How To Lose Weight

Hi. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about how to lose weight. Often, an element that many people struggle with, you know, there's two bits, how to lose it and how to keep it off.

Today, we're going to focus very much on how to lose it. Throw most of the common traditional thinking and the things you've been trying for ages already out the window. The thinking is very much changing around weight loss and what's important.

I'm going to try to give you the most up-to-date information, much of which will pretty contradict what you've heard before. So, here we go. Forget calorie counting.

It's an element that's important, but it's not the most important bit. Forget low-fat diets. Again, same thing- it's important, to a point, but actually not the most important.

The most important thing, really, when it comes to losing weight is all about sugar and carbohydrates. It's much, much easier to overeat carbohydrates and sugar than it is fat, and so many of the foods we eat today in the western diet are absolutely loaded with hidden sugar calories. Another reason that sugar is so important is what it does when it's metabolized in the body.

So, when you eat sugar, it's digested very easily by the stomach and the intestines, and it then goes into the bloodstream as glucose and triggers a response from a hormone called insulin, which I'm sure most of you have heard of, especially with all the scares around diabetes these days, and insulin has a couple of jobs. Its main job is then to take that sugar to your cells, to your liver, and convert it into a substance called glycogen, where it's stored, ready for use as energy. But then what happens, any excess sugar that you've consumed gets converted into fat, and stored in your fat cells, wherever on your body that happens to be - on your thighs, on your hips, on your stomach, and that, you know, contributes to weight gain.

Another core element then is what we call kind of the 'sugar highs and lows'. So, you eat a lot of sugar, your blood sugar level goes up, your insulin goes up, and then what happens is you end up going the other way and you dip, which causes you to feel hungry again, and often as a result of that up and down, you end up eating much more than you would otherwise, so that's another reason that, you know, your sugar needs to be cut out of your diet. So, how do you lose weight? You basically eliminate as much sugar as you can.

For the first week, five to seven days, you will almost cut it out completely, with the only carbohydrate you have being from kinds of vegetable sources, vegetables and salads. That means no fruit, no sweets, no cakes, no carbohydrates of any kind. No bread, no pasta, no potatoes, cut out everything.

No alcohol either. Do that for a week to seven days, that will really kick your body into a fat burning state, and then you want to kind of build it back in a little bit, so that your kind of diet on going through your weight loss period is about twenty percent or slightly less from carbohydrates, fifty percent or more from protein, and then around twenty to thirty percent fat, and if you stick to that diet over a long term period, you will lose the weight you want to lose, and you'll actually find it easier to keep it off. Exercise-wise, couple of key things people don't really understand- muscle is calorie-hungry, so the more muscle you get on your body, the easier you're going to find it to lose weight, and the easier you're going to find it to keep it off.

Most women are scared of lifting heavy weights because they think they're going to end up looking like men- very unlikely to happen. Women don't build muscle that easily, so actually if you want to lose weight, what you need to do is get more muscular. So, get down to the gym, use those heavy weights, don't keep going for the light ones, and you will lose weight faster, and you will find it easier to keep it off.

If you do seem to be the body shape who tends to