Two Things to Remember About Eating and Weight Loss

I’m going to talk about my two favorite eating rules. Eating rules can help you keep on your dietary plan. They don’t make it easier to do, but they’re fairly simple.

The first one is always sit down at a specific location to eat. It doesn’t matter if it’s a snack or a meal.  Always sit down and always have it be a specific location. Eat at a specific location in your home. It gets rid of that eating on the run or eating over the kitchen sink. There are some specific decisions that have to be made.  You’re physically going to get the food, sit down, and eat it in a specific location. That’s the first eating rule.

Number two is always use utensils. This requires more decisions.  Even if it is finger food (which typically isn’t what I call eating clean), you still have to use utensils.  If it’s an Oreo or chips, you have to sit down at a certain place, and you have to use utensils. If you can do this, they’re very simple rules. Simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy. If you can do this, you’ll find it easier to stick to your dietary plan. Multiple decisions have to be made in order to get there. So when you are potentially “straying”, you’ve got multiple decisions points that you can actually change your mind.

Number one, sit in a specific location. 

Number two, always use utensils. 

The Best Weigh In Routine – Part 2

I want to complete the video I made last week which was about routine weighing. Should you weigh yourself routinely or not?  My inclination is, yes, people ought to weigh themselves regularly. I think people should weigh themselves daily.

I want to talk about what the real reason is for weighing yourself daily. Especially if you’re in a weight loss program, whether you’ve had surgery or you’re in the middle of a weight loss plan, I encourage people to weigh themselves daily. During the weight loss program, you’re not just weighing yourself to watch the pounds come off. The real reason to weigh daily is to get in the habit of weighing yourself routinely for maintenance.

Maintenance is hard.  It’s actually harder than weight loss. So, you want to get in the habit of weighing yourself routinely during the weight loss plan so that you’re doing it for maintenance. If you weight yourself daily during maintenance you’ll notice little fluctuations.  If you notice little fluctuations you can look back on that 24 hours and figure out, “What did I do differently during those 24 hours that would affect today’s weight?”  Typically there is going to be something. You’ll be able to figure that out a lot easier if you’re weighing yourself routinely (daily).  If you try to look back a week’s period of time you really have no idea what you did differently. So, this is the reason you want to weigh yourself routinely so you can have those little fluctuations under control.

Maintenance, as I mentioned, is harder than weight loss. It’s easier to make little modifications by looking back over the past 24 hours to figure out what you did differently and then modify what you’re doing.  You can change that fairly easily. So that’s why you should weigh yourself daily.  It’s so that you can be in the habit of doing it for maintenance.

Stop in anytime to check your BCA – and don’t forget to add those pounds to the total on our home page!

The Best Weigh In Routine

Should you weigh yourself routinely or not? You’ll see things all over the map like “You should never weigh yourself” or “You should just go with how you feel” or “If you feel good, you’re good.”  There are a lot of questions out there and I’m going to give you my thought on that whole issue about weighing.  Weighing is the best monitor we have as far as keeping track of your weight and overall health.

Weighing is a good way to look at health because when our weight is stable, we tend to be in stable health. When our weight is changing very quickly one way or the other, potentially there can be changes in health. In a weight loss program we’re obviously trying to lose weight.  So, subsequently then we want to keep track of these things.

Should your weigh in routine be once a week, twice a week, should we step on the scale whenever?? I encourage people to weigh themselves daily and you should weigh yourselves early in the morning.  If you forget to weigh yourself early in the morning, don’t bother.  Wait until the next day. It should be routine weighing.  Why do I say that? Many of the patients I see are very sensitive to carbohydrates.  As we’ve talked about many times in the past, carbohydrates influence insulin level. Insulin is one of the hormones that makes you retain water. It also makes you store fat. If insulin levels go up, you store fat, but the first thing you do is retain water. Subsequently, weight jumps up. So, it’s actually a good monitor to weigh yourself.  Many of our patients are sensitive to carbohydrates and even a little carbohydrate causes a significant weight increase.

If your weigh in routine is daily, it’s relatively easy to look back on the past 24 hours and see what you did differently. Where did you stray?  What happened over the last 24 hours? If your weigh in routine is once a week, it’s hard to look back at a whole week period of time and see what happened differently.  It seems like we’re doing the same things week-to-week. But day-to-day it’s much easier to monitor your weight and notice little changes. And, little changes will matter. If you’re sensitive to carbohydrates, one bad day can cause your weight to jump up significantly. If you wait a week to find that out, you’ll never really know what happened. This goes along with the journaling discussion we’ve had as well. So, write things down and weigh yourself routinely.

I typically like people to weigh themselves in the morning.  Early in the morning is your most accurate weight. As we progress throughout the day, we typically will retain some fluid and weight will go up.  Make it a part of the morning routine.  Get up, weigh yourself, and get on with your day. If you’re someone who is going to obsess about the numbers, understand that the weight does fluctuate day-to-day even when you’re doing all the right things.  Don’t obsess about that number.  What I encourage people to do is to look at what’s happened on average over the past 7 days. But don’t obsess about the numbers because there are lots of reasons to have fluid shifts and fluctuations up and down, and it may not be something you ate the previous day.  It could be that you’re close to your cycle (women).  It could be blood pressure or salt issues. There are lots of little things that will play into that. The biggest thing tends to be the carbohydrate sensitivity. Overall, I recommend you weigh yourself daily early in the morning.  If you forget, wait until the next morning.

Don’t forget to post your weight losses on the Home Page of the website!

The Fallacy of the Fat Burning Zone

We talked recently about heart monitors and how they’re helpful in determining how well you’re doing with your fitness routine. You’re often taught to exercise in the “fat burning zone” to maximize the utilization of fat.

We want to burn calories and fat. That fat burning zone is where you burn the highest percentage of fat as your energy source during your exercise. It’s usually at about 60-70% of your maximum heart rate. We talked last time about maximum heart rate (220-your age).  That’s a good estimate. We’re then taking 60-70% of that maximum heart rate.  It’s somewhere between 108-126 if you’re 40 years old. In theory, that’s your fat burning zone. That means that the highest percentage of calories burned is actually coming from fat.

The problem is that you’re not actually burning very many calories. Most of the calories you’re burning are coming from fat, but the issue is that you’re not burning that many calories. What you really want to do is bump up the intensity.  If you bump up the intensity, you’re burning a lot more calories. As you’re burning a lot more calories, your body can’t use fat quite as efficiently and so you’re burning more calories from carbohydrate. Is there something wrong with that?  Absolutely not! If you’re burning more calories from carbohydrate, what you’re doing is decreasing your carbohydrate stores.

We can store carbohydrate in our muscles. If we start decreasing the carbohydrate stores, you can actually replace that carbohydrate. For example, you can’t put more gasoline into your car’s gas tank until your burn the gas off. There’s only so much carbohydrate that will fit into your muscles. If you don’t actually decrease the amount that’s in the muscle, then you can’t replace it. You want to burn off that carbohydrate that’s in the muscles. If you burn that off, then you can actually put more in.  That’s how we can smooth over blood sugar swings.  Then, you can get a little leeway on your carbohydrates.

There are two reasons why the fat burning zone doesn’t work really well.  The first is you’re not burning that many calories. If you bump up the intensity, you’re going to burn a lot more calories. Number two, you want to use some of the carbohydrates stores because you want to be able to replace those stores. When you’re exercising, use a heart rate monitor and bump up the heart rate to higher than the fat burning zone. If you’re just starting an exercise program, you can’t just jump right into that.  But if you’ve been in exercise for a while you can go into that higher intensity as your fitness level increases. That’s where you burn the most calories and you get the most after burn as well. That’s burning calories long after you’ve finished exercising.

I have a great 20 minute High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) workout you can use to get the intensity up!  https://youtu.be/WBAw-pRraGY

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