I will commence with what I feel is the fundamentals to any fitness goal including weight loss. I believe you will feel fantastic if you abide by all of these. The foundation is to start with a healthy body which is:
Good nutrition. This includes eating three meals a day. Each meal having the correct macro nutrient balance so that you are getting carbohydrates and some good fats and proteins, I can provide an exact idea of how to eat to your metabolic type or blood type. In fact, I can also provide you information on foods that promote weight loss and foods to avoid to
weight loss specific to your blood type.
It is best to eat fresh, local and organic foods containing plenty of fresh vegetables, good organic proteins and some fruit (no more than 3serves per day). It is desirable to avoid alcohol, smoking, take away, meal replacement supplements and processed food. Importantly, you should be avoiding the white poisons white sugar, white salt, white flour. These are all highly refined and as a consequence make you want to eat more (usually more bad food).
Keep a food diary and note which meals are making you feel good or make you feel hungry again quickly (usually means you have not balance the macro nutrients.
Take food with you everywhere, if you are caught without the foods from home you can trust you may be tempted to eat badly or miss a meal.
Eat most at breakfast and least in the evening when you should eat less carbs including fruits.
Hydration. It is important you are drinking only spring or filtered water. Do not drink unfiltered water, as this is full of chemicals harmful to your body. On average drink 2 to 3 litres of water per day. To assist in retention of the water, I recommend adding a pinch of Celtic sea salt to every bottle of your water.
I also recommend you filter your showers so you don't inhale vapourised chlorine and other chemicals or absorb them through your skin.
Digestion. A poor digestive system is an important factor in avoiding future joint pain for persons losing weight. Just like a swollen ankle will affect your foot in running, a swollen tummy or to put it another way, digestive problems really impact on your core activation and have ramifications on the stability impacting all surrounding hinges your joints. If you are having digestion problems such as non regular emptying of bowels (what I call pooing), excessive gas bloating or burping. These are an indicator that you need to improve your hydration and nutrition or seek to eliminate beverages or foods which are causing intolerance to your stomach. I can assist you with detecting some of your digestive problems or refer you to allied health professionals.
Well rested; this includes going to bed by 10:30 PM every night. This is because your body is designed to sleep and rest in darkness. Your body is recovering from 10 PM to 2 AM. Going to sleep well into or past this time will result in chronic physical injuries as it is deprived of its recovery time. You cannot properly catch up sleep during daytime, because sunlight hitting your skin automatically releases the hormone cortisol in your body preparing you to wake up, this disallows you to sleep property in sunlight.
Stress. In order to alleviate pain and gain normal movement, a person must be relatively stress-free. A highly stressed person will find it difficult to manage movement correctly as its body is probably concerning with more life threatening concerns and disease instead of wanting to run around the block. Stresses may come from many forms including digestive psychological environmental and physical factors. If you go over your limits of tolerance to stress it will result in harm to your body and may be reflected in sickness or an inability to exercise. This is why movement and exercise should be increased gradually to a stressed body as it can be an excessive physical stress to the body. If you would like an indication of your body stress levels please ask for my health and lifestyle questionnaire, this will give you real ways to reduce your stress levels so that you're not tipping over the limit of your stress limits.
Movement. I suggest you do movement for half an hour everyday. For many this sounds like an enormous task, however there are many opportunities for you to move throughout the day from hiring a personal trainer, walking to work, parking further away and playing with the kids or dog. A simple way to make this fun used to jot down seven activities which you like and to program them into your week as your movement objective.
I also believe that all athletes advanced or beginners should balance their movement and exercise between slow energizing and fast strengthening exercises. So all athletes should have heavy sessions such as pumping weights sessions as well as recovery sessions such as walking or yoga.
Breathing. Many people breathe shallow and only in the chest. However if you want to see how to breathe properly look at the baby and how they breathe and you will notice it's breathing into its belly and the belly moves up and down. I take the time to teach all my personal training clients how to correctly breathe. The essence of this is to breathe deeply into your diaphragm not just your chest beating in through the nose for five and then out to the mouse for five. This is both coming and meditative thinking improve your core activation. Breathing is also the body's major mechanism of detoxifying the body, so improving your breath will improve your body detoxification and can even assist with weight loss. Let me reiterate why breathing is important, because you take 20,000 breaths per day.
Tip deep breathing squats - 300 per day can help you lose weight. Why detoxification of breathing and it is a large compound movement which will increase your metabolism. Easy huh. If it is hard to count them, count them once and time the amount, then do them in a timed manner. You can also do 100 after every meal. Go on do it.
Then the fun part...
Once these fundamentals are underway, I check or do a posture, strength and flexibility assessment. As everybody has a different posture and no one has a perfect posture, this along with any weaknesses and tightness throughout the body must be known in order to individually design corrective exercises for a patient to avoid pain or injury down the track.
Importantly You need to believe you can do it. You also need many reasons to achieve your goal. I help you know why and how much you want to do this. I can help give you a stack of reasons too.
- I listen to your goals, and set targets within a realistic time frame.
- Make sure you are committed
- Review your weekly nutrition and movement log
- Start at an exercise level correct for your body stress level and progress as your cardio and strength abilities improve. This is so you get the results faster while maintaining no injuries.
I also guarantee results provided you can all the steps I tell you too like keeping your food diary and doing your movement during the week.
Fat Loss exercises
Good fat burning exercises include large muscle group (e.g. lunges and squats), compound (many muscles at once e.g. lunge and cable pull), jumping if your body is stable enough, stepping and free weights. These are just a few, but suitable exercises will be included in your program strategy depending on your levels of stress in lifestyle questionnaire, your objectives and your body and postural assessment.
My personal favorite is the dead lift.This is because:
• it uses every muscle in the body
• with good technique you can progress quickly
• there are many subtle variations to the exercise
• it is one of the king exercises
• good for backs and knees
• it is functional to daily life
• it trains your inner unit of abdominal control
• make you hungry after you train in dead lifts, so you know it has burned calories
Some other simple tips are to:
• Include your cardio after resistance training. This is because cardio (running, stepping, cycling, rowing etc) will fatigue you and consequently make your weight training technique poor.
• Commence your workouts with an exercise which will get big muscles burning such as a squat hold against the wall. The muscle burning is a quick way to deplete the carbohydrate (usually sugar in your bloodstream) in the muscles and therefore take you to the burn fat zone faster and continue to suck up your carbohydrate (blood sugars) for the next 24 hours.
• Lift heavier but reasonable weights as you will burn more calories.
• Always do a warm up set of the exercise you are about to do, even if it is with no weight at all. This will warm up the muscles you are about to use and help you avoid injury.
• Beginners to exercise should only train at 60% intensity for 4 weeks. This will give you time to build ligament and muscle strength at a sustainable pace. You are also less likely to tip your body over the stress limit, which will have if you are already highly stressed and then you also introduce vigorous exercise.
• Time in tension is important in your workout. Make sure you are starting with high repetition sets. Keep your sessions short and intense, no longer than an hour.
Barriers to success in weight loss:
• In males it can be too much estrogens and depletion of testosterone levels.
• In females body weight can fluctuate due to hormones
• In general hormone imbalance is a key factor in weight gain. Gentle exercises can regulate hormone levels, this is why I promote use of energising exercises, plus they feel great and very suitable if you are a beginner as well. A good naturopath can do hormone and adrenal tests to see if anything is wrong.
• Change in body composition, early on there may be some weight gain due to increases in muscle. This should not be of concern if you are seeing reductions in size in your body measurements.
• Attitude and paradigms that "I can't really do that; I haven't been able to before". I suggest you look in the mirror say "I like myself and I can do this". Meditate for 5 minutes every day taking deep breathes and think about how good it will feel to achieve your goal.
• Not eating quality foods and too much sugar, processed foods and high GI foods (especially in evenings). In general, poor diet won't help you lose weight even if you exercise. Your nutrition is 70% of the weight loss battle.
• Not eating to your metabolic type or not eating the right foods for you. In particular, not having the correct macro nutrient(protein, fat and carbohydrate) mix in your meal to leave you satisfied until your next meal.
• Most people are gluten and lactose intolerant. These foods if eliminated may drastically improve your well being digestion, abdominal bloating and stubborn enlarged belly.
• Not drinking enough filtered or bottled water. Do not drink tap water as it is high in toxins. Added Celtic sea salt will improve your body acceptance and retention of the water. Also, often hunger pangs are often just dehydration. So drink quality water at first sign of hunger.
• Not taking enough steps to eliminate stress levels in the body to a low to moderate level. Stress can come in many forms such as nutritional, physical, psychological, electromagnetic to name a few. Another example is not to over train in exercise, it will make you stress your body and retain fat. Aim for intense sessions of no longer than an hour and balance your program between Cardio resistance, energising and stretching exercise. A great way to relieve stress through energising exercises is to use my free calendar and click here.
• Over training in Cardio and not enough resistance training, especially for the ladies. Weight training can be fun and very varied. It will use the carbohydrates in all your muscles and help bring you into fat burning mode. The increased body muscle composition will increase your daily metabolism and help you burn more calories even while you rest.
• The opposite is true too, especially for men. Too much weights and not enough Cardio
• People having Candida, fungus and parasites living in their digestive tract. This again is diagnosed by naturopaths. I can advise you on anti fungal nutrition which works to starve these bad guys out of your system, they do not like healthy bodies and nutrition. I can provide information to cure your Candida.
• Dieting and diet replacement pills/meals do not work. The best method is to find healthy foods you enjoy and can sustain eating for the rest of your life. Also adapting all the principles of healthy living mentioned in this article.
More on Nutrition and Supplements:
Apart from great organic nutrition. Try to get back to the native diet:
• No refined or denatured foods
• No foods with labels basically
• Animal protein from meat
• Fats from fish, seafood, fowl, eggs and raw milks
• Calcium and other minerals from animal fats
• High food enzyme content from raw vegetables
• Seeds nuts and grains
• Omega 6 and omega 3 fats
• Nutrient rich foods
• Bone broths
• Mineral salts such as Celtic sea salts
• I also recommend anti candida nutrition.
Other recommended supplements for weight loss are:
• Salmon or fish oils
• Garlic
• Magnesium
• Probiotics
• Pysillium husk
