Greg: Tonight, we are going to
run through a checklist. I have about 14 items - a
14-point checklist for weight loss. These are
just the primary factors that I have seen that are
most important in helping people to be successful
at losing weight. I think if you can check off at
least most of these then you are on a good path to
being successful with weight loss.
Number 1: Develop a healthy
food list.
I think the best way to do this
is when you have an hour or two that you can spend
at your grocery store, to go there with a pad and
pen and literally walk through the aisles as you do
shopping, in the same order. Take time and make a
list of every food in that grocery store that you
believe is a healthy choice. We won’t spend
much time on how to determine that. I think that
most of you who have called have probably been through
that. But you want to look at the SQ factor and
divide calories by grams of fiber. Ideally, we want
that answer to be under 60, the lower the better.
That’s a good start.
You want to be careful of course
with added fat and sugar. You want it to be as close
to its most natural state as possible. We talked
about not having artificial sweeteners added to it. So
the bottom line, the two most important things probably
are, “Is it as close to its most natural state
as possible?”
I always like to use the example
of a vegetable, let’s say broccoli. Broccoli
in its absolutely most natural state would be raw,
fresh and in the produce department. Perhaps a step
down from that would be broccoli with something added,
maybe in a casserole in the frozen foods section,
but still fairly healthy. Then maybe another casserole
that is loaded with added cheese and fat. So it’s
still broccoli, it has just been adulterated along
the way. So with any food, grain, fruit, vegetable,
if it’s in its most natural state once we start
adding things to it, it becomes further and further
away from that most natural state and generally more
unhealthy and not as good for both weight management
and health.
So walk through your grocery store.
Make a list of everything that you would consider
a healthy food. This list helps you to make better
food choices. It helps you at home when you are planning
what you will shop for. It helps you in the grocery
store. What a lot of people do is, they go through
the grocery store and over and over again make the
choices, “Is this a good choice, is this a healthy
food?” That list really helps as a direct
reference and to have you thinking about those foods
and realizing, “These are my best choices. These
are what I am going to choose from.” So,
develop your own healthy food list based on your grocery
store.
Number 2: Most of you have
heard me talk about this before, but I really want
to emphasize it. It seems like practically every week
more and more research comes out about the importance
of fiber and weight loss.
Obviously we have known that fiber
is good and healthy for you. It makes sense that
it would also be important for weight loss because
fiber is the bulk in your diet. It is what gets you
full, keeps you full and (and I think this is neat
too)—We don’t think about this, but it
acts as sort of a natural "fat and sugar blocker". You
know, they sell these fat blockers and starch blockers.
Well, fiber is sort of a natural form of this. We
are not talking to a large degree here, but when you
eat fiber and you eat fat or any type of carbohydrate
with it, some of it is absorbed by the fiber. Then
it releases some of it slowly into your bloodstream. But
some of it, it never releases and it is just passed
out of your body before ever being absorbed into your
bloodstream.
So, lots of good reasons, both
for health and for weight management to get lots of
fiber in your diet. I recommend that you shoot
for 50 grams of fiber a day. Now, that’s
a lot of fiber, but if your diet is concentrated on
fruits, vegetables and whole grains you’ll have
no trouble getting 50 grams of fiber a day. We know
that there is a direct relationship between how much
fiber someone consumes and how successful they are
at weight loss. More fiber, more weight loss, less
fiber, less weight loss.
One of the reasons that I encourage
people to really focus on fruits, vegetables and whole
grains and to only moderately, if at all, consume
animal products, is that EVERY animal product (beef,
chicken, fish, butter, cheese) anything that comes
from an animal, has absolutely no fiber at all. Everything
that comes from fruits, vegetables and whole grains
has fiber, some more than others, but they all have
some fiber. So that is another reason to really
focus on fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
Number 3: Include intervals within
your aerobic exercise.
This is one of the most powerful
things that I have seen to increase basal metabolic
rate and increase your fitness level and the way your
body handles fat. Intervals, most of you know, are
just one minute of more intense exercise once every
five minutes throughout your workout. I want
you to think of this as sort of “pushing the
envelope”, making your body do just a little
bit more than it is comfortable with. Your body
responds by raising your fitness level and raising
your metabolism, because it says, “Hey! Janet
is trying to do more than she is capable of for a
long period of time!”
Now, you are only doing this for
a minute and it is something that you couldn’t
do for five or ten minutes. You are going just above
the line of what your body is comfortable with and
capable of for a longer period of time. So your body
says, “Hey! Janet is trying to do more
than we’re capable of. We need to push this
up a little bit!” So your body responds
by pushing your fitness level up, by pushing your
anaerobic threshold up and by raising your metabolism. So
it forces your body to respond to your demands, which
is to push the envelope a little bit.
Intervals are important. If you
are not doing intervals right now, I would really
encourage you to start. You don’t have to start
with them every five minutes, but add one or two throughout
your workout and gradually increase that. Ideally,
we are shooting for one, one-minute interval once
every five minutes throughout your workout. Intervals
should be included in about 75 percent of your workouts.
So if you are doing something aerobic, walking, rowing,
whatever, say 5, 6, 7 days a week then roughly three
or four of those days should include intervals.
Number 4: I meant to cover
this before we got into exercise. Create your
own personal calorie and fat gram list.
Keeping up with what you eat and
the caloric content is important, at least for a few
weeks, to really know where you are. Some people
like to do it long term because of the accountability
of knowing exactly how many calories they are consuming
and fat grams. But it can be tedious, especially early
on. However, there is something that makes it
easier, and that is to create your own personal list.
Now the people that study this
tell us that most of us eat the same 10 to 15 meals
over and over again. So it’s not like we have
a huge variety of food. We tend to eat the same things
over and over. So the first week or so, looking
up the caloric and fat content for those foods can
be tedious. But look them up and put them on a piece
of paper. Do it on your computer and alphabetize it
so that it’s an easy reference. After a week
or two, you will have the calories and fat grams for
most of the foods that you eat on a regular basis.
Then, looking it up becomes simple. You have this
one sheet of paper that has everything that you eat
in alphabetical order with calorie and fat content.
So, create your own fat gram and calorie list.
Number 5: Log your eating
and exercise.
Writing things down helps for a
few reasons. Number one: There is a degree of
accountability, as I mentioned earlier, that is for
eating and for exercise. Specifically, with exercise,
I think it helps with a feeling of accomplishment.
If you go out and take a 30-minute walk tomorrow morning,
you will benefit from it. You will burn some calories,
you will affect your metabolism and you will feel
better. But once it’s over, you really don’t
have anything concrete to show for it unless it’s
on paper. I think there is a feeling of accomplishment
in being able to write down, April 8th, 7:30 a.m.
– Walked for 30 minutes.
You can keep an ongoing account
of your minutes. It is kind of like putting money
in the bank, putting those minutes in there, and you
can actually see it on paper. So there is a feeling
of accomplishment and you can actually see what you
did. And it’s nice to look back over and
the month and see, “I’ve done 900 minutes
this month.”
For eating, there is the accountability
of having to write it down. There is also the
importance of actually knowing what you’re consuming. I
can’t tell you how many people come to me and
say, “I’m not losing weight. I’m
at a plateau.” The first thing I usually ask
is, “Do you know that you have a caloric deficit?” Because
if you don’t actually know that, then chances
are you don’t have enough of a caloric deficit
to lose weight. And in that case, it is even more
important to know exactly what you’re consuming.
Number 6: You should be weight
training, ideally two to three days per week.
A lot of people, even people who
are consistent aerobic exercisers, do not weight train.
It’s unfortunate, because the benefit you get
from the time you put in the weight training exceeds
even that of aerobic exercise. By that I mean, for
an hour or aerobic exercise you certainly get benefit,
but an hour of weight training gives you much more
benefit. And, it doesn’t take that much. In
fact, you can spend as little as 20 minutes three
days per week and get all the benefit that we’re
looking for. By that, I mean primarily muscle tone
and affecting basal metabolic rate. So, 20 minutes
three days a week, it doesn’t need to be every
day and in fact, it shouldn’t be every day. And
you can accomplish great things.
Because the combination of aerobic
exercise and anaerobic exercise like weight training
is a powerful one-two punch. Together, they are
much stronger than either of them are without the
other. So most people are doing some type of aerobic
exercise but not weight training and they are really
missing out on a lot of benefit, primarily to basal
metabolic rate, that they could be achieving with
just three days of weight training a week.
Number 7: Use the proper weights.
With weight training, one thing
you really want to be sure of that can make the difference
between really seeing success with weight training
or not is that you are using the proper weight. Most
people are using a weight that is too light. They
go to a gym and maybe somebody says, “Okay,
do 12 repetitions.” They have no idea what weight
to use. They use a weight that is too light. They
stop at 12, but maybe they could have done 20 or 30
repetitions. So the muscle has to be stressed
appropriately for it to respond. The way you
do that is to use a weight that fatigues you just
about to failure, somewhere between 12 and 15 repetitions. You
determine that through trial and error. If you
are doing an exercise and you can do 20 or 25 reps,
that tells you that the weight is too light. Conversely,
if you have a weight where you can do only 8 or 10
repetitions, that tells you that it is a little too
heavy. So you adjust the weight until it fatigues
you just about to failure somewhere between 12 and
15 repetitions. That is very important.
