Are you only working part-time?
Imagine that you had an awesome full-time job which paid an enormous salary with great benefits. The full package is enough to meet all your daily needs and attain your long-term goals. If you had such a job, would you give it your all, or would you just show up when you felt like working? This is a no-brainer for most people, you would get up every day and go to work thankful for having such a great job. Even with such a job, we all know that one person who does as little as possible and shows up when they feel like working. Eventually they lose their job, and we wonder why they didn’t care enough to do the required work and keep the job.
When most people think about their full time job, they only consider their nine-to-five day job. In reality, everyone has more than one full-time job, but the one which we all share is our health. When we lose our health, getting it back can be difficult, or even impossible. Our health is our wealth!
You CANNOT lose weight by exercising!
Our physical health revolves around two points, diet and exercise. Both are full-time jobs. You cannot lose weight by exercising. Exercising tones the body and builds muscle. Adding lean muscle increases your metabolism so that you can burn calories faster, but by building muscle you can actually gain weight by exercising. Consider professional body-builders who pack on pounds of muscle and spend hours a day exercising. You would not consider a body-builder fat, though they may be considered to be overweight compared to the physical norm. Being overweight as a result of being muscle-bound is much different than being overweight due to obesity, but both carry health concerns. Being fat is never a good thing.
We exercise to maintain and improve our physical fitness.
Components of Physical Fitness include:
- Agility
- Balance
- Body Composition
- Cardiovascular Endurance
- Coordination
- Flexibility
- Muscular Endurance
- Muscular Strength
- Power
- Reaction Time
- Speed
Soda is a carb, and so is broccoli!
In order to lose weight you must first control your diet. The phrase ‘we are what we eat’ is a tired cliché but there is some wisdom there. If we eat junk food frequently, our health will suffer as a result. Your diet is composed of both quality of food, diversity of food, and most importantly quantity of food. The Standard American Diet is about 2,200-2,500 calories per day, with 50% of calories from carbohydrates, 15% protein, and 35% fat. All of our food is made of three components: Carbohydrates (carbs), fats, and protein. Food also may contain certain vitamins and trace minerals which our bodies need. We burn these calories for energy each day. At rest and during normal activities, fats contribute 80–90% of our energy; carbohydrates provide 5–18% and protein 2–5%. During exercise there are four major endogenous sources of energy: muscle carbohydrate stores (glycogen), blood sugar, blood fatty acids, and intramuscular triacylglycerols. The extent to which these substrates contribute energy for exercise depends on the intensity and duration of exercise, the level of exercise training, the initial muscle glycogen levels, and supplementation with carbohydrates during exercise.
So the key to losing weight is to eat better quality food, and eat less than our normal daily caloric intake for maintaining our weight. In other words, eat less calories than you use each day.
Water, water, everywhere!
Soda and fruit juice, as well as so-called sport drinks such as Gatorade or Powerade contain a lot of empty calories. When you are working with a daily allotment of 2,200 – 2,500 calories, drinking these add excesses calories which don’t fill you up, and then you still have to eat. Jesus Christ didn’t have soda or Gatorade and got along just fine drinking water. Water contains ZERO calories, metabolizes fat, and maintains good hydration to ensure the body works the way it should. It is important to drink water on a regular basis at regular intervals. A good rule of thumb is to aim to drink half your body weight in ounces daily. If you are exercising or exerting yourself in high heat, you may need to up this amount. You should drink a glass of water shortly after waking, with each meal, and before bed, as well as sips throughout the day as needed. Water was good enough for Jesus, and it should be good enough for you as well!
Let’s THINK this through.
Our bodies have an innate intelligence and they know what needs to be done, and when to do it. We don’t have to tell our hearts to beat, our lungs to breathe, etc. Our bodies do this naturally. That same innate intelligence works against us when we disrupt our natural cycles of eating, drinking, and sleeping. If we starve ourselves to lose weight, the body slows down our metabolism to conserve fats. If we try to drink less, our body ‘thinks’ it needs to hold on to fluids, and we can stop sweating, which is a natural cooling system. As amazing as the body is, it only knows what it knows, and when we change our daily cycles of eating, drinking, and even sleeping we alter our metabolism. In order for our bodies to work properly, we need to maintain regular cycles. This is why crash diets don’t work, as well as short-term dieting. When we cease regularly dieting and exercising, we lose the benefits gained by doing so. We take care of our bodies by eating, drinking, exercising, and resting on a regular cycle each day. When we do this, we make ourselves stronger, and we last longer. Everyone should want to live a long and healthy life, but whether or not we accomplish this is entirely up to ourselves! As always, I wish you success and happiness!
Instant Coffee Wisdom 