*Weight loss*
Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, hypertension are all related to poor diet and lack of exercise (not being overweight). These diseases kill many times more people than any criminal, so these are really the most important things to concentrate on for self-defense.
In order to respond to crime or disasters, a person must be physically able to act. If you are more than 40 or 50 pounds overweight and in poor physical condition, it will be harder or impossible for you to do what is necessary to protect or help yourself and your family. Imagine having to walk down or up dozens of flights of stairs in an emergency, can you do it? Imagine running out of gas with a small child you must carry to get help. Imagine needing to walk several miles to home or to work because your car broke down. These are all reasons to lose weight, and more importantly be more active and stronger.
· There are three basic ways to lose weight and be healthier. Eat healthier, eat less or exercise more. By using any one of these diet ideas, you will lose weight but if you use all three you will loose weight and be healthier and stronger. If you decide to use only one of these methods, it is much harder to lose weight and become stronger than using all three at the same time.
Most individuals that try to lose weight try a diet program that they buy from some expert. These programs have been shown over the decades to very rarely work in the long-term or short-term, and in fact they usually cause weight gain over the long-term. The weight loss industry takes in tens of billions of dollars per year as the number of overweight people increases in the US. Using fad diets do not work.
· If you have used many or dozens of fad diets and are still overweight and not healthy, you should think about this definition of insanity: "Doing the same thing over and over again while continually expecting a different result."
The best way to lose weight, feel better and be stronger is to use a little of each of the three forms of weight loss listed earlier and to use them all at the same time. Whether you use just one or all three forms, you should start very slowly. There is no rush to lose weight; since you did not get overweight in a few months, you should not expect to get thinner or stronger in 2 months. If you are in a rush to lose weight, you are wrong and a sad victim of the "diet insanity". Note: See definition of insanity above. Fast weight loss always guarantees future weight gain, always!
My idea of a diet program is as follows:
Step one: begin to eat healthier, but do not decrease your intake of food or start to exercise.
· You should begin to pay close attention to how much you eat, when you eat and why you eat.
· You should keep detailed written records of your entire food and drink intake throughout the day. This means that if you eat just one potato chip, keep track of it.
· During this step, it is important to eat the same amount of food you have always eaten.
· Step one should last for a few weeks or months. During this phase you will learn what you currently eat so you will know what to change.
Step two: after a few weeks or months of learning what you currently eat you should begin to eat healthier and start to exercise for 5 to 10 minutes per day, while continuing to eat healthy and continuing to keep track of all the food you eat.
· Do not begin to change the amount of food you eat yet, just start exercising and eating healthier.
· Any exercise you do should be enough to make you get a little winded or tired by the end of the 5 or 10 minutes. If you get too tired or winded, it is bad and may hurt the diet and exercise program. Remember your goal is to feel better not to just loose weight.
· When you exercise, you need to do both aerobic and muscle building exercises.
· The only part of your body that uses or eats fat is muscle. The more muscle you have, and the more you use that muscle the quicker you can lose weight and the easier it is to keep the weight off.
· Examples of aerobic exercises are walking, running, swimming, water aerobics, step aerobics, kickboxing, etc.
· Examples of muscle building exercises are lifting weights, Pilates, Yoga, etc.
Step three: after several months of eating healthier and exercising 5 to 10 minutes a day, you should start very slowly to decrease your food intake.
· You should know by now when and how much you eat, so you should decrease your food intake by about 5% every month or two.
· This is not the time to go hungry so decrease your eating by just a little. If you try to starve yourself you will be falling back into the "diet insanity" again.
· This is a long term plan. Never try to rush it, it will take months to see much difference and years to get to where you want to be.
Note: this or any diet plan is not just useful for loosing weight. By eating smarter and exercising you will feel better and be healthier, even if no weight is lost. Remember the real goal is not to loose weight but to be healthier and stronger.
As you decrease your food intake, you should plan during the day to eat healthy snacks every hour or two. Eat more (smaller) meals and a lot of planned stacks.
· Snacks and planned smaller meals are very important because if you get hungry and you do not have a healthy snack, you are more likely to get an unhealthy snack.
· Unhealthy snacks are diet killers so pay attention to what your snacks are made of and when you eat them. Snacks must be healthy and low fat. Do not fall victim the Atkins diet, it is a fad diet. Just because everyone is doing it and talking about it does not make it work in the long term.
Within 6 to 12 months of starting my diet plan, a person should either be exercising for about 30 minutes a day most every day of the week or exercising about 60 minutes per day, every other day. This exercise does not have to be very hard, but just enough to get you a little winded and tired. It is more important to exercise, eat healthy and eat a little less for the long term than doing anything difficult in the short term. This is a long term lifestyle and diet change that I am speaking about. You did not get fat or unhealthy quickly so do not expect to loose weight quickly.
Note: I am not a doctor so I cannot give medical advice. Before you start any diet program, you must see a medical professional first to make sure you do not kill yourself.
The idea that the US is a nation that is eating itself to death is a lie. We are fad dieting ourselves to death. We spend part of the year starving ourselves on too little food or on special diets and the other part of the year we eat pizza and hamburgers all day. We spend billions of dollars on fad diets and low fat foods, and we still gain weight every year. There is no secret to losing weight when you see the facts. The fact is we eat more food than we need, we exercise too little and we eat too unhealthy. We eat too much food and the food that we do eat has too much fat or carbohydrates in it. One thing that all fad diets have in common is that they always say that they have the "new answer" to losing weight. There is no new answer to be found. It is simple: eat a little less, exercise a little more, and do not trust the fad diet salesman that wants you to buy his product. Eating odd foods or starving yourself will not work long-term. It may be possible to starve yourself for a few months and lose weight, but that weight will return and you will definitely gain more weight than you had before the diet.
There are many weight loss programs and books that will have valuable information on what types of food you need to eat and how you should exercise. If you have already tried several or dozens of weight loss methods, you probably already know how to eat right, but you just don’t do it because the fad diets are too hard or are intended to be short term fixes. You must start slow in your diet by slowly changing your diet over months and years and by slowly increasing how much you exercise over the same time period. Remember, you did not get overweight and unhealthy in three months so you should not expect to get thin in three months.
· Let me start off by saying that being thin is not the cure to the problem. If you have an extra 20 to 50 pounds more than others your height you are not necessarily less healthy. It is more important to be active and happy than thin and miserable. If all a "professional diet coach" does is look at your height and weight and say you are too fat he is wrong. Fat is not evil or unhealthy, being a couch potato and eating unhealthy is unhealthy.
Research shows that a woman with 50 extra pounds on her body and is active will live just as long or longer than the woman that is considered thin but is not active, assuming no other chronic medical problems exist. Research also shows that it is not the 50 pounds that causes diseases but it is inactivity that causes these so-called weight related diseases. At the American Enterprise Institute's June 2003 conference, "Obesity, Individual Responsibility and Public Policy," Glenn Gaesser, Ph.D., said, "An abundance of epidemiological evidence shows a 20 to 70 percent reduction in all-cause mortality with increased fitness or physical activity, independent of BMI (body fat)." This means that loosing weight will not make you healthier or live longer. It is exercise and being active that leads to a healthy person.
When I look at a human body I see a machine, I see input verses output.
· All the food and liquid you eat or drink is input.
· All the activity or exercise you do is output.
If you are overweight and unhealthy, you either have too much of one or too little of the other. Your body must be retrained in how it uses this input and output.
· Every time you eat or fail to eat, your body gets used to a certain behavior.
· If you starve yourself, your body thinks food will always be scarce, your metabolism slows down, which means that when you get off that fad diet and eat a normal amount of food, you will gain even more weight than before.
· This is why it must take years to slowly lose the weight, get healthier and to stop the "diet insanity" yo-yo effect.
· It is important to eat a wide variety of food as this will ensure you get enough of the right kinds of nutrients to be healthy.
· It is important to take a vacation from dieting every so often. I think it is best that every time you loose 20 pounds you should take a few months off of you diet. This will let your body get used to your new diet and exercise routine. Do not go back to your unhealthy lifestyle; just stop trying to loose weight temporarily.
It is of the utmost importance to defend yourself against the things that are most likely to kill or harm you. At the end of this book, I have listed the top ten killers of Americans per age group. After reading through the different lists, it is easy to see that heart disease is the number one killer on the list, followed by cancer, stroke and chronic lung disease. All of these top killers are very closely related to eating healthy, exercising regularly and not smoking. It is important to note that for every death in a particular category there are 5 to 10 individuals who are disabled or adversely affected by the above causes. When you decide what actions to take to extend your life and prevent pain, make sure you spend most of your time on the greatest risks you have.
Pills and fad diets
The use of any drug to increase your energy or decrease your body fat is not healthy and will not work long-term. The diet drugs that do help you lose weight usually cause heart disease and early death. The diet drugs that do not cause heart disease do not work and are just a waste of your time.
· A diet is input (food) and output (exercise) for an entire life. A person does not go on a diet, lose the weight and then go back to a normal diet.
· A person must change their diet and keep the change forever. Slowly changing your diet and the amount of exercise you get is the only way. By slowly changing your diet over time, hunger can be prevented and you can get used to the new diet and feel fine.
If you need to lose over 100 pounds or more, you may have a hormone problem that makes it very easy for you to gain and keep weight. If you do have this extremely rare condition, you must understand that you require much less food than the average person to live. Most adults need between 1500 to 2500 calories per day to stay healthy. In the US, most adults actually eat between 2000 to 4000 calories per day. Individuals with hormone issues might be able to eat as little as 800 to 1000 calories per day and do just fine. If you have hormone-caused obesity, your body is extremely efficient in processing food. It is this hyper efficiency that allows you to eat a normal amount of food and still stay extremely overweight. Only a doctor can test to see if you have a hormone issue that is causing your weight gain. If you are more than 100 pounds overweight it is more likely that the cause of your obesity is your inability to see how much you really eat. The "hormone" problem is very rare and can be easily diagnosed by a doctor. The most important thing for the very obese person to do is to be very precise in writing down every thing you eat for a few months. Every single potato chip you eat must be documented. If you do this documentation properly you will probably see the error in your past memory.
Diet insanity
· If you have been on dozens of new fad diets from slick-talking gurus, you must be able to see exactly what those diets did for you, nothing.
· If you are not the weight you want to be after following a diet, then the diet author was wrong.
· The proof is in the pudding; go and look in the mirror right now and decide for yourself if the fad diet worked.
· Many people consider themselves addicted to food. While this may be true in some sense of the word it is not strictly a fact. An addiction is supposed to be something that a person cannot control by any means. Many people consider food addiction to be a disease. To my thinking an addiction is not a disease because it is under the control of the individual.
o If a person is smoking or overeating and another person holds a loaded gun to their head the smoker, the will not smoke. If you do the same thing to an overeater, they will not eat. This test shows that an addiction can be controlled by human will and therefore not a disease.
o On the other hand holding a gun to the head of a cancer patient will not have any effect on the disease. Cancer is a disease, obesity is not.
· This being said, I know "addictions" exist and are hard to overcome. Just remember that if you want it bad enough, plan properly and work hard enough the "addiction" can be beaten.
Note: Most people do not understand what bottled water really is and how dangerous it is. Unlike public water systems, federal and state governments do not regulate bottled water. There is no governmental oversight of what testing is done to the water and who sees the test results. There have been many studies done from water obtained from a variety of bottled water suppliers. Most of the time it is discovered that there is more bacteria and impurities in bottled water on the grocery store shelf than is allowed or found in regular tap water. Another issue with bottled water is that it does not contain fluoride. For decades fluoride has been added to public water supplies to control bacterial growth and to help prevent cavities in those that drink tap water. Bottled water companies do not add fluoride to their products. It has been shown that children that drink bottled water higher rates of cavities.
www.alpharubicon.com
All materials at this site not otherwise credited are Copyright © 1996 - 2005 Trip Williams. All rights reserved. May be reproduced for personal use only. Use of any material contained herein is subject to stated terms or written permission.