Introduction Part 1 – What The Diet Industry Don’t Tell You Part 2 – Calories Part 3 –Why Sugar Really Stops You Losing Weight Part 4 – When You Already Avoid Sugar But Don’t Lose Weight Part 5 – Exercise – Don’t Miss This Out

IntroductionI will cut to the chase, but 99% of the information you hear and read about losing weight is a pile of kitten crap! If they told you then truth, then the diet industry would lose money and go out of business so read this and learn what they are NOT telling you. There was a TV program in the UK the other day, with a very very well known diet company and one of their previous representatives. He said, if diet companies actually helped you lose weight, their business would not last very long.

So, As you are reading this, I expect you would like to lose at least a stone or two, or have tried before, given up and tried again but got nowhere. Losing weight is not any different to achieving anything else in life, it is just a process. However when someone does not either know the steps or have the confidence and self belief then many people give up before they get to where they would like to be.

When you have the right information, people’s patience becomes much stronger because they believe and know what they are doing instead of getting confused on what they are supposed to be doing, but more importantly…why. At the end of the day, a great deal of it boils down to mindset. Will power could be one side but if you try and force something, then you can find it backfires so it is easier to take things one step at a time. Slow and steady wins the race.

We only have one chance at this life, so becoming slimmer and happier with ourselves for good is so much better than losing some weight and then letting it all pile back on again because you don’t understand why you were told to do something. So below here, are

the steps I took and suggest you look into taking and making sure each one is included.

If you do not do one of them, then you are missing out on something which could be the piece of the jigsaw you are missing. You can read about where I began and got to on my About Me page where I explain more indepth on how I learnt all of this and why it will help you a tremendous amount. Stop going from one thing to another, listening to multiple people, magazines, adverts.. much of it is a load of rubbish.

So, I would like to cover first though, some common reasons people fail to lose weight which you may or may not be able to relate to. If you do, then I hope my views shed some light and give you the ah ha moment and motivation to get going in the right direction.

Up until now you have probably read so many articles, success stories but get a sense that the media, magazines to tv are leaving out important pieces of information or just on purpose not telling you the whole story which is why I created this site as I am fed up with it and you deserve to know all you need to know.

Part 1 -Marketing – Tv, Radio, Magazines – Are set out to misguide you Fat Free Is WRONG! – Avoid anything that says Fat Free

One of the main principles of losing weight is to avoid processed sugar, not fat! (not yet anyway) What you need to remember is when you see something advertised as Fat

Free, avoid it. It boils down to, sugar is worse for you than fat! Absolutely. Do they tell you this? nope! ( I will explain shortly why it’s an awful sight worse for you than fat)The whole diet industry tells you to avoid anything along the lines of chocolate, cake and biscuits.

Yup, that is true but it is how your body reacts to these and the ingredients inside them that can shed more light on how to lose weight, than just avoiding them and not seeing the bigger picture. People generally know to avoid them because they are .. fattening. However, do you know why they are fattening (it’s not just because they contain fat). Once you do then you are on the way to understanding why you need to avoid them which makes your journey so much more successful.

We have all been fooled into believing that fat makes us fat, but it does not make us fat anymore than eating to much carbs, protein or anything in abundance which goes over the calories per day. Fat does have more calories per gram than protein and carbohydrates so in a way it can be easier to put on weight by eating fat, but fat does not make you put on weight like they industry tells you it does.

What companies do to food when it is advertised as Fat Free is replace the fat with sugar, which is actually worse for you. Cut out the processed sugar and you will notice a hell of a difference quicker than going on a low fat diet. I will go into this further in Part 3 in a moment.

Part 2 -Calories - (Bear with me – please don’t go *sigh* lol) I have heard this before, because hear what I have to say before you think what I am going to say is the same as everything else you hear. If you go online, there are so many websites that give you tools to lose weight, from Weight Watches to all the websites out there to get

you on their site and sell you something even if you do not realise they are.

Just remember a woman generally needs 2000 calories to maintain her weight, and a guy needs around 2500. Yup, this maybe different from person to person but go by these figures as a baseline and you will do fine, by following the rest of this website.

Example – Say you are a woman and 3 stone over weight. To maintain your weight at your current size when you are overweight, you may need to eat say 3000 calories a day if you are a chocoholic, love cake or just generally eat a lot as many people do.

So, if you look at the calories you are eating per day and change a few things so you eat 2000 , you are instantly eating 1000 calories less a day. So because your body needs the extra 1000 calories to maintain your weight, it does not have them view food so where do it get them? Your body fat.

So as your body fights with itself about the calories it needs, it takes it from your body fat as the replacement fuel, and you lose weight. No it won’t happen over night, but the right information, mindset you can achieve an incredible amount more in the same time you would go on a mainstream diet and get nowhere fast. So next time you look about going in a diet, don’t as a diet will just make you rebound.

Just track the calories and you can easily lose weight by using your own body against itself, but in a good way. Just like when you boil water and it rises up the pan, take the heat off and the water naturally goes back to a level state. Your body is the same.. especially when it comes to cutting out processed sugar which is an evil carbohydrate.

Take the boiling pan of water off the hob, the water level naturally goes down

Take processed sugar out of your diet, your body fat naturally goes back down

As with anything in life, there are exceptions like if you are female and have whats called PCOS. There are ways to combat this which will be talked about shortly. In general though, if you are eating food with sugar in every day, you will notice a difference so the effect of sugar will come in a moment.

Maintenance Mode – Avoid

What you need to also bear in mind is you may need to eat more to lose weight. Sound crazy? It doe’s but its absolutely true. If you are someone who skips breakfast, a meal or just tries to live on as little number of calories a day, you are going to completely rebound in weight. That weight you lose you will put back on. Maybe not in the next few weeks but over the months you are trying to lose it, it will go back on.

But why? If you cut your calories to much, for example if a woman cuts her calories to 1400 a day, then your body can in time, store fat as an emergency instead of burning it off. A friend of mine began to eat breakfast and added several hundred calories to their eating per day. When I went round a few weeks later, they have very noticeably lose weight. Your body needs fuel, even if you are sitting on the sofa doing nothing so give it what it needs and don’t restrict it.

But I am Always Hungry – What do I do?

As I have mentioned, a huge mistake people make when looking to lose weight is not eat enough. They may also eat the wrong types of food which gets digested very quickly, high in calories and leaves them hungry again very soon after. A bad example is macarni cheese with garlic bread, tastes wonderful but carbs are what we

have around our mid section. Do you know what the worst carbohydrate is you can eat? white bread? White rice? nope .. it’s sugar.

Most people don’t realise it’s a carb. Also bear that in mind as sugar can hide in many other forms which I will talk about later. Anyway,  You need to make sure you have protein in every single meal as protein fills you up more than carbohydrates or fat. This can be anything from chicken, turkey, tuna, salmon, cottage cheese to tofu if you are vegetarian.

Most of you would probably know that anyway, which is great but many do not realise protein is fantastic because your body needs it as building blocks to keep you healthy but also! it fills you up easier and longer than carbs or fat. When was the last time you had something like say a jam sandwich and still hungry half an hour later? A chicken and lettuce sandwich is so much better for you. Get your chicken from the local butcher to, it’s much better quality and cheaper to. I live on chicken breasts from my butcher, they are huge! because they are from decent chickens.

Supermarkets generally have much smaller breasts, lower quality and filled with water. Look around this site for an article I will write to compare the difference. With the Jam sandwich, because your body digests the bread and jam very very quickly but protein, it takes much much longer. It actually takes your body more calories to digest the protein to, bonus eh!

Part 3 - Why Sugar Stops You Losing Weight 

Now the Really REALLY important part. We all know sugar is bad for us, but most people do not know why. When you know why, it makes avoiding it much easier when you know what it is doing to you. I also mentioned at the top of this article is that sugar is worse for you than fat. So now, I will go into this in more detail as it can easily be the biggest reason people don’t lose weight.

What many people do not realise is that sugar is worse for you that fat. What sugar does, is raise your insulin levels and promotes fat storage. <– MAJOR

So your body uses sugar as energy whilst you go about your daily life. It doesn’t need to fat , so thinks.. what shall I do with this? So it stores it..and you put on weight. Also, most people do not realise how much sugar they are having a day, even if you say.. but I don’t eat cake or chocolate.  It’s in more food than you think, right down to cereal bars that are promoted to help you lose weight or advertised as .. again.. fat free or … only 120 calories for example. 

The calories are in a way, irrelevant if it’s got sugar as that sugar will spike your insulin levels and any food you eat for the next 24 hours will end up being stored as far more than if you didn’t have the sugar. The trouble is since the 1970’s the world got turned upside down and the governments advertised a low fat died as heart disease was on the rise.

What happened since then is that heart disease increased dramatically as soon as the low fat diet was introduced, but why? It

all boils down to one main factor – They replaced fat with sugar. Have a look at the image below which is from a well known brand of low fat yogurt. Notice the fat is very low but the carbohydrates is high, then look at the sugars!. Pretty much all sugar, to keep the taste as there is no fat. What you can also see, is in the ingredients they have Fructose.. which is another name for sugar but if you read the label.. would you notice it, or notice it more if it said sugar? 

Weight out 12grams of sugar on a pair of scales at home and it works out to be a pretty heafty amount. Say for example, you have a couple of yogurts a day for a month. That’s 12 x 30 x 2 which is 720grams which is approaching a KG of sugar per month.

That’s alot! and thats only just counting low fat or no fat yogurts. Add in chocolate, cake, biscuits, alot of the cereals to all the other processed food you don’t realise contains sugar. Look at the ingredients of the food you buy and if sugar is in the top 3 of the list of ingredients, don’t buy it.

Anyway, Without fat in a food product, the food item itself soon looses its taste and texture and can easily become like cardboard, so to compensate for this, food manufactures replace the fat with sugar to keep the taste there. Then they trick you on adverts saying, it low fat or no fat but people do not realise that sugar is so so much worse.

Any food you see in the fridge in supermarkets, on the cake isle or anywhere else you see fat free or low fat advertises is most likely to have a huge amount of sugar to compensate. This includes the very popular, low fat yogurt which when eaten, are preventing you from losing weight but are advertised to help you lose weight.

When you listen to the tv adverts next for low fat yogurts or cereal for example, listen to their wording. Most likely they will say – “eating this could help you lose weight” , they never “eating this will help you lose weight” so because they are not lying, the tv advertising agencies let them get away with it.

The same goes for.. it tastes wondering and contains no fat.. but it’s what they don’t tell you which is harming you and preventing you from losing weight. Another example of marketing to trick you into eating sugar is a particular UK advert that says eat this breakfast produce for breakfast and lunch and help you lose weight.

Of course it will, because you are eating far less calories but – The cereal itself has a great deal of sugar in it You could eat cucumber for breakfast and lunch and lose weight so the cereal itself has

nothing in it that justifies their statement. Just marketing for you and people who do not read between the lines.

For a great dessert, which not just satisfies a sugar craving but is damn good for you is Greek Yogurt and blueberries. I have the Total Greek Yogurt , either 0% or 2% fat and frozen blueberries from Tesco.

It tastes lush as the Welsh say heh Total Greek Yogurt from Fage is one of the very few 0% Yogurt’s that doesn’t get pumped full of sugar and Greek Yogurt in general is very good for you, unlike all the other yogurt our there which is flippin bad for you.

I have the 2% Total Greek Yogurt as it’s good fat and does taste creamier but also, your body does need fat to keep healthy. Again, the media confuse people by supplying them with the wrong or

steer you in the wrong direction.  You can also get small pots of 0% for £1 in Tesco at least, so great for taking to work. At home, the large tubs of 2% Total is perfect as the natural fat is good fat, which our internal organs actually require and tastes a little better to. So why does all this sugar make me put on weight? or stop me losing weight? The answer is Insulin.

When you eat a steady healthy diet that has sugar from natural sources such as fruit (blue berries for example) and vegetables, all good. Add in processed sugar that’s put into food from low fat yogurt to ice cream and cakes then isulin comes into the equation.

Very Important – Read this next part a couple of times!

What happens is your sugar levels rise due to the sugar in the food you are eating so your body produces insulin to come along and lower your blood sugar levels. The catch is, as your body is using the sugar for fuel, and insulin is playing its part, the body sees fat as not needed for fuel as it has the sugar, and stores it.

Therefore, you put on weight. For years, I ate normal food but also a great deal of biscuits, cake and chocolate and thought – “ahh its ok, I will burn it off tomorrow” But because my body was using the sugar, I did not realise I was fighting such a losing battle. In June 2012 I decided I would cut down the cake and chocolate, and lost weight pretty damn quickly.

I was still eating food I should not have at the time, but because I was eating far less sugar, my body used the sugar and fat as fuel, instead of just sugar. Now there’s more to it than that, as I mentioned good fat, bad fat. There are also calories and exercise which benefits a great deal but if you have several stone in weight to lose, reducing sugar will help you lose weight just by doing that by itself. Then you can add in other methods to lower your weight but reduce that sugar, and see for yourself.

Part 4 - When You Already Avoid Processed Sugar But Can’t Lose Weight So, no more talking about sugar. If you eat it, cut it down or out and replace with something natural. If you don’t eat much, or anything major with sugar but can’t lose weight, then this could be down to a few things -

1. Eating to much white bread, paste or rice as these turn into sugar in the body pretty quick so wholemeal is better. Then again on the GI , the numbers compared from white bread to wholemeal bread are not that far apart, but it’s one thing to look at in your day to day eating. 

2. Generally eating to many calories but not realising. Don’t get me wrong, I love my food and eat healthy compared to my old days but still love eating but know staying away from certain things and exercising properly, keeps me how I am and so can  you.

3. Just a generally slow metabolism – This can be sped up easily by the correct exercise ;)  This is where people with a slow metabolism (alot of us probably do) go in the gym, do dull steady cardio and sweat but don’t burn any fat after the gym, unless you go things right. 

4. Conditions that stop you losing weight such as PCOS, which has a side effect where you easily store fat much more than someone else. This can be combated with the exercise I am going to mention below to melt the fat away. Saying that, 80% of losing weight is what you eat so now you know all of the above, on the next section is how you should be using the gym and not how most people do it.

By doing things the right way, you burn a shed load of fat in the gym, and after the gym for 2-3 days until your next session. With your body having a higher metabolism, repairing itself from your gym session, you burn calories an awful lot of alot more whilst you are sleeping, at work or just watching tv. It all adds up and works wonders So, how do we speed up your metabolism and burn fat all day, all week long.. 

Part 5 -Exercise Part 1 – Yup. It’s got to be done

Believe me, when I was at school I hated hated! Exercise with a vengeance. I remember many occasions being picked 2nd to last with my friend being picked last purely because I was so fat and unfit.

So I know many of you maybe thinking, I really don’t want to do it but again, believe me it makes a hell of a difference when done

right when loosing weight but many people do it wrong. Many people join the gym, slog it out and lose a few lb then give up or do the same routine every time and get nowhere fast. 

They may go every day and do the same routine and not see any results. As I mentioned before, you see so so many people doing the same speed on the treadmill, cross trainer for half an hour at a time.  Slow state cardio which what it’s called is the totally wrong thing to do, complete crap and will get you nowhere fast.   Which is maybe why many of you are reading this?

Also, as soon as they get off the machine, their heartbeat goes back down and you stop burning calories.  Learn how it’s supposed to be done, and you will feel the complete difference, see a difference in such a short period of time and best of all.. people will SEE a difference in you .. so read on..

How to Exercise Properly and Feel the Benefit To! Many do the exercise but then have a cappuccino or muffin afterwards (I have seen it myself in the gyms I goto ) I have gone from disliking exercise so much I avoided school classes to doing cardio pretty much everyday and loving it. Exercise per week boils down to 3 rules for men and women! which may come as a shock to many women reading this.

Weight Training 2-3 times a week Cardio Interval Training 2-3 times a week for 20-25 minutes

Now I can hear most women reading this.. oh no.. I can’t do weights, that’s just for men and I will bulk up. That’s a pile of even bigger kitten crap so keep reading! If you have time and exercise 3-5 times a week, you can easily burn 200-500 calories off per session when done right with even more calories over the next couple of days even if you are not in the gym.

Over a few weeks, this add’s up but so many do not keep up with it. If you find motivation a issue, classes like circuit training and

boxfit are good to get going. You will lose weight but as you get good at cardio, you will find it stagnates. Which is where you learn how to do it properly whereas everyone else is wondering why they can’t lose bodyfat.

The  better way.. So does 2-3 times a week of cardio sound better?  20-25 minutes a time instead of 40 minutes or an hours class? That’s how much cardio I do now, and 20 minutes a time max. None of this slow, borrrrrinng ZZZzzzz same speed cardio you see people doing and look utterly depressed to.

This is where you want to look at HIIT which stands for High Intersity Interval Training. All it consists of is taking a cardio exercise, and slogging it out as hard as you can for a short period of time. Then rest, before you go again. Repeat this 10-15 times and you get the following benefits -

It’s damn quick to do – 5 minute warmup 15-20 mins max of interval cardio instead of 30-60 minutes of

slow steady boring cardio 5 minute warmdown It gets the heart rate up and burns fat very efficiently You burn fat for hours, if not a day or so later and that’s just

doing cardio right.Bear in mind, your leg muscles as a example, will be pushed harder so you will find you become toned up more, and burn more calories as your muscles tone up. You can do this in the gym on the cross trainer but even better is a bike with the best way by far is the rowing machine!

2 minute warmup 20 seconds full pelt 40 seconds rest Repeat this 10 times – Sound easy? give it a go..  ;)

If you don’t want to do this in a gym, run down your road for 20 seconds, turn around and jog back, then sprint again. So you now

know what most people are doing wrong in the gym – I will write a seperate article on interval training on this site. So here is the even more vital part for anyone male or female, who wants to shed bodyfat - Exercise Part 2 – Weight Training

The two main issues that rise here is women thinking either or both of the following – 1. Weight Training is just for guys 2. If you weight train I will bulk up

Both are completely wrong and every single girl my brother has spoken to in his Personal Training career has had the Ah Ha! Moment once he has explained it to them.

Men AND women weight training is a superb way to burn calories and burn stomach fat.

Long story short, lifting some weights tears the micro fibres that makes up muscles. They need to repair, so where do you think muscles get that energy to do so? – Bodyfat!

Contrary to what many women think, when guys see women weight training they have the utter most respect for them as they know the benefits that weight training brings.  So lower sugar, combine cardio and weights 2-3 times a week and you absolutely melt fat and feel damn good to 

As you are using interval training and weight training, your body is burning calories all day, all week long. Love it! When was the last time Weight Watchers or the awful weight loss tv programs told you to do that? Pretty much never. If they do mention it then don’t tell you why, if they did as I mentioned then the diet industy

wouldn’t make so much money out of people who don’t understand why.

They just talk about your BMI, Low fat diet, exercise 3-5 a week.. blah blah blah kitten bloody crap – Old News lol and usually advised by looks like they are gaunt and doesn’t eat r workout properly themselves. So, You need to remember that our bodies are made up from bone and muscle so when we exercise via cardio we can actually loose some muscle.

This is why it is important to eat enough protein each day, to keep full but also to keep our muscle. How many times have you seen someone be on a diet and become gaunt looking? Think back and see if you can think of any. They may look slim but their face, neck, arms and legs can become untoned which means they have not actually lose all their weight via fat loss, but muscle loss to.

Perform some weight training exercises and you can easily keep your muscle but also gain some to and have a very sexy toned look and be the envy of your friends. Men would need to weight train for a long time before they looked like Arnie, with spot on diet like actual body builders do.

For us mere mortals both men and women can both do themselves wonders by integrating some weight training into their exercise routine. Women who do this, feel their confidence grow pretty much overnight and in just a few weeks see a difference in their body shape but you will NOT bulk up like guys do. So remember, women of any age do not have enough testosterone in their bodies to have biceps like men do and even then, men can take months to get there.

The benefit of weight training is that you burn calories as your muscles repair over the next 2-3 days whereas old school slow cardio, you can stop burning additional calories within the hour or getting off that treadmill. Don’t believe me? Have a read of this –

http://www.leanitup.com/why-you-need-to-lift-weights-women-too/ So to sum up -

Reduce or cut out processed sugar and replace with something like Greek Yogurt and blueberries

Make sure you are eating enough or your metabolism slows down -No skipping meals 

Start weight training 2-3 times a week – with the interval training cardio after your weights session or if you are to tired, on days you do not weight train.

That’s all – Weight / Fat loss doesn’t need to be complicated – If you already eat ok, and goto the gym.. get that cardio changed and weight training in. Do it   Lastly, be patient.  Take self photos every 2 weeks and over 12 weeks you will see an amazing difference   If you don’t know me, just to prove all of this works, here is a photo of me now and what I looked like in from Feb 2012 after losing 4lb away off 3 stone.  So get off that sofa and don’t look back 

 

http://www.simplygetfit.co.uk/