Eating Lightly |
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Introduce two light eating days per week. Many overweight people find they start to lose weight when they establish sensible eating and healthy exercise programs. By matching their daily energy intake to what they need to maintain their ideal body weight and by boosting their RMR with regular exercise, they achieve all the weight loss they need. If this happens for you, congratulate yourself and keep it up. For some people, these two steps are not enough. If you have been overweight for a long time and you have tried lots of 'weight loss diets' in the past, your body may now be very good at protecting its fat. Sensible eating and exercise are not enough for you. Alternatively you may start losing weight on your sensible eating and healthy exercise programs, but then hit one of those plateaux in weight loss we have mentioned. Your weight has not moved down any further for a while and you are getting discouraged. Either way, it's time to give your weight loss a hefty nudge. To do this, start having two days per week when you eat as little as possible. Keep these two days apart, not one after the other. If your total intake for a day will be less than 5,000 kilojoules, we recommend you take a vitamin and mineral supplement that day. The best meal to skip or reduce is dinner, the second best is lunch. A good complex carbohydrate breakfast can stave off hunger for much of the day, making it easier for you to stick to your plan. Make sure that one of your exercise workouts is on the day after eating light. Since you have already established that your regular eating habits now provide only enough energy to maintain your ideal body weight, these two light eating days mean your energy intake must be less than you need and your body will start to burn some fat. By making your food restriction for only one day at a time, and by following each light eating day with a normal eating day and an exercise workout, you prevent your body from doing its usual trick of lowering its RMR when you eat less. just as your body would try to compensate for your eating less by reducing its energy needs, you are pushing up your energy needs by eating and exercising. We have found people with very stubborn overweight problems get success with this approach. Researchers have found that you feel more hunger with a moderate food restriction than if you eat nothing. This hunger is what makes it hard to stick to traditional 'weight loss diets'. The less you eat on a light eating day, the less hunger you should feel. You can also console yourself with the fact that you will be eating normally again the very next day. We have found these brief periods of light eating are much easier for people to stick to than the weeks or months involved in traditional 'diets'. Watch your total intake and, if it will be less than 5,000 kilojoules, take a vitamin and mineral supplement to protect your nutritional needs. Stop your light eating days when you reach your goal. Once you have achieved your weight loss goal, you can stop eating light on those two days each week. Continue to eat sensibly and exercise regularly as normal parts of your healthy lifestyle. If ever your weight creeps up again, reintroduce the two light eating days per week until you have trimmed it down again. Then go back to sensible eating but check your eating plan to see if you are sticking to it or if you need to reduce your daily energy intake a little. Our table of daily energy requirements is based on averages and may not suit you exactly. By now you will know that being overweight can be a complicated problem and that this is why simple approaches to weight loss don't get lasting results for many people. Although we have outlined a complete weight loss program in this and the last unit, you may want or need to know more. Weight loss is such a potentially complex and difficult task for some people that we have written a whole book about it (based on Dr Laurel's research at La Trobe University). |
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