Permanent And Painless

I remembered how great it felt to slip into my smallest jeans. I loved how I looked with my shirt tucked in. My stomach was flat. My waist was small. What a rush to see the reflection in the three-way mirror and realise it was really me! I loved that old phrase I had learned at a weight-management meeting: “Thin feels better than this food tastes.” I  was absolutely convinced that I  would never give in to old bad habits. It just felt too good to be slim. Pauline narrated.


That was several years ago. Pauline enjoyed the marvellous feeling for ten months. Then over the next fourteen months, she returned one size at a time back to the ” original” Pauline. What happened? Why was it so hard to keep the weight off? It was almost more defeating to have lost and gained the weight back than never to have lost it at all. She felt like a complete failure.

Have you ever wondered why you do the things you do? Does it sometimes seem like you have no control over your emotions or behaviour? Do you ever feel like you are waging a war?

A general rule of thumb is for every 100 extra calories burned per day, you will lose about half to one kilogramme of fat per month. For a 64 kilogramme woman, that is the equivalent of walking about one mile. So extra calories equals approximately 9 kilogramme  in one year; 200 equals 20; 250 equals 25, and so forth. Of course this is assuming your caloric intake does not go up! Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? It is! Our greatest obstacle is discipline and consistency.

Don’t get frustrated and try to get that excess weight off too quickly. A month or two down the road, you will feel exhausted  and irritable. That is not a lifestyle change. It’s an all-or-nothing approach, and it rarely works.

Decrease Your Imput
If you want to make  a  faster  progress, take a look at the food you are eating. Decreasing the calories in your diet could save you one hundred calories  per day. Just eliminate some of your fun foods or “empty” carbohydrates like crackers, salted breads that you thought were safe because they are fat free. It’s pretty easy to find small ways to reduce  your caloric intake by two hundred to three hundred calories a day.

The key to losing fat permanently is to make  changes you can live with. This is not about how fast you can achieve your aim, it’s about a permanent and painless weight losing process .

Let’s look at this principle- If your body were a car with a ten-litre  tank, ten litres would be the maximum you could fuel up at one time. You’d be forced to burn fuel before you could take on more. Consider your body just that way and imagine that each litre represent about one hundred calories. That means you could only take in about five hundred calories at one time without spilling over into the reserved tanks. Of course, larger women and men might have larger six, seven, or eight -litre  tanks. Our bodies process limited amounts of calories each time we eat. If we can’t use all the calories within a short period of time , we store them as fat.

My Advice?

•Eat several small meals or substantial snacks throughout the day. Start early with breakfast and then eat and burn all day long. These are examples of lifestyle activities that can make a big difference in your overall health and calorie burn.

• Writing down everything that you eat- including drinks and “bites” or “tastes” of food can help increase self-awareness. Pay attention to serving sizes and use measuring cups and spoons as serving utensils to keep portions reasonable. Food eaten outside of the home tends to be much larger portion sizes and much higher in calories. Try to look up nutrition information of your favorite take-out meal or restaurant in order to select a healthy meal when eating  oust

•Typically you need to cut 500 calories per day to lose 0.5kg per week. This is very difficult to achieve through exercise alone, and would require 60 minutes or more of vigorous activity every day. A more attainable goal would be to try to increase activity throughout the day and get a total of 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise most days of the week.  But be careful — exercise is not an excuse to eat more!”

• You need a steady stream of glucose throughout the day to maintain optimal energy and to prevent metabolism from slowing down. Eat breakfast every day within one hour of waking up, then eat a healthy snack or meal every three to four hours. Try not to go longer than 5 hours without eating a healthy snack or meal to keep your metabolism steady.”

•Studies have shown that people who get fewer than six hours of sleep have higher levels of ghrelin, which is a hormone that stimulates appetite, particularly for high- carbohydrate/high- calorie foods. In addition, less sleep raises levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, which can lead to weight gain.”