Mental Strength for Weight Loss

 

No matter where you look these days there is always someone ready to tell you the right way to loss weight.  So much information (both good and bad) is readily available that to the average person it’s overwhelming.

One thing is certain, that is excess body fat carries increased health risk.  Therefore, more importantly for health instead of for aesthetic reasons, weight management and particularly, weight loss should be a focus of every individual.

The goal of this post is to look at the role of exercises a tool to achieve weight loss, mental strength and help you to understand how and why exercise works.  By the end of this post, you should feel confident that you have a basic knowledge of exercise for weight loss to make the right choices for your body-today, tomorrow, and for the rest your life.

Let’s review some fundamentals about BMI and Obesity.

• Body mass index (BMI) is calculated as your weight in kilograms divided by this aware of your height in meters.  For example, a person who is 5’9” tall and weighs 25 pounds has a BMI of 18.5.

• The Center of Disease Control and Prevention suggests that a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9 is a healthy range, with 25.0 229.9 being overweight and more than 30 being classified as obese.  This is merely a guideline that correlates to amount of body fat in the general population, and athletes or extreme lean muscular individuals will score falsely on the scale.

• The percent of overweight individuals is growing because of a very simple mathematical equation: the sum of calories in minus calories out.  If more calories are consumed in the form of food that are used up through activity and metabolism, the result is weight gain.

• Fortunately, dietary restrictions and increased exercise will lead to a caloric deficit and therefore, to weight loss.  Unfortunately, however, the technology rich age in which we live has led to a predominantly sedentary lifestyle for most of us, and essential movement for everyday tasks has become minimized.  When this is combined with the incredible easy access to caloric-dense foods, it’s easy to understand how the equation works against us, leading to weight problems.

• We’ve evolved as a species that was occasionally threatened with famine and that required considerable physical effort to acquire food, and as a result, we developed the ability to take in and store food in the form of fat tissue.  The existence of readily available food and the removal of the necessity to hunt for it have led to an expanding global waistline.

• When you eat and how much you sleep are factors in being overweight, and both of these are completely in your control…with the help from some mental strength.

• There are other contributors to being overweight, including genetics.  There’s no doubt that hereditary plays a role in our physical makeup-or, rather, it can explain disorders that contribute to increased weight – but genetics cannot account for a significant portion of obese people.

• In general, women carry more body fat than men, and usually, around the hips and thighs-known as gynoid, pear-shaped, body – while men’s fat deposit tends to be around the stomach, which is referred to as the android, or Apple, shape.  For many, the increased abdominal fat is likely to lead to a greater risk of cardiovascular disease.

Now let’s look at how fat is stored.

• We store fat in the body in the form of triglycerides, which are composed of 3 fatty acid molecules found within specific fat cells known as adipocytes. There is also a small amount of fat residing within the muscle cells, ready to be used for fuel for exercise, although most will come through the bloodstream.

• The release of fat from storage to be used as fuel is regulated by 2 enzymes: hormone-sensitive lipase and lipoprotein lipase. Hormone-sensitive lipase is located in the fat cell and acts to break down the triglyceride, releasing the 3 fatty acids into the bloodstream.  This is influenced by the hormone epinephrine, which increases in concentration during cardio exercise.  The responsiveness of hormone-sensitive lipase increases during cardio exercise as well.

• A train effect of regular exercise is that this phenomenon proves; as we get fitter, the enzyme responds to lower levels of ephedrine, and therefore more readily breaks apart the triglyceride is to be used as energy.

• Conversely, the lipoprotein lipase is found on the walls of the blood vessels and acts as a transporter, mopping up triglycerides in the blood and taken them to storage sites to be used as fuel later.

• Exercise, especially when combined with reduced caloric intake through sensible eating, is the optimal approach to sustained weight loss – not only decreasing body fat but also enhancing cardiovascular strength, improving insulin sensitivity, and lowering blood pressure.

Let’s move on to some misconceptions about losing weight.

• Losing weight through exercise can be somewhat confusing.  For example, cardio machines in the gym recommend built-in fat burning programs at around 60% to 70% of maximum working heart rate – which we calculated by subtracting your age from 220-although this is a fairly low intensity.

• This is based on the premise that at lower intensities, the majority of the calories burned or from fat stores – rather than carbohydrate, which is stored in the muscles and liver.  It is true that as the intensity increases, a lower proportion of the fuel will be provided by fat, but the important factor is the total number of calories expended.

• Therefore, a vigorous workout may burn a lesser percentage of calories from fat stores, but the total amount could be greater than working out for the same length of time at lower intensity.  As your fitness level starts to improve through regular activity, your ability to achieve and maintain higher intensities will also improve, and therefore, your capacity to burn fat during exercise will increase.

• It’s important to begin exercise gently, particularly if you have not done in a while, but accelerated results will come from increasing the intensity of exercise, so you should try to do that as soon as possible.  In addition, consult your physician before embarking on a new exercise regime.

• Another common misconception is that fat burning exercise only begins after a set period, usually quoted as being around 20 or 30 minutes.  Fat metabolism is, indeed a slower starter because transport to and utilization in the muscles require time to work effectively.  After a while, the switch takes place from carbohydrate and fat for fuel, and this switch occurs sooner for fitter people because the fitter you are, the more fat you will be able to burn during exercise.

• Studies have shown that there are a number of physiological adaptations as result of cardio exercise that helped to shift body fat, and regular exercise helps us become editor at using our fat stores.

Now let’s take a look at how to get results from exercise programs.

• The best exercise prescription for weight loss and mental strength is to combine intense cardio and resistance training modes.  Because low-calorie diets lead to a slowing of the metabolism, resistance training is a vital tool to counter this and is highly valuable to help you maintain weight loss progress – as long as you’re combining exercise in food restrictions.

• High intensity interval training requires 10 sets of four minutes and 95% of your maximum working heart rate with two minutes of rest in between.  This will really tax your mental strength!

• Circuit resistance training involves about 20 reputations at each of 12 weight-training stations with little or no rest, and the stations ideally should alternate between upper and lower body for a good calorie burn.

• Sprint interval training involves maximum effort for 30 seconds followed by a four minutes of light exercise – repeat six times.

• Fartlek training involves interspersing a steady pace with a quicker burst of varying duration in an unstructured format.

• Metabolic conditioning is the idea of working continuous cardio at a moderate intensity of around 70% of your maximum working heart rate around 40 to 60 minutes.

• Step-up interval training begins at an easy cardio pace, and speed increases perhaps every four minutes by about 15% until you reach the set target of between 20 and 60 minutes.

• As you start to become fit or another technique is near maximal training, which involves five sets of five minutes at 95% of your maximum working heart rate followed by five minutes at 50%…this will really build your mental strength.

OK…there you have it, some basic no-nonsense information on exercise for weight loss that will also build your mental strength.

There is more great information contained in the Mental Strength for Weight Loss program.

Remember… “Physical fitness is the basis for all other forms of excellence.” ~ JFK

Reference: Physiology and Fitness – The Great Courses®