If you’re overweight, you are not a bad person. You’re simply overweight. But it’s important to lose the extra pounds so you’ll look good, feel healthier and develop a sense of pride and self-esteem. Once you’ve lost the fat, you’ll need to maintain your weight.
In this book, you’ll discover how to lose 10 pounds a month – a nice, safe loss of about two or two-and-a- half pounds a week – painlessly. You’ll feel satisfied and more energetic than in the past without feeling deprived.
Most Americans pack on those extra pounds by eating the wrong things. Changing these poor eating habits is the key to long-term success. Knowledge – along with the right food – is the key.
When humans lived in caves, they didn’t know anything about preserving and storing food. They spent all their waking time and energy hunting and gathering food. When they had it, they gobbled it down fast. Instead of storing food in pantries or cupboards, they stored energy in their bodies in the form of fat to burn during periods when there was little or nothing to eat.
Each year, it was absolutely vital for them to put on a good layer of fat during the warm sprint and summer months. That was the only way they could guarantee their survival during the lean and mean winter months.
And since women bore the young, they needed more energy to sustain themselves and their babies, and that meant they were usually heavier.
Even though we no longer live in caves, we have inherited and maintained this basic mechanism for fat storage from our hunting and gathering ancestors.
Each one of us is born with a certain number of fat cells. How many of these fat cells you possess depends on genetics. If you have a lot of fat cells, maybe your ancestors were the biggest people in the tribe, which was a good thing because they had the best chances of survival.
You can never get rid of fat cells, but – unfortunately – you can add to them. Depending upon what you eat, your body will manufacture new far cells. And like those you were born with, they never go away.
That doesn’t mean you’re doomed to be fat once you put on extra pounds. It is possible to shrink fat cells. That’s what happens when you lose weight. You burn up the fat stored in those big fat cells. Think of them as balloons. Burning off the fat inside them has the save effect as letting the air out of a balloon.
A good weight loss program requires a certain amount of intake restriction – the consumption of fewer calories. You burn off the fat by eating less fat and becoming more active.
To guarantee a lifetime of weight-control success, you have to change the type of foods you eat, so that you ingest less fat and still get the vitamins, minerals, trace elements, protein, fat and carbohydrates your body needs to thrive.
Extremely low-calorie diets may help you shed pounds quickly, but they’ll lead to failure in the long run.
That’s because humans are genetically protected against starvation. During food shortages, our bodies slow down our metabolisms and burn less energy so we can stay alive.
A part of our brain called the hypothalamus keeps us on an even weight keep by creating a “set point.” That’s the weight where we feel comfortable. The hypothalamus determines this point based on the level of consumption it’s used to. It seeks to keep our weight constant, even if that point is over what it should be.
When we drastically cut back our food intake, the brain thinks the body is starving, and in an effort to preserve life, it slows the metabolism. Soon the pounds stop coming off. Consequently, we grow hungry and uncomfortable and then eat more. And then the diet fails.
How can you compensate for this metabolic slow- down? The answer is that you have to change the nutritional composition of the foods you eat. You will have to cut down on total calories – that’s absolutely basic to weight loss. More important, however, is reducing the percentage of total calories you are getting from fat.
That’s how you’ll avoid starvation panic in your system. At the same time, you reduce the amount of fat in your food, replacing it with safe, low calorie, nutrient-rich plant foods. This will convince your brain that your body is getting all the nutrition it needs.
In fact, you’ll be able to eat more food and feel more satisfied while consuming fewer calories and fats.
Plant foods break down slowly in your stomach, making you feel full longer, and they are rich in vitamins, minerals, trace elements, carbohydrates and protein for energy and muscle-building. This allows your body to burn off its excess stored fat.
