Most people mistake being health with being lean. While it is true most lean people are healthy, you can be overweight and healthy or slim and unhealthy. In their quest to be slim however, most people resort to abusing their bodies, making them unhealthy.
Obsession with weight loss can result in such disorders as bulimia and anorexia, which, truth be told, are worse than being overweight and are usually a result of a psychological disorder and low self-esteem. To improve your healthy, you must have peace of mind and that comes with accepting yourself as you are. So here are tips on losing weight:
Control your metabolism
Your metabolic rate determines how fast you burn calories. You can increase your metabolic rate in the short term with aerobic exercise (boosts it in the long-term too) and drinking a lot of water (ice-cold water preferable as you expend energy raising its temperature to that of the body), and in the long term by weight training which increases your muscles. Muscles increase your metabolic rate and burn more calories than fat, thus provide a double gain. However, they weigh more than fat, so the scale may not be the best metric of how well your weight loss program is proceeding.
Understand weight control hormones
There are 2 hormones responsible for body weight: insulin and glucagon.
Insulin reduces sugar levels in the blood by signalling the body to not release any fat and store glucose as glycogen in the liver and muscles. Any excess glucose not stored as glycogen ends up stored as fat.
Glucagon converts the glycogen in the liver to glucose when blood sugar levels are low and once depleted, starts breaking down fat.
So all you need to lose weight is ensure most of the times your glucagon levels high and insulin levels low. Remember its a cycle, and if you try to keep glucagon levels always high it will result in your body responding as if you were starving, lowering your metabolism.
Basic Arithmetic
To lose weight, you must take in less calories than you use and vice versa. As when budgeting you can either focus on the expenditure (in this case increase it) or the income (reduce it). They work best in combination, yet I find increasing energy expenditure is more sustainable than reducing the amount of calories you consume.
You must remember that as you age your metabolism decreases, so what was a small serving at 20 might be binging at 60. The only way to use significant amounts body energy is to work (remember physics?), and I mean physical labour (exercise).
Next time we look at foods that help you gain/lose weight in a healthy way
