My Tips For Weight Loss
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?
More on my ongoing health later!
Healthy Body Purity
I’d like to follow on from my last two posts that concentrated on the health of the mind Healthy Workout for the Mind Part 2, by now looking on the effect that cleaning up the body’s intake can have on general health. This isn’t a scientific or statistical test, but more a common sense look at what is plain in front of everyone’s face.
This is about the pollutants that we are exposed to every day of our lives on 21st century earth. They are for the most part unavoidable as many pollutants exist in the air we breath and the water we drink. More gets into our food, so there is really no escaping these poisons. Fortunately, our bodies are quite good at filtering these pollutants out and getting rid of them without to much damage, but we don’t do a perfect job of it and our levels of certain pollutants will increase in our bodies over the course of our lives. Heavy metals such as mercury, lead and aluminium cannot be purged from the body and the latter two are responsible for lowering our intelligence levels, especially in children.
Modern pesticides are sprayed with carefree abandon on our crops by over zealous farmers hell bent on reaping every last ounce of vegetable matter form their beleaguered soil, regardless of the cost to human health. Governments and health bodies either turn a blind eye or deliberately misdirect and obfuscate the issue in the hope that it will be swept under the carpet and public awareness will wane.
These can be avoided to a certain extent by eating organically produced crops and waving a finger in the polluted air at intensive farmers and the greedy supermarket chains that force the issue. Better still if you have your own garden, you could learn to grow a large proportion of your own food crops, thereby saving yourself money and being totally sure that your crops are 100% free from all poisons.
Every little thing that you can do to reduce your body’s intake of pollutants will help you to maintain a better level of overall health and this should be pursued with ever increasing determination if you want to grow old healthily.
My Health Today 