My Tips For Weight Loss

February 9, 2009 at 11:42 am (weight loss) (exercise, health, my health, my health today, tips for weight loss, weight loss, weight loss tips)

My tips for weight loss might not suit everybody, but it certainly suits me and as this blog is about my health (today!) then that’s good enough! My last post “Healthy Body Purity”, went into how I’m trying to avoid the plethora of pollutants that everyday life seems to smother everyone in, so here I’m going to move away from that a little and look at losing some of the weight I’ve been piling on in the last few months – and I’ll tell you why.

First of all, I had a bad attack of gout in both feet throughout most of last summer which really set me back a long way health-wise. Because of the intense pain and crazy swelling in my ankles, the balls of my feet and several toes, walking became almost impossible most days, which meant spending a lot of time sitting around.

Ok, I spend a lot of time sitting around anyway as I write for a living, which naturally means spending several hours a day perched in front of a computer. But normally during the hours I don’t work, I get active by taking the dogs for long walks doing some gardening and home maintenance jobs that always need doing. So in an average day, I still get plenty of exercise. Not being able to walk knocked that on teh head.

So in those months, I gained weight, lost muscle bulk and lost a lot of mobility. For the last three months, I’ve been back to normal and trying to shift the weight, build up my muscles again and also increase mobility by going on plenty of long walks with the dogs. So here’s my weight loss tips for the recovery stage post-gout attack:

Now I live by the coast in a hilly area, so walking up and down hills is much better exercise than walking on the flat. This is excellent for building up strength in legs, feet and hips as if forces those muscles to work harder. By doing it for a prolonged time – more than 30 minutes at a go – the muscles call for increasing amounts of fuel that the body initially provides from the blood sugar. But after 20 minutes, the liver has to release more burnable sugars into teh bloodstream to replace those used up and it gets that supply from that stored in fat cells.

Which means you start to lose weight from those stored up fat cells. You start to increase muscle bulk too, so you’ll initially see a little weight gain as muscle cells are heavier by mass than fat cells. But that’s a good sign because it means that as the muscles gain mass, they need even more sugars to burn to keep them working, which means even more fat cells get used up in teh process. Which means that over time, you will lose weight by doing this.

And I certainly did lose weight. In fact I had put on almost 4 kilos (approx 8.8 pounds) during my period of gout induced immobility and I have since lost it all, over a period of about 3 months.

So the most successful of all my weight loss tips is to do light exercise for more than 30 minutes at a go where you are working hard enough to work up a sweat and raise your heartbeat so that you are slightly out of breath. Just don’t expect immediate results as it takes a little time.

But if you, like me, have plenty of time and are not in any rush (and you should be), then this in itself is an excellent way to lose weight safely and naturally. No pills and no drugs!

Perfect, wouldn’t you say?

My Health Today