Exercising with Urban Line Dancing: See You On the Wood

The year rolls on and I’m continuing my weight loss efforts. Controlling my food intake, watching my portions and following healthy eating guidelines are important to my success. But, all serious weight loss efforts include exercise. Over the past several years my exercise of choice was aqua aerobics, but recently thanks to my youngest daughter, I’ve developed an interest in urban line dancing. It’s fun, easy, and supports my efforts to “move more”.

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Eat Early- Shed Weight

Most people working on losing weight have heard the caution to eat before 6:00 p.m. Sometimes we make it, sometimes we don't. Now a recent scientific study proves that in trying to control your weight,when you eat matters as much as what you eat.

In the study, four hundred twenty overweight men and women were monitored for 20 weeks. The subjects all had the same calorie intake of 1400 calories per day. At the end of the test period, early eaters lost an average of 22 pounds, while late eaters averaged just 17 pounds. Scientists know the effect of sleep and our biological clocks affect weight regulation. Not even the differences in exercise, hunger levels, or sleep habits made as much of an impact as the time meals were eaten.

The study suggests we eat lunch as our main meal of the day, ideally before 3:00 p.m. Here are some other well known keys to losing weight fast:

• Drink more water
• Eat breakfast everyday
• Eat smaller meals, more often
• Eat fish two or three times weekly (an red meat at most once)
• Spend at least 30 minutes on a meal
• Drink two cups of caffeinated coffee daily
• Bring two small snacks, i.e. a piece of fruit, a cup of low-fat dairy, to work every day
• Eat a small bit of dark chocolate daily
• Count steps- at least 10,000 per day
• Incorporate heart-healthy nuts and olive oil into your meals
• Eat plenty of vegetables and fruits, especially berries
• Weigh yourself once a week
• Eat at the table, with your food on a small plate

Hopefully, following these easy guidelines will give you a new way of thinking about food and weight loss. Emphasize healthy, whole foods over unhealthy, processed ones. Eat healthy, feel better, and live longer.

Good Eating,
Silverlady

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A Thinner Me in 2013-A Personal Journey

Like many of you, I've struggled with my weight for years and years.  I've tried every imaginable diet-high carb, low carb, high protein, low fat.Yes, I've tried Jenny Craig, Nutri-System and Weight Watchers.  I've lost a few pounds on each one, but fell off the diet, resumed my old eating and wound up heavier than when I started. But along the way, I learned a thing or two that helped me make important changes.

I'm lucky. About three weeks ago, I celebrated my 70th birthday surrounded by family and friends. My efforts over the past several years have resulted in a weight loss of eighty pounds. Now, I'm just "overweight" and no longer "obese". Ain't that grand.  I still have twenty more pounds to lose to reach my personal goal. I'm not alone...my entire family is committed to losing weight. It's not that we just want to look better, although that would be nice. We all want to be more healthy and avoid complications that accompany being overweight. Some family members have diabetes, and one has survived breast cancer. Some struggle with Lupus and others just feel the burden of carrying extra weight around every day. Some are young, or middle age or seniors...all of us plan to make dietary and lifestyle changes this new year.

Let's sift through some well-known and lesser know facts about obesity. Did you know that 70 percent of the over 60 population in America is overweight?  More than 40 percent of those 65 to 74 are classified as obese. Complications from obesity cost the United States $190 billion dollars in medical expenses every year. We all know that obesity shortens lives: An Oxford University study found that an obese person's life span is three to ten years shorter than that of someone age weight.about the same loss of life associated with smoking. Knowing all these things should give motivation to resolve to  the problem.

We know that losing weight gets harder as we grow older. Slowing metabolism, a loss in muscle mass and declining hormones...all of these things cause your body to store fat more easily. Did you know that adding to the challenge, our body actually sabotages our efforts to lose weight and keep it off. A recent New England Journal of Medicine study examined overweight adults who lost an average of thirty pounds by reducing the number of calories they consumed. Here's what they found. Two hormones that suppress appetite, Leptin and peptide YY, dropped significantly  after the weight loss and stayed low for a year. This isn't good- we need more leptin and peptide YY so we don't get hungry. Researchers found also that ghrelin, a hormone that increases hunger, rose and remained high for up to a year. Decline in appetite suppression and and an increase in hunger...talk about making things harder.

So what's a midlife dieter to do? Personally, I say forget about dieting and focus on changing your dietary and lifestyle choices. The thought of dieting makes one feel that this is something you'll do for a while, achieve your goal and return to past habits. I had to realize that I needed to make changes that I would embrace for a lifetime. In short, we need to know how certain food choices affect our bodies, so we can adjust our dietary choices accordingly to stay healthy and lose weight.

I'm looking forward to sharing information in future posts that will help steer us all to making better choices and lead us to a thinner me" in 2013. I hope my family will join in with personal stories that might prove helpful. If you have a story to tell, feel free to jump in and share your journey with us.
Watch for posts that continue my personal journey.

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