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Healthy weight loss
When many people think of low carb diets they imagine they must be very high protein. Whilst the elimination of the majority of carbs almost inevitably leads to a correspondingly high consumption of protein foods such as meat, fish and eggs, the majority of the calories in a high protein diet, so called, should actually come from the fat in those proteinaceous foods.
So the high protein low carb diet is based around meat, fish, eggs, poultry, cream, butter, olive oil, coconut oil, lard, and nuts. Great salads can be enjoyed including a drizzle of olive oil. Lovely "full English" style breakfasts can be indulged in - bacon and eggs and high quality sausages, fried in olive oil or coconut oil. Lovely dinners of duck, goose or rib eye steak can be had, succulent and tasty, with green leafy vegetables.
A high protein diet is not about counting calories and depriving yourself, in fact you should eat until you are satisfied, but that doesn't mean busting at the seams! It is still a good idea to be aware of your eating and to only eat until you're no longer hungry, not wait until you are so full you can't move. The combination of protein and pure fats ensures it is almost impossible to really overeat. If you kept on eating the way you might do with carb and fat laden foods like ice cream, cookies, potato chips or cake, you would feel pretty sick much sooner. Hence the idea is that the diet will be calorifically self-limiting anyway.
Ketosis is something you strive to achieve on a high protein low carb diet. The state of ketosis is not a dangerous one (do not confuse it with a similar-sounding condition, ketoacidosis). It is what happens when your metabolism, in the absence of excessive carbs, turns to burning fat for energy instead of carbs. This means that the liver produces chemicals known as ketones, made from fat, and you burn these for energy instead of glucose and glycogen. Ketones cannot be stored again as fat, so they are excreted in the urine. Test strips can be used which reveal the presence of ketones in the urine and confirm whether you are in ketosis, and achieving healthy weight loss.
Make sure you don't avoid good fats on a high protein diet, so that you feel fuller for longer, and encourage ketosis and the burning of fat for fuel. Some Doctors believe that the consumption of excessive protein puts strain on the kidneys but not everyone agrees with this. As long as you don't go low-fat as well as high protein low carb, you should be OK for healthy weight loss.
This will be one of the most important changes you will add to your lifestyle un-diet: ''Take 40 grams of fiber per day for LIFE!''
Fiber is good for clearing your digestive tract of toxins and it also keeps your bowels moving. There are 2 types of fiber: insoluble and soluble. Here are the differences:
Functions And Benefits Of Insoluble Fiber
- Moves bulk through the intestines
- Controls and balance the pH (acidity) in the intestines
Benefits Of Insoluble Fiber
- Promotes regular bowel movement and prevent constipation
- Moves toxic waste through the colon in less time
- Helps prevent colon cancer by keeping an optimal pH in intestines to prevent microbes from producing cancerous substances
- Keeps unwanted pounds off
Food Sources Of Insoluble Fiber
- Vegetables such as green beans and dark green leafy vegetables
- Fruit skins and root vegetable skins
- Whole-grain products
- Wheat oat
- Corn bran
- Seeds & nuts
Functions Of Soluble Fiber
- Forms a gelatinous substance when mixed with water
- Binds with fatty acids
- Prolongs stomach emptying time so sugar is released and absorbed more slowly, which means your body won’t get blood sugar spikes
- Binds with toxic substances in the bowel and draws it out ofyour system
Benefits Of Soluble Fiber
- Lowers your total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol (the “bad” cholesterol), therefore reducing the risk of heart disease
- Regulates blood sugar
- Expands in your stomach, giving the feeling of fullness
- Clears heavy metals, heavy chemicals, parasites, and other toxicsubstances from the body
- Keeps unwanted pounds off Food Sources Of Soluble Fiber
- Oats, oat bran, oatmeal
- Dried beans and peas
- Nuts
- Barley
- Flax seed
- Fruits such as citrus and apples
- Vegetables such as carrots
- Psyllium husk powder
My personal favorite fiber food is hemp protein. You can purchase this online or at health food stores. One serving of hemp protein contains 14 grams of fiber and 10 grams of protein. Perfect for a smoothie.
This might seem like a silly thing to say, but the truth of the matter is that many of us just don’t get the right amounts of sleep these days. Long days at work, and long nights at play (or work), means that we are left short of the required eight hours of sleep.
But why should you be concerned with that, you ask, especially since you want to get a six pack, not win a beauty contest, right? Well, the truth of the matter is that without the right amounts of sleep on your side, your body just doesn’t function in the way that it needs to. Which, in turn means that you won’t be making the most of your day or your training because your body is so sleep deprived, and this means that you won’t be making the most of your workout.
Besides which, you will also find that being severely sleep deprived can prove detrimental to your training as you might not be fully aware of what you are doing, and thereby pose a danger to yourself.
Of course, with that much of sleep deprivation, you should be in bed, not doing an intense workout, but there you have it, we will still do something as silly as workout when we are do tired, even if this is not going to help us in any way whatsoever.
The reason I mention it here is for the simple reason that between sleep deprivation and stress from the daily grind of life, you are not getting as much rest as you ideally should. And this in turn, makes it harder for your body to recuperate when it needs to.
So, as far as you are able to, as far as you can, learn to get at least a good solid six to seven hours of sleep even if not eight, and try and do away with the stress – it’s simply not good for you.
While many people may simply want to lose weight to look better and to be more attractive, there are many others who are doing it for more personal reasons; they are looking to turn their lives around, to become healthier, strengthening themselves and decreasing their chances of tragically dying of some kind of condition or disease. As you can guess, when people try to go through weight loss with the latter goals they aren’t looking to lose weight just for the summer… they want to make a complete transformation, often changing their habits and lifestyle completely. The only true way to achieve that goal is to take the healthy weight loss approach to the problem, and here is why.
Healthy Means No Drawbacks
The healthy way of losing weight consists of making small, incremental changes to one’s diet and exercising habits. Ideally, you should be losing one to two pounds every week, not any more than that; remember that in the end, slow and steady wins the race. Yes, these results may seem kind of slow compared to what many other methods are promising, but there are certain things you need to take into account before passing that kind of judgment. For starters, when weight loss systems provide drastic results, they require those who follow them to make some pretty harsh efforts, and in the end, going through with those efforts is not only mentally-straining, but it is also physically-debilitating.
Just because you are losing weight does not mean you are getting healthier, and not only does a healthy weight loss approach require much less immediate effort, it also ensures that your body has the time to adapt to the changes it is going through. In other words, you won’t be damaging yourself in order to get the results you want, even if it will take longer.
Healthy Means Permanent
As was mentioned above, those who want to lose weight for the benefit of their own health want the results to stick with them; they don’t want to find themselves going back to square one a month after laying off their program. If you aren’t losing weight in the healthy way and obtain immediate results, you will lack a crucial component: a maintenance plan. You will only know what you need to do in order to slim down, but you won’t have the knowledge to remain there.
On the other hand, if you are losing one to two pounds every week while slowly changing the way you live, once you will have lost the weight, you won’t have any problems maintaining it; you will already be living healthy and ready to take on the challenge of staying at the top.
The good news is that putting together a healthy weight loss plan for yourself is quite easy; all you need to do is scour the internet and inform yourself in regards to nutrition and fitness. At the end of it, you are going to have more than enough knowledge to put together your own diet and exercising plan. Alternatively, if you have the money, you could always purchase weight loss systems, or perhaps even hire the services of a nutritionist and a fitness expert.
