Drinking water is essential no matter if you’re on a diet or not

1. Our organisms need water to function properly. Each one of us should drink at least half a gallon of water a day and even more than that is better. It is quite interesting that most of us don’t do it. We drink coffee, tea or other fuzzy or sweet drinks, none of which can substitute water. In fact a lot of these dehydrate us even more. Majority of people are constantly dehydrated.
2. Drinking water boost metabolism. This is quite a long one, but I’ll try to explain it in detail. If you are like one of those people I described above and do not drink too much water, your kidneys, which are responsible for collecting and removing many produces of your body from the blood, cannot work properly. In that situation their function is taken over by your liver. Your liver is reducing slack to prevent it from being toxic to you. Being busy with that, however, liver cannot perform it’s other function, which is converting fat into energy. When during your diet you start to drink water, your kidneys begin to work again and free your liver, which can focus its efforts on burning that excess fat of yours.
3. Drinking water reduces craving for food. Feeling of thirst starts to bother you only if your body fluids drop 4-5% below their optimum. Until then, you do not really feel thirsty. Quite often, however, you might get this feeling of craving for something, but its difficult to figure out what. On many of those occasions, instead of a glass of water, you’ll reach for a snack. To prevent that from happening, you should drink a little too much and a bit earlier. If you actually feel thirsty, that means it is too late – try to improve next time.
4. Drinking before eating makes you eat less. This goes especially to people who are obese, but everyone should do it. If you drink a glass or two 10 minutes before eating, your stomach fills up and already starts to send signals to the brain, saying ‘I’m full – not hungry!!’. This helps you eat slower and less. Also, there is a greater chance of actually feeling full before you eat too much.
5. Water has no calories. All other drinks have more or less calories, but water has an absolute zero. If you really want to lose weight, forget about fuzzy drinks. Coke and other stuff like that should be gone from your menu for good. But what’s more – remember about juices. If you drink them, count them in your daily calorie intake. You’d be surprised how many calories can there be in your drinks.

There you go – 5 reasons. There are more probably, but for me these are enough.

So how about you – do you drink water? How is it working for you?

Post from: Permanent Fitness

5 serious reasons to drink water for weight loss

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When we go on a diet and reduce calorie intakes below our daily calorie needs, our organisms adjust the metabolism to match usage of energy to the amount of energy received. This way they hope to get us through to the times when there will be access to more food.

A bit of history

This pattern has been working effectively for ages. In prehistoric times, during summer, tribesman were hunting and gathering food. They had plenty to eat and their caloric intakes were optimal. But when the winter came food was scarce and hunting more difficult. Maintaining the same caloric intake was impossible. People ate less and their bodies went into a metabolic slow mode. At these times whole tribes reduced their activity – stayed more in the village by the fire, told stories,  slept much more… They didn’t even feel the need to go anywhere – they didn’t have the energy. This lasted until spring, with which came the first edible plants and more game came out to feast on the first green grass. Calories were within reach and metabolisms jump started again. Life begun again: hunting, rebuilding camps, dancing, competitions and all other energy consuming activities took part during summer.

Present times

We unfortunately are not that far in development when it comes to our bodies. When we go on a diet, our organisms don’t know, that we aim to lose fat. They think it’s something like the winter time of the ancient tribesmen, that these are tough times which they have to get us through. They react by reducing the rate of metabolism.

Will we be losing weight? Probably yes. Caloric intake at 70% of DCN is so low that we should be losing weight even despite slowing metabolisms. This, however, will be a painful and slow process. Sometimes we might just be able to lose a couple of pounds after which the arrow on our scale will stop.

Also, what is even more important, loss of weight will come in great part as a loss of muscle. Our bodies are very quick to use our muscles as a source of energy. They can burn them almost equally as fast as the fat.

I can feel the slow down myself

I am now in my 5th day of a diet and I already feel effects of reduction in the rate of my metabolism. First of all, I feel cold much more easily. Usually I would be one of those people who are never cold – now I do notice every chilly breeze, and today for the first time I put my socks on at home (Before that, I always walked bare feet).

Other symptoms may include tiredness, easy irritation, more difficulty in focusing on complex tasks. They may not be  severe, but they are noticeable.

Solution – Exercise to boost metabolism

To overcome the problem of slowing metabolism, diets should be accompanied with exercise. Exercising prevents our organisms from burning muscles and boosts metabolism, which then uses our excess fat as the energy source.

That is why in my weight loss plan I included exercising from day one. My organism will try to slow down, but I will not let this happen. I exercise regularly now. I can feel the surge of positive feeling and energy almost after each session. I am tired, but somehow, I feel more energetic – more alive

Exercising has also other positive effects. It relieves the stress that may build up when one is on a diet. If you have a day of particularly strong cravings, exercising can reduce them significantly. It can help you fight off the feeling that you want to throw it all away and simply have a doughnut or a cake.

To sum up: If you want to lose weight – do not wait – put your trainers on and go out for a trot!

So tell me – do you exercise on your diet? If not – how successful are you?

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Exercising is essential in weight loss

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I think that joining a challenge on such a renowned blog is a perfect way to build up motivation for initial phases of my diet and to make it through the first month of fat loss with success. My progress will now be followed not only by me but by thousands of readers of Leigh’s blog all over the world. I can’t let myself and them down. I can’t make excuses and can’t back down – this train is running and I am on it! I must admit – it is quite exciting!

One big meal challenge

The challenge is set up according to rules similar to those I laid for myself in the previous post about caloric deficit. Every participant is supposed to eat only around 65% to 70% of his daily calorie needs. For me that is 1900 calories per day.

To help us achieve the goal Leigh goes even further and suggests a concept she calls One Big Meal (OBM). I have never thought of that before but the idea makes a lot of sense. As Leigh points out, one of the problems with maintaining a good diet is the need to constantly monitor calories eaten during the day. To overcome that, we should simply cook one big meal in the morning or the day before. The meal should have calories equal to our daily caloric intakes. That ‘one meal’ is what we would be eating throughout the day. Do not get confused though – the idea is to cook everything at once, but it does not have to be just one single dish – you can maintain variety if you want and you can spread the eating over as many smaller meals during the day as you want.

I think that ‘One Big Meal’ approach might prove quite effective. As Leigh says, it makes control of calories much easier. But it does more than that – it also takes away many threats usually encountered when being on a diet. The psychological effect is the one I think is especially worth mentioning. OBM method puts you in a position, where it is very easy to assess whether a day was successful or not: If you ate only your one big meal – it was successful, if you went beyond it – it wasn’t. The border is clear and you break the rules with the first bite of something from outside ‘the meal’. If it is that easy to assess, you know you failed as soon as you did it, not in the evening when you total up all daily calories. That particular guilty cookie, drink or sandwich will not taste as good, when you know that it is the one that makes you fat and the one that stops you from fitting in your daily dose of calories – the one that kills your dreams…

Is it going to work in practice? – I will let you know.

Spread of meals during the day

Leigh does not specify how often should we eat and how frequently during the day, although she advocates a bit in favour of a one huge meal a day. I will not go for that and will do it in a more traditional way, which is having many small meals spread more or less evenly along the day. This method worked for me once before, so I am not going to change it. I noticed that when I eat a huge meal, I get hungry afterwards anyway. Smaller meals don’t stretch my stomach and it is then easier to fill it with something small. This way, I do not really feel hungry at all, and if I did – well, I’ll just wait for another meal which is probably only an hour or so away.

Variety of foods

I love variety in my diet. I don’t think I would feel good if I had to eat the same thing for a whole day. I really like fresh fruits for example, and I have to have meat on my plate practicaly every day. These two, however, do not go well in one meal for me. I have to eat fruits and meat separately and I want to eat both each day. To overcome that, but still stay in line with the rules of the challenge, I will be preparing a couple of different dishes every day – some with fruits, some with meat – and I will eat them separately.

I will be doing all the cooking in the morning before going to work. It will be easier not to eat during that than it would be if I cooked it in the afternoon. I am not that hungry in the morning.

So there I am, on my way to thinness and fitness. Thanks to Leigh, I have a really exciting start. I’ll keep you informed on my progress.

Thanks for all the good words so far

Post from: Permanent Fitness

Weight loss 30 day challenge starts

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What are calories?

Basically there are 2 different types of calories:

• Calories as measure of energy in physics
• Food Calories and measure of energy contained in food

We, of course, will focus on the second type. A definition of food calories found on Wikipedia states that:

• Food energy is the amount of energy in food that is available through digestion. The values for food energy are expressed in kilojoules (kJ) or food Calories (kcal).
• One food Calorie (1 kcal or 1,000 calories) is the amount of digestively available food energy (heat) that will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water one degree Celsius.
• One food Calorie is equal to approximately 4.1868 kJ
• One gram (g) of most proteins or carbohydrates has about 4kcal (17kJ)
• One gram of fat has approximately 9kcal (38kJ)
• One gram of pure alcohol (ethanol) – 7kcal (30kJ)

Calories measure the amount of energy which is available from digestion of particular food. Almost all grocery products have information about their energetic characteristics displayed on their packages. It is given in calories (kcal) or kilojoules (kJ) per 100 grams (g) of the food.

So there it is – that’s what calories are – a measure of energy. Going further, let’s see what does the organism do with the energy it receives from food.

Our bodies and energy

Our bodies need energy to live. Muscles use energy with each body movement, we need energy to breathe, our hearts need energy to pump blood, each of or our organs uses energy at every single moment in time. Even maintaining body temperature at a constant level requires significant amounts of energy.

As we already know, this energy comes from food. Our organisms, in many chemical processes, digest food, ‘extract’ energy contained in it, and use it to maintain our life functions. It all works perfectly as long as the amount of energy provided is equal to the amount of energy used. When the energy intake starts to exceed the amount required, the body has to do something with the excess which it doesn’t use. It stores it in specially designed for the purpose cells, which are commonly know as ‘fat cells’. These cells can grow exponentially to accommodate excess lipids (a scientific term for fats). When they grow, we get fat.

This excess energy is stored as a backup resource for times, when the body doesn’t receive energy supplies it requires. It then releases the collected energy and uses it to cover the deficit. When the fat cells release the energy, they are getting smaller – we are getting thinner.

We owe this design to the evolution. For thousands of years humankind suffered rather of scarceness of food than its excess. Our organisms, in order to help us survive, have learned to catch and store all available energy. It was never known, when the next meal is going to be so any storage was usually used quite quickly. This mechanism was evolving for thousands of years when humankind fought for survival in the wilderness, competing with nature and various predators. Today’s situation, where most of us have access to abundance of food is very new – just a blink of an eye for the evolution. Our bodies did not have time to adjust to it. Maybe someday humankind will adjust to the changed circumstances, but that will take hundreds of generations. We here, are stuck with what we’ve got:)

Anyway, coming back to the topic of this post…

Want to get thin – maintain an energy deficit

The conclusion from the above considerations is obvious: If we want to lose weight, we need to provide our bodies with amounts of calories, below their requirements. They will then start to burn energy stored in the fat cells, which in turn will reduce their sizes and… we will get thinner.

That’s so easy!!

The only thing we need to learn now is how much calories do our organism require?

Daily calorie needs (DCN)

Depending on age, sex and weight our bodies need various amounts of calories. For weight loss purposes, the best method is to calculate you daily caloric needs, which indicates approximate, average amount of calories your body uses every day. This is done in two steps:

1. Calculate your BMR (basal metabolic rate)

Basal metabolic rate (also called a Resting Metabolic Rate) is an amount of calories your body uses to maintain your life functions. That would be the amount of calories you would burn every day if you stayed in bed for a whole day, not moved at all and also did not engage into any significant brain activity.

Wikipedia comes in handy to describe how to calculate the BMR. Below is the equation, which is supposed to be the most accurate:

BMR = (9.99 x W + 6.25 x H – 4.92 x A + S), where:

• W is weight in kilograms
• H is height in centimeters
• A is age in years
• S is sex – for male S equals +5 and for female S equals -161

If you are not into kilograms and centimeters or just want to make it easy for yourself, you can use an online calculator.

Using it, I can calculate my BMR as 2015.

Now to the second step.

2. Adjust your BMR according to your activity level

Most of us don’t stay in bed all day. We work, walk, talk and engage in various activities – all of which require additional energy. To reflect that, we have to adjust our BMRs. This is done by multiplying the BMR by a factor which depends on how active we are. And so:

• if you are not doing any sports and have a sitting job, you multiply the BMR by 1.2.
• if you do sports 2-3 times a week and have a sitting job, you can multiply it by 1.4.
• those who do sports 5 times a week and are generally pretty active, can use a 1.7 factor,
• and finally athletes should use a factor of 2.

I for example, as a person with a desk job, doing sports 2-3 times a week, will use a factor of 1.4. That means that every day, my organism uses about 2015 x 1.4 = 2821 calories. To lose weight I should eat meals, which have a cumulative total amount of calories lower that 2821. My organism will then use the energy which is stored in my fat and I will lose weight.

How much should we lower our caloric intakes to get thin?

There are many different views as to how much lower the caloric intake should be in relation to the daily caloric needs. Nutrition experts agree, however, that intake shouldn’t fall below 1000 calories a day. This could prove harmful to our bodies.

The best approach is to keep the caloric intake 30% – 35% below the daily calorie needs. It is sufficient to generate effects, but not serious enough to put your body at risk. My daily intake of calories will therefore be around 1900. That is the goal I am setting for myself:

I will keep my daily caloric intake at 1900.

If you want to lose weight you should calculate your daily calorie needs and adjust intake of calories accordingly. Remember also that as you lose weight, your DCN also lowers, so you have to also adjust caloric intake. If you do that, you will get thinner.

That is all. I will keep you updated on my progress.

Questions or doubts, any thoughts? – let me know or drop me a comment

Post from: Permanent Fitness

Energy deficit – the principle of fat loss

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