two big meals per day
Misconception number 3. “In order to lose weight, I need to eat less fat”
A low fat diet will not mean that you will definitely lose weight. Think of it like this. If there is little fat in your diet, then the body will store fat. If there is an abundance of the right kind of fat in your diet then your body does not need to store it.
The kind of fats we look to avoid are found in things like lard, butter, cheese and heavy animal fats. These fats are good to avoid if you want to be in great shape. That does not mean that you cant have them. It means that having lots of them regularly will not help you stay lean.
Vegetable fats on the other hand, such as olive oil, flack seed oil and other vegetable fats actually encourage the body to stop storing fats. These fats make your body burn fat! Amazing and true.
In order to stay lean, you need a diet that has plenty of fats in it. They just need to be the right kind of fats.
Misconception number 4. “In order to lose weight I must starve myself and I should feel hungry all the time”
We have seen how starving yourself lowers your metabolism, makes you tired, hungry and irritable. Eventually you will have to eat and if you have been starving yourself then you may eat in a way that does not serve you well, perhaps by gorging. This is a sure fire way to end up yo yo dieting.
Have you ever noticed that skinny people often seem to eat a lot of the time? Ever wondered how this can be?
Regular small meals, grazing if you like, raises your metabolism and encourages your body to shed stored fats. Don’t forget we are talking about small and nutritionally sound meals here, not regular portions of Big Mac, but small portions of things such as rice, vegetables, lean chicken, fish, tofu.
In order to shed body fat, you should never feel hungry and be eating regularly, five or six small meals a day or every three hours.
Misconception number 5. “In order to lose weight and get into shape, I need to go to the gym or do some other exercise until I am absolutely exhausted. If I am not working really really hard then its a waste of time.”
If, when you do go to a gym or do some exercise, you work yourself so hard that you are in agony the next day, what association do you think that your body will make with this activity?
Baring in mind that your body looks to protect you from injury all the time as a number one priority?
It will make the correct association that when you go to the gym or do your exercise you end up being injured.
Then, the next time that its time for you to do some exercise, your mind will be thinking “I must go to the gym” and yet for some reason you won’t be able to summon the energy to go. Something, you are not too sure what, will stop you. the real motivation will not be there and it will be difficult, if not impossible to go.
Your body will be delighted, because it has successfully protected you from damaging yourself.
If you start a new exercise regime, start really, really gently. Start off with just one minute on the running machine today, then take a rest day tomorrow. The day after, go on the running machine for one minute and fifteen seconds. The next day, rest. The day after, go for one and a half minutes.
You can see the sense in this. It does not matter that it may take a few weeks to build up to being able to run for ten or fifteen minutes. What is really important is that you are building a habit, the habit of going to a gym without injuring or hurting yourself.
Exercise gently and regularly. Build up the intensity slowly over weeks or months. It’s the habit of regular activity which we are after.
A professional athlete once told me this. He said
“If I have been away from the gym or training for any reason, say I have been off with an injury or a virus, or even just away on a holiday, this is the way that I get safely back in to a training regime. On the first day back, I will get my gear on, walk down to the gym, I check in to the gym, say hi to anybody I know in there, walk up to the equipment, take a look at the running machine and the weights, walk back down stairs and go home. I consider this my first work out. The next day or the next time I go training, I do exactly the same routine except this time I might do five minutes on the running machine or cross trainer and that’s all. I have to discipline myself not to do more. The next time, I will do, say, eight minutes cardio and one very light set of weights. I will continue in this way and only after about two to three weeks I am back in to a full training routine which is quite demanding. This way protect myself from injury, and I don’t stress my mind or my body.”
It’s easy to do too much, too soon and try and make up for “lost time”. Build up in small increments. That is much better than overdoing exercise which will result not only in physical injury but also a mental association of pain with visiting the gym.
Misconception number 6. “Cardiovascular exercise is really the only way. If I exercise using weights I will not get the results that I want and I certainly do not want to end up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger ”
It really depends what your goal is. Cardiovascular exercise does what it says on the tin. The cardio part of the word relates to the heart and the vascular part relates to your lungs. So when you are working out in this way you are exercising your heart and lungs, which is of course, a great thing to do. It keeps your heart in great shape and helps your lungs increase efficiency and capacity. Cardio work comes highly recommended by pretty much every everyone from doctors to personal trainers. However, cardio for weight loss must be done in the correct way otherwise it will not work very efficiently.
Firstly, in order to burn fat through cardio exercise you must work out for longer than twenty minutes. This is because for the first twenty minutes of cardio exercise, the fuel that your body is using is called glycogen. This is a kind of sugar found in your blood. Only when your body has depleted this source of fuel will it look for another source, amongst which is stored body fats. This means that if you are working out with cardio exercise for less than twenty minutes, you are doing very good things for your heart and lungs but you are burning very little fat indeed.
If you work out for twenty five minutes, you are getting just five minutes of fat burning work done.
If you want to have a good fat burning workout just through cardio alone, you need to be exercising for at least thirty to forty minutes, with a minimum of three time a week. On its own, its not a very efficient way of reducing stored fat.
Resistance training, more commonly called weight training, is a very efficient way of reducing fats and here is why.
When you exercise with weights you break down the muscle tissue of the part of the body that you are working on. The next time that you eat, your body uses the food to repair and replace that muscle tissue instead of storing it as fats.
It has also been shown that when you tone up and work your muscles, resulting in greater muscle mass on the body, the bodies tendency to store fat diminishes. The more lean muscle you have, the higher your metabolic rate and the less likely you are to store fat.
Changing the ratio between lean muscle and body fat even slightly can have a massive impact on how your body operates.
It also tones the muscles which support your skeletal structure, helping with your posture.
It has been scientifically shown to prevent and delay osteoporosis in men and especially in women.
If you have a bad back, resistance training on your tummy muscles will, over time, reduce pain and discomfort hugely.
If your muscles are toned and in great condition, it has a positive knock on effect on your confidence and happiness levels.
People are often concerned that doing weight training will result in them taking on the shape of Arnold. Especially women do not want to look muscle bound. This is not going to happen unless you work with weights in a highly dedicated and precise way along with a very precise eating plan. It is actually extremely hard for most people to build big muscles and you have to be lifting weights on a regular basis which are extremely heavy, over 75% of your maximum weight lifting capacity.
For most of us, regular gentle to medium weight lifting sessions will result in us not gaining bulk or size, but gaining tone and shape, while changing the bodies lean muscle to fat ratio in a positive way.
If you add cardio exercise to weight training exercise on a regular basis, the inevitable result will be that you begin to tone up and reduce body fat. Notice, I did not say that you will necessarily lose weight, although this is a possibility.
Depending on your bodies composition you may stay the same weight while losing body fat or you may even gain weight slightly. If you start off with a lot of stored body fat it is more likely that you will lose some weight. Either way, your body will start to look leaner and more toned.
If you combine regular weight training with cardio training AND a great eating plan then you will notice big results in a matter of weeks.
Misconception number 7. “One meal a day is good for losing weight. I can cut out breakfast and have a light lunch and have a proper meal for dinner. It does not matter that this makes me feel tired and irritable.”
It DOES matter if you are doing something that makes you feel tired and irritable. Your body is sending a clear message.
When your diet is great and your training regime well planned you will start to feel FANTASTIC!
Look at misconception number 4 again. The way that lean or skinny people eat is small regular meals. One meal a day will slow your metabolic rate and make your body think that you are in a time of famine. It will also make you miserable!
We have all heard that breakfast is the most important meal, IT IS! Have a great breakfast every day. Then eat every 3 hours or up to six small meals a day. Don’t forget I said six SMALL meals, not six portions of fish and chips!
Misconception number 8. “I need to be on a low calorie, low fat diet”
If your diet has very low levels of fat, your body tends to store fats where it can because it correctly deduces that there are low fat levels in your diet. If however, your diet is rich in the RIGHT kind of fats, like vegetable fats such as olive oil then your body deduces that there are plenty of fats in your diet and so there’s less need to store them. Of course reducing the amount artery clogging heavy fats that you consume, like animal fat and fats found in lard and butter is a good idea. However a low fat diet does not mean that you will necessarily reduce the amount of stored body fats.
A very low calorie diet is highly likely to make you feel tired and irritable. You may well lose weight, but not in the form of body fat. In fact if you are on a low calorie diet you will tend to hold on to body fats. The weight you lose will be in the form of water and muscle protein, as this is an easier source of fuel to access for your body. When you eventually go back to a more normal eating pattern you are highly likely to gain back any weight that you lost and put weight on. This is the start of Yo Yo dieting and is extremely dangerous to good health.
In order to lose body fat through calorie control you need to have a calorific deficit of no more than 15% of the amount of calories that you are spending every day. In order to work out how many calories you are spending you need to go through a complicated mathematical procedure which involves taking your heart rate over a period of a few days, measuring your height and weight, your age is another factor and so on. Its a science. If you are interested in this there are books you can buy and professionals that you can go to.
Misconception Number 9. “Carbohydrates are bad. I need to stay away from all carbs.”
If you have a low carb diet you probably will lose weight. Not always body fat, but weight. You will also feel pretty awful and after a while your breath will start to smell very bad.
Carbohydrates are the number on source of fuel for your body. Your diet should have plenty of the right kind of carbs if you want to have energy and feel great.
Complex carbs release energy slowly so that you don’t feel hungry through the day. Complex carbohydrates are foods such as porridge oats, brown rice, sweet potato. Other kinds of carbohydrates, called simple carbohydrates, such as pasta and white bread are not as efficient. They give you short term energy followed by a low energy feeling.
Start your day with a big blast of carbohydrates to feel energised through the day. Have small amounts of carbs throughout the day.
Reducing the amount of carbs that you eat toward the end of the day is recommended if you want to avoid storing fat. So reducing consumption of carb rich foods after 8pm is a good idea.
Misconception number 10. “Carbohydrates are bad. I need to stay away from all carbs.”
“Healthy food has natural things in it. Home made, or food made from natural things in is OK to eat with abundance”
If you eat anything with abandon or in abundance then the chances of you consuming more calories that you are spending increase. If you consume more calories that you spend you may store the extra energy as fat.
Just because a food is home made or has natural ingredients does not mean that it will you can consume vast quantities of it without having undesired results.
So, now we have looked at some of the common misconceptions, here are some top tips for working toward and maintaining a lean, healthy body.
Eat small, regular meals throughout the day. Stick to healthy options such as lean chicken, grilled fish, fresh vegetables, brown rice, baked potato, sweet potato, salads, fruit and drink lots of water. Have olive oil on your food
Things to avoid are fried foods, junk foods such as burgers, heavy dressings, white bread, fizzy drinks packed with sugar, sweets and cakes. You can have these things once in a while, but not everyday if you want to stay lean.
Avoid eating late in the evening and especially avoid eating carbohydrate rich meals last thing at night.
Don’t be fooled with low fat foods. Often they are packed with sugar. Sugar, in itself has zero fat. Once you put it in your body, however, there is a chemical reaction which results in a strong tendency to store fat.
Reducing your consumption of refined sugar is a great idea if you want to stay lean.
Reducing or eliminating alcohol is another great way of reducing unwanted calories that offer zero nutritional content.
Alcohol is treated purely as a toxin by the body.
Exercise regularly. Start off gently. Make a commitment that you will incorporate regular exercise into your life, for the rest of your life. Not just for the next two weeks or until you have lost a few pounds, but for the rest of your life. Set a shining example to yourself and to your family and the world. Experience the physical and psychological benefits that become apparent after just a few sessions.
Combine weight training with cardio exercise.
Join a gym. Studies show that more than 90% of home exercise machines are left under the bed or in a cupboard and never used.
Get a one-off session with a personal trainer who can show you round the gym and make sure that you have a well thought out plan. If you are not sure, ask!
The gym can, for some people, be a boring place. Take your ipod with you and put your favourite music on it. Lose yourself in your music or your podcasts while you train!
Have a one-off consultation with a nutritionist who can clear up any questions that you have regarding diet.
Get serious about this subject. This is your health we are talking about here
Keeping fit and lean is more than this. It is a behavioural pattern which comes from a state. State control is my specialist subject.
Disclaimer
Before starting any new diet or training plan you should always talk to your doctor or your medical practitioner first.
Yet the really amazing thing is the confusion surrounding this issue.
This is why I became a registered fitness instructor with The World Amateur Body Builders Association. I am not a body builder though! However, the techniques that body builders use are superb if you want to have a strong, lean physique that serves you very well.
Its important to appreciate that weight control is more than just a set of training techniques and a great eating plan. Its an attitude which can be adopted. Its a set of behaviour patterns which can be learned.
I specialise in one to one sessions for learning to adopt these patterns as well as building confidence, positivity and other positive states and general state management. For a private consultation at my practice in Muswell Hill, North London, please call me on the numbers provided on the contact page.
I want you to explore with me some of the most common misconceptions around training and exercise and then together discover why these commonly held beliefs end up getting us exactly the very opposite of what we actually want to achieve.
Misconception number 1. “My main objective is to lose weight”
2. “In order to lose weight I need to cut the frequency of my eating, I need to eat less meals”
3. “In order to lose weight, I need to eat less fat”
4. “In order to lose weight I must starve myself and I should feel hungry all the time”
5. “In order to lose weight and get into shape, I need to go to the gym or do some other exercise until I am absolutely exhausted. If I am not working really really hard then its a waste of time.”
6. “Cardiovascular exercise is really the only way. If I exercise using weights I will not get the results that I want and I certainly do not want to end up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger ”
7. “One meal a day is good for losing weight. I can cut out breakfast and have a light lunch and have a proper meal for dinner. It does not matter that this makes me feel tired and irritable.”
8. “I need to be on a low calorie, low fat diet”
9. “Carbohydrates are bad. I need to stay away from all carbs.”
10. “Healthy food has natural things in it. Home made, or food made from natural things in is OK to eat with abundance”
Lets look at and deal with misconception number 1.
I have called this page “ for weight issues” because that is the common parlance around this problem, when in fact this is the very first misconception or misnomer and here’s why.
People do not necessarily need to think about losing weight. What they do need to think about is their bodies composition. That is, how much stored body fat a person has in relation to the amount of lean muscle that they have.
Muscle weighs three times as much as fat does. So if you start taking more care of what you eat and go and do some exercise then after a month you should have lost some weight, right?
Then you go and weigh yourself and you have not lost any weight at all and so you think to yourself, this is hopeless, what is the point? I am wasting my time and its impossible to lose weight. Has this happened to you?
What has happened?
In that month that you started taking more care with what you ate and combined that with some regular sensible exercise. After a few days of this your body started to change its composition. That is, it started to use some of the body fat as energy and in so doing reducing the percentage of stored body fat.
At the same time because you have been exercising your muscle tissues have been broken down and so your body uses energy in the form of food that you eat to rebuild this muscle tissue.
So over that month you have built a small amount of muscle and lost some body fat. But here’s the thing, because muscle weighs more than fat, your weight remains the same! Yet is has been shown that the less body fat you carry the better your health will be.
Look at it this way. It is better, healthier, to be heavier, yet your body is lean, that means not carrying lots of extra body fat, than weighing less yet carrying more body fat.
You may not need to lose weight, you may just need to shed some excess body fat. Its a different thing. When you start to think like this you get more specificity about achieving your goal and spend less time standing on the scales because your weight is no longer the most important factor.
So why is carrying too much body fat a bad thing?
The answer is because excess fat wraps around your vital organs, particularly your heart and makes the job of pumping blood around your system much harder. It leaves fatty deposits on your arteries which can become blocked which in turn may lead to high blood pressure, putting further strain on all your organs and especially your heart.
Blocked arteries may lead to heart disease. The type of diet that leads to lots of excess body fat tends to be low in nutrition so that your body is getting a poor source of fuel and running poorly.
This type of diet may be very high in refined sugars. Over time this can make the body unable to process sugars well, leading to diabetes, a very difficult and debilitating problem to live with.
Carrying lots of excess body fat may affect some people’s confidence.
Misconception number 2. “In order to lose weight I need to cut the frequency of my eating, I need to eat less meals”
This is one of the most common misconceptions that I hear regarding getting into great shape, and nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth is this: In order to keep your body fat low, you need to eat very regularly and the optimum level is eating every three hours. Five or six small meals a day is ideal. So how would that work?
Lets say you rise at 8 am, have breakfast. Then a small light meal at 11am, lunch at about 2pm, a light snack at 5pm and then some dinner at 8pm.
Why does this work?
In order to understand this we need to look at what is meant by your metabolic rate.
Your metabolic rate is the rate at which you burn energy when you are resting. That is, while you are just sitting around watching telly, you are burning energy in the form of calories just to stay alive.
When you drop your frequency of your eating, your body notices this. It takes action to ensure your survival. Your body drops your metabolic rate so that you are spending as little energy as possible because the frequency of food is low. It guesses that you are in a time of famine. This may make you feel sluggish, low energy and your body hangs on to stored fat.
When you eat frequently, this makes your metabolic rate increase significantly. Your body notices that there is food coming in frequently. It raises your metabolic rate which gives you a feeling of high energy. Your body realises that it does not need to hang on to body fat because there is lots of good fats in the diet coming in regularly. You feel energised, lively and you start to shed unnecessary stored fat.
Eat regularly. Five or six small meals is better than two big meals per day
Misconception number 3. “In order to lose weight, I need to eat less fat”
A low fat diet will not mean that you will definitely lose weight. Think of it like this. If there is little fat in your diet, then the body will store fat. If there is an abundance of the right kind of fat in your diet then your body does not need to store it.
The kind of fats we look to avoid are found in things like lard, butter, cheese and heavy animal fats. These fats are good to avoid if you want to be in great shape. That does not mean that you cant have them. It means that having lots of them regularly will not help you stay lean.
Vegetable fats on the other hand, such as olive oil, flack seed oil and other vegetable fats actually encourage the body to stop storing fats. These fats make your body burn fat! Amazing and true.
In order to stay lean, you need a diet that has plenty of fats in it. They just need to be the right kind of fats.
Misconception number 4. “In order to lose weight I must starve myself and I should feel hungry all the time”
We have seen how starving yourself lowers your metabolism, makes you tired, hungry and irritable. Eventually you will have to eat and if you have been starving yourself then you may eat in a way that does not serve you well, perhaps by gorging. This is a sure fire way to end up yo yo dieting.
Have you ever noticed that skinny people often seem to eat a lot of the time? Ever wondered how this can be?
Regular small meals, grazing if you like, raises your metabolism and encourages your body to shed stored fats. Don’t forget we are talking about small and nutritionally sound meals here, not regular portions of Big Mac, but small portions of things such as rice, vegetables, lean chicken, fish, tofu.
In order to shed body fat, you should never feel hungry and be eating regularly, five or six small meals a day or every three hours.
Misconception number 5. “In order to lose weight and get into shape, I need to go to the gym or do some other exercise until I am absolutely exhausted. If I am not working really really hard then its a waste of time.”
If, when you do go to a gym or do some exercise, you work yourself so hard that you are in agony the next day, what association do you think that your body will make with this activity?
Baring in mind that your body looks to protect you from injury all the time as a number one priority?
It will make the correct association that when you go to the gym or do your exercise you end up being injured.
Then, the next time that its time for you to do some exercise, your mind will be thinking “I must go to the gym” and yet for some reason you won’t be able to summon the energy to go. Something, you are not too sure what, will stop you. the real motivation will not be there and it will be difficult, if not impossible to go.
Your body will be delighted, because it has successfully protected you from damaging yourself.
If you start a new exercise regime, start really, really gently. Start off with just one minute on the running machine today, then take a rest day tomorrow. The day after, go on the running machine for one minute and fifteen seconds. The next day, rest. The day after, go for one and a half minutes.
You can see the sense in this. It does not matter that it may take a few weeks to build up to being able to run for ten or fifteen minutes. What is really important is that you are building a habit, the habit of going to a gym without injuring or hurting yourself.
Exercise gently and regularly. Build up the intensity slowly over weeks or months. It’s the habit of regular activity which we are after.
A professional athlete once told me this. He said
“If I have been away from the gym or training for any reason, say I have been off with an injury or a virus, or even just away on a holiday, this is the way that I get safely back in to a training regime. On the first day back, I will get my gear on, walk down to the gym, I check in to the gym, say hi to anybody I know in there, walk up to the equipment, take a look at the running machine and the weights, walk back down stairs and go home. I consider this my first work out. The next day or the next time I go training, I do exactly the same routine except this time I might do five minutes on the running machine or cross trainer and that’s all. I have to discipline myself not to do more. The next time, I will do, say, eight minutes cardio and one very light set of weights. I will continue in this way and only after about two to three weeks I am back in to a full training routine which is quite demanding. This way protect myself from injury, and I don’t stress my mind or my body.”
It’s easy to do too much, too soon and try and make up for “lost time”. Build up in small increments. That is much better than overdoing exercise which will result not only in physical injury but also a mental association of pain with visiting the gym.
Misconception number 6. “Cardiovascular exercise is really the only way. If I exercise using weights I will not get the results that I want and I certainly do not want to end up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger ”
It really depends what your goal is. Cardiovascular exercise does what it says on the tin. The cardio part of the word relates to the heart and the vascular part relates to your lungs. So when you are working out in this way you are exercising your heart and lungs, which is of course, a great thing to do. It keeps your heart in great shape and helps your lungs increase efficiency and capacity. Cardio work comes highly recommended by pretty much every everyone from doctors to personal trainers. However, cardio for weight loss must be done in the correct way otherwise it will not work very efficiently.
Firstly, in order to burn fat through cardio exercise you must work out for longer than twenty minutes. This is because for the first twenty minutes of cardio exercise, the fuel that your body is using is called glycogen. This is a kind of sugar found in your blood. Only when your body has depleted this source of fuel will it look for another source, amongst which is stored body fats. This means that if you are working out with cardio exercise for less than twenty minutes, you are doing very good things for your heart and lungs but you are burning very little fat indeed.
If you work out for twenty five minutes, you are getting just five minutes of fat burning work done.
If you want to have a good fat burning workout just through cardio alone, you need to be exercising for at least thirty to forty minutes, with a minimum of three time a week. On its own, its not a very efficient way of reducing stored fat.
Resistance training, more commonly called weight training, is a very efficient way of reducing fats and here is why.
When you exercise with weights you break down the muscle tissue of the part of the body that you are working on. The next time that you eat, your body uses the food to repair and replace that muscle tissue instead of storing it as fats.
It has also been shown that when you tone up and work your muscles, resulting in greater muscle mass on the body, the bodies tendency to store fat diminishes. The more lean muscle you have, the higher your metabolic rate and the less likely you are to store fat.
Changing the ratio between lean muscle and body fat even slightly can have a massive impact on how your body operates.
It also tones the muscles which support your skeletal structure, helping with your posture.
It has been scientifically shown to prevent and delay osteoporosis in men and especially in women.
If you have a bad back, resistance training on your tummy muscles will, over time, reduce pain and discomfort hugely.
If your muscles are toned and in great condition, it has a positive knock on effect on your confidence and happiness levels.
People are often concerned that doing weight training will result in them taking on the shape of Arnold. Especially women do not want to look muscle bound. This is not going to happen unless you work with weights in a highly dedicated and precise way along with a very precise eating plan. It is actually extremely hard for most people to build big muscles and you have to be lifting weights on a regular basis which are extremely heavy, over 75% of your maximum weight lifting capacity.
For most of us, regular gentle to medium weight lifting sessions will result in us not gaining bulk or size, but gaining tone and shape, while changing the bodies lean muscle to fat ratio in a positive way.
If you add cardio exercise to weight training exercise on a regular basis, the inevitable result will be that you begin to tone up and reduce body fat. Notice, I did not say that you will necessarily lose weight, although this is a possibility.
Depending on your bodies composition you may stay the same weight while losing body fat or you may even gain weight slightly. If you start off with a lot of stored body fat it is more likely that you will lose some weight. Either way, your body will start to look leaner and more toned.
If you combine regular weight training with cardio training AND a great eating plan then you will notice big results in a matter of weeks.
Misconception number 7. “One meal a day is good for losing weight. I can cut out breakfast and have a light lunch and have a proper meal for dinner. It does not matter that this makes me feel tired and irritable.”
It DOES matter if you are doing something that makes you feel tired and irritable. Your body is sending a clear message.
When your diet is great and your training regime well planned you will start to feel FANTASTIC!
Look at misconception number 4 again. The way that lean or skinny people eat is small regular meals. One meal a day will slow your metabolic rate and make your body think that you are in a time of famine. It will also make you miserable!
We have all heard that breakfast is the most important meal, IT IS! Have a great breakfast every day. Then eat every 3 hours or up to six small meals a day. Don’t forget I said six SMALL meals, not six portions of fish and chips!
Misconception number 8. “I need to be on a low calorie, low fat diet”
If your diet has very low levels of fat, your body tends to store fats where it can because it correctly deduces that there are low fat levels in your diet. If however, your diet is rich in the RIGHT kind of fats, like vegetable fats such as olive oil then your body deduces that there are plenty of fats in your diet and so there’s less need to store them. Of course reducing the amount artery clogging heavy fats that you consume, like animal fat and fats found in lard and butter is a good idea. However a low fat diet does not mean that you will necessarily reduce the amount of stored body fats.
A very low calorie diet is highly likely to make you feel tired and irritable. You may well lose weight, but not in the form of body fat. In fact if you are on a low calorie diet you will tend to hold on to body fats. The weight you lose will be in the form of water and muscle protein, as this is an easier source of fuel to access for your body. When you eventually go back to a more normal eating pattern you are highly likely to gain back any weight that you lost and put weight on. This is the start of Yo Yo dieting and is extremely dangerous to good health.
In order to lose body fat through calorie control you need to have a calorific deficit of no more than 15% of the amount of calories that you are spending every day. In order to work out how many calories you are spending you need to go through a complicated mathematical procedure which involves taking your heart rate over a period of a few days, measuring your height and weight, your age is another factor and so on. Its a science. If you are interested in this there are books you can buy and professionals that you can go to.
Misconception Number 9. “Carbohydrates are bad. I need to stay away from all carbs.”
If you have a low carb diet you probably will lose weight. Not always body fat, but weight. You will also feel pretty awful and after a while your breath will start to smell very bad.
Carbohydrates are the number on source of fuel for your body. Your diet should have plenty of the right kind of carbs if you want to have energy and feel great.
Complex carbs release energy slowly so that you don’t feel hungry through the day. Complex carbohydrates are foods such as porridge oats, brown rice, sweet potato. Other kinds of carbohydrates, called simple carbohydrates, such as pasta and white bread are not as efficient. They give you short term energy followed by a low energy feeling.
Start your day with a big blast of carbohydrates to feel energised through the day. Have small amounts of carbs throughout the day.
Reducing the amount of carbs that you eat toward the end of the day is recommended if you want to avoid storing fat. So reducing consumption of carb rich foods after 8pm is a good idea.
Misconception number 10. “Carbohydrates are bad. I need to stay away from all carbs.”
“Healthy food has natural things in it. Home made, or food made from natural things in is OK to eat with abundance”
If you eat anything with abandon or in abundance then the chances of you consuming more calories that you are spending increase. If you consume more calories that you spend you may store the extra energy as fat.
Just because a food is home made or has natural ingredients does not mean that it will you can consume vast quantities of it without having undesired results.
So, now we have looked at some of the common misconceptions, here are some top tips for working toward and maintaining a lean, healthy body.
Eat small, regular meals throughout the day. Stick to healthy options such as lean chicken, grilled fish, fresh vegetables, brown rice, baked potato, sweet potato, salads, fruit and drink lots of water. Have olive oil on your food
Things to avoid are fried foods, junk foods such as burgers, heavy dressings, white bread, fizzy drinks packed with sugar, sweets and cakes. You can have these things once in a while, but not everyday if you want to stay lean.
Avoid eating late in the evening and especially avoid eating carbohydrate rich meals last thing at night.
Don’t be fooled with low fat foods. Often they are packed with sugar. Sugar, in itself has zero fat. Once you put it in your body, however, there is a chemical reaction which results in a strong tendency to store fat.
Reducing your consumption of refined sugar is a great idea if you want to stay lean.
Reducing or eliminating alcohol is another great way of reducing unwanted calories that offer zero nutritional content.
Alcohol is treated purely as a toxin by the body.
Exercise regularly. Start off gently. Make a commitment that you will incorporate regular exercise into your life, for the rest of your life. Not just for the next two weeks or until you have lost a few pounds, but for the rest of your life. Set a shining example to yourself and to your family and the world. Experience the physical and psychological benefits that become apparent after just a few sessions.
Combine weight training with cardio exercise.
Join a gym. Studies show that more than 90% of home exercise machines are left under the bed or in a cupboard and never used.
Get a one-off session with a personal trainer who can show you round the gym and make sure that you have a well thought out plan. If you are not sure, ask!
The gym can, for some people, be a boring place. Take your ipod with you and put your favourite music on it. Lose yourself in your music or your podcasts while you train!
Have a one-off consultation with a nutritionist who can clear up any questions that you have regarding diet.
Get serious about this subject. This is your health we are talking about here
Keeping fit and lean is more than this. It is a behavioural pattern which comes from a state. State control is my specialist subject.
Disclaimer
Before starting any new diet or training plan you should always talk to your doctor or your medical practitioner first.
