How to Lose Weight

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How To Lose Calories/Fat

Fitness is an attitude. To condition, shape your body, gain muscle mass, and lose calories/fat, you must really be willing to change your eating habits and lifestyle, this is an attitude. I will personally tell you that it is not easy to change your eating habits and lifestyle to lose calories/fat. It takes a lot of love for yourself, motivation, sweat/tears, dedication, and be consistent with your workouts. Remember moderate intensity is what counts in your fitness attitude workout.

In my 40 years of experience practicing the martial arts, weightlifting, doing aerobics, jogging/running, playing racquetball, basketball, football, baseball, soccer, swimming, hiking, and bike riding I have noticed that in the beginning people are always, “bragging, enthusiastic and excited” or willing to train hard in the beginning, but what many beginners lack is that fitness attitude, motivation and dedication. In order to succeed, you must be motivated and dedicated to your fitness goals. Without this fitness attitude you will fail in the end.

I understand that finding time in your daily busy schedule is hard. But fitness should be or become just as important, as work or any other personal or leisure activity. You must manage your daily task to include your fitness attitude. Your workout should be intense or as relaxed as you wanted to be. This should take about 30 minutes to one hour. When considering your fitness attitude level, I have put together a few tips that should help you along your way.

What is your fitness attitude? Are you the type that goes thru the motions when in the gym because you do not have that fitness attitude? Or are you the type that’s their for socializing and making friends? Spending lots of time wasting your time and everyone else’s around you. Their could be reasons for this behavior but I am not a psychologist. You need to find your “fitness attitude level and think fitness”.

The following exercise categories I use will help you transform your fitness attitude. These are broken up into the following and your fitness attitude in each category should be spent evenly: Diet, Weight Lifting, and Cardio.

Diet and Nutrition

*  Drink lots of water.

*  80% or more of your carbohydrates should be from oatmeal, vegetables, fruits, fish, poultry, and beans.

*  Eat enough protein. This would be in relation to your body weight and how active you are. Athletes should consume about 1 gm for every pound of body weight. If you’re working out 3 to 5 days a week, then you would need within the range of .5 to .7 grams of protein per pound of body weight.

*  Eat 5 to 6 times a day or every 3 to 4 hours. Don’t skip meals.

*  Keep a food journal. If you have a trainer, have them review it weekly. If you don’t have a trainer, still keep a food journal. Having a journal will keep you aware and accountable with respect to your eating habits.

Your diet should be broken up into the following macro nutrients – approximately 30% Protein, 50% Carbs, and 20% fat.

Weight Training

Rest time in between sets should vary between 30 to 60 seconds based on your level of fitness, health and age. Longer for those not healthy, older, or beginners. These are cases where you should wait longer in between sets, but for a healthy fitness person this is the “ideal” rest period for muscle growth.

Change your fitness workouts every 4 to 8 weeks. Your body will grow accustomed to training with the same fitness routine. In order for it to continue adapting and growing you should change your workout routines.

Keep a fitness journal. This is avoided by most people. Most people can’t remember exactly what they did in their last workout which had 8 to 12 sets. The fitness journal will help you stay in track of the weights that you’ve lifted in previous workouts and time spend on cardio.

Also, buy a stop watch to monitor time spent between sets and cardio workouts.

Lift more weight. Now that you’re keeping a fitness journal, you know exactly how much you lifted last week and the week before. One of the fundamental principles of growing muscle is simply adding more weight at your next workout. Every time or every other time you workout you should be a little bit stronger than the last workout. Thereby, your next workout you should be able to go up in weight on various sets in your routine. Try increasing the weight by increments of 2.5 to 5 pounds.

Eat a snack or meal immediately after your fitness attitude session. Your body will need to replace the energy burned.

Many women do not lift weights and primarily focus on cardio and diet. While those two categories are important, you must not forgot to do weight training at least three times a week. Building some muscle will add tone and shape your body. It tones your arms, legs, and of course your backside. Trust me, you won’t look like a body builder or too masculine if you lift weights. Gaining muscle is a lot harder than you think. Women do not have the amount of testosterone to gain that kind of mass.

Cardio

Change your cardio routines in every workout. Remember moderate intensity is what counts in your fitness attitude workout. For example, on one day perform sprint training for 20 minutes; the next cardio routine try walking on an incline treadmill. Next workout use the stair master or spin classes, or elliptical, or the bike. Also, you can use 2 or 3 different cardio exercises in one workout. For example, 20 minutes workout on the bike, then 20 minutes on the stair master, then 20 minutes of boxing or kick boxing. Your body is an efficient workout machine. It will get used to habitual cardio workout routines. By changing it up, your body will continue to burn more calories then if you keep performing the same cardio routine month after month.

Weightlifting can be helpful for obese kids

The idea of using strength training to help overweight youth has been slow to catch on.

By James S. Fell, Special to the Los Angeles Times

February 14, 2011, 11:25 a.m

It goes without saying that children who are obese would benefit from aerobic exercise. However, they’re likely to find the idea of going for a jog or spending half an hour on a treadmill about as appealing as watching Congress debate the fine points of tax policy on C-SPAN.

Fortunately, there’s an alternative form of exercise that plays to the strengths of plus-sized kids: weightlifting.

It may sound like an unconventional suggestion, but I’m not the only one making it. There’s even some evidence that for this demographic, weightlifting is a more effective gateway to a healthy lifestyle than traditional aerobic exercise.

Before I continue, allow me to recap my recent column detailing why it’s not only safe but also beneficial for children as young as 7 to start lifting weights with proper supervision. It doesn’t stunt growth. It strengthens bones and connective tissue, which reduces the risk of injury when engaging in other physical activities. And it’s far safer than playing contact sports like football or ice hockey.

Unfortunately, the idea of youth strength training is slow to catch on, so the opportunity to use it to combat childhood obesity is often missed.

Unlike aerobic exercise, strength training is inherently appealing because it involves short periods of activity followed by rest periods. It’s true that 30 minutes on a treadmill is going to burn more calories than 30 minutes of lifting weights. But most likely an obese kid will hate the former, while he could enjoy — and even excel at — the latter.

“Obese kids aren’t going to be very good at aerobic activities,” Dr. Teri McCambridge, head of the Council of Sport Medicine and Fitness for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told me. “Forcing them to engage in it is hard on their joints and bad for their self-confidence.”

David Stodden, who studies motor behavior in Texas Tech’s Department of Health, Exercise and Sport Sciences, agrees. He laid out the potential consequences of pushing aerobic activity on obese children in a 2008 article in Quest, the journal of the National Assn. for Kinesiology and Physical Education in Higher Education. “There is a negative spiral of disengagement in physical activity with low motor competence,” he wrote, “leading to increased weight and obesity.”

Weight training, on the other hand, often leads to a positive-feedback loop, according to Avery Faigenbaum, a pediatric exercise scientist and professor at the College of New Jersey in Ewing, N.J.

“These kids are really strong,” Faigenbaum told me. “The skinny kids are always impressed with how much the overweight kids can lift.”

The benefits of this go beyond physical health, he added: “I see these obese kids come into my program, and you can tell they’re depressed and have low self-esteem because they always get picked last for teams. But with weightlifting, all of a sudden they get respect and friends and an ego boost because they are good at something that is physical.”

Faigenbaum also told me research shows that between 80% and 90% of obese youth stick with resistance training, compared with less than half who opt for aerobic training programs.

For example, researchers at USC‘s Department of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy and the Keck School of Medicine and colleagues studied the effectiveness of resistance training for 22 overweight Latino adolescent males and found that all but one of them stuck with the program throughout a 16-week trial — an adherence rate of 95%. During that time, the teens reduced their body fat by almost 7%, increased their insulin sensitivity by 45% and had significant increases in muscle mass and overall body strength, according to a 2006 report in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.

While aerobic activity may burn calories faster than resistance training, I firmly believe that when it comes to a healthy lifestyle, motivation rules all. There is no quick fix to being overweight or obese, and you can’t sustain something you hate. For obese kids, lifting weights is an exercise they can excel at and enjoy. Kids don’t care about cholesterol; they care about having fun.

And the sky is the limit after that. If weightlifting can build their self-confidence about fitness, obese children are more likely to tackle more challenging endeavors such as aerobic activities and pursuing a more healthful diet.

Faigenbaum has witnessed this phenomenon many times in the weightlifting programs he runs in cooperation with New Jersey school systems. “The most important part is to change their mind about their approach to physical activity,” he told me.

Unfortunately, availability of weightlifting programs for children is an issue. Elementary and middle school students typically have little access to weight rooms, and even in high schools, the weightlifting portion of phys-ed class is usually limited.

Clinical childhood obesity programs also are reluctant to focus on heavier weightlifting that allows for muscle and strength development. Dr. Larry Yin, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, told me his program recommends lots of walking and advises patients on how to incorporate this into everyday life. But when I asked him about weightlifting, he said, “We only recommend it for older kids who are specifically interested in getting stronger.” Even then he suggests limiting children to lighter weights and having them do many repetitions, which is essentially an aerobic workout, not a strength-building one.

Yin also conducts motivational interviews and makes dietary recommendations at the family level, and I certainly don’t wish to disparage his efforts. Nevertheless, the evidence indicates that the medical community should take a closer look at recommending weightlifting that gradually increases in intensity for obese children as a sport of choice to both improve health and their attitudes toward exercise.

Also, remember to consult with a doctor before starting any type of physical fitness workout/activity.