Battle Of The Flesh

Sharon Jane

Chioma remembered how great it felt to slip into her smallest jeans. She loved how she looked with her shirt tucked in. Her stomach was flat. Her waist was small. What a rush to see the reflection in the three-way mirror and realise it was really her! She loved that old phrase she had learned at a weight-management meeting: “Thin feels better than this food tastes.” Chioma was absolutely convinced that she would never give in to her old bad habits. It just felt too good to be slim.

That was three years ago. Chioma enjoyed the marvellous feeling for a fleeting ten months. Then over the next 14 months, she returned one size at a time back to the “ original” Chioma. What happened? Why was it so hard to keep the weight off? It was almost more defeating to have lost and gained the weight back than never to have lost it at all. She felt like a complete failure.

Have you ever wondered why you do the things you do? Does it sometimes seem like you have no control over your emotions or behaviour? Do you ever feel like you are waging a war?

Do The Maths And Get Moving

A general rule of thumb is for every 100 extra calories burned per day, you will lose about one pound of fat per month. For a 140-pound woman, that is the equivalent of walking about one mile. So extra calories equals approximately 20 pounds in one year; 400 equals 40,500 equals 50, and so forth. Of course this is assuming your caloric intake does not go up! Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? It is! Our greatest obstacle is discipline and consistency.

Don’t get frustrated and try to get that excess weight off too quickly. A month or two down the road, you will feel exhausted and irritable.That is not a lifestyle change. It’s an all-or-nothing approach, and it rarely works.

Do The Maths And

Decrease Your Imput

If you want to make a fast progress, take a look at the food you are eating. Decreasing the calories in your diet could save you one hundred calories per day. Just eliminate some of your fun foods or “empty” carbohydrates like crackers, salted breads and Irish potatoes that you thought were safe because they are fat free. It’s pretty easy to find small ways to reduce your caloric intake by two hundred to three hundred calories a day.

To lose that twenty pounds in six months, all you have to do is increase your activity (calorie burn) by two hundred calories a day and decrease your caloric intake two hundred calories per day. The key to losing fat permanently is to make changes you can live with. This is not about fast……it’s about permanent and painless active lifestyle.

In addition, let’s look at this principle: If your body were a car with a five-gallon tank, five gallons would be the maximum you could fuel up at one time. You’d be forced to burn fuel before you could take on more. Consider your body just that way and imagine that each gallon represents about one hundred calories.

That means you can only take in about five hundred calories at one time without spilling over into the reserved tanks. Of course, larger women and men might have larger six, seven, or eight-gallon tanks. our bodies process limited amounts of calories each time we eat. If we can’t use all the calories within a short period of time, we store them as fat.

My advice?

You can choose to adopt a more active lifestyle in general by:

• Parking farther from the store

•Taking stairs instead of the lift

•Walking

•Dancing

•Working in the yard

•Cultivating the habit of eating several small meals or substantial snacks throughout the day.

• And start early with breakfast and then eat and burn all day long.

These are examples of lifestyle activities that can make a big difference in your overall health and calorie burn.

Credit: Sharon Jane

Source: PM News, Nigeria