Overweight? How to be a good loser...

Most women who are overweight actually suffer from subclinical malnutrition and malnourishment. This doesn't always lead to immediate illness, but it does cause biochemical imbalances which may cause problems and actually slow down or preclude weight loss.

You have to avoid unbalanced diets, because temporarliy losing a few kilos is not worth any long term risk to your good health. 

Here is something most people are not aware of - to have good health and more importantly to lose weight, your thyroid must be functioning properly so you can get full benefits from what you eat. In fact you can be eating a perfect diet nutritionally, but still not get full benefits because of thyroid problems.

Basically the process is like this. Food is broken down in the stomach and intestines first. The nutrients are absorbed by the mucosa in the tract, and this can be impaired if you have hypothyroidism.

Food also has to be processed by enzymes from the pancreas, so it can then be converted by the liver to become biochemicaly available to the body. The nutrients are then transported by the blood to the cells where the nutrients and sugars are used to sustain life. Lack of certain nutrients can slow this process.

Summed up, if your thyroid is slow, you use less oxygen, which reduces the rate of heat production, and thus drops the rate of metabolic burn. So it becomes almost impossible to lose weight no matter how hard you try.

So to lose weight do this...

1. Make sure your thyroid is working properly so you can rule it ot as a barrier to weight loss. get a blod test for active thyroid hormones T3 and T4. Also find out how to do a Barnes Basal Temperature test, which is a strong indicator of a lazy thyroid.

2. Eat frequent small meals - I follow the Zone dietary recommendations from Dr Barry Sears.

3. Eat more vegetables, the fresher the better. One way to lose more weight is to start and maintain a home vege garden. I like my own food, and tend to eat a lot more of it, because it tastes so good straight from the garden.

4. Of course avoid refined carbos like white rice, anything with white flour, and sugars especialy the white stuff.

5. Avoid everything you can with artificial anything - stabilisers, flavour enhancers, colours, preservatives etc. There is a lot of information now linking toxicity and hard to shift fat. I will write other articles on that, becasue it is crucial to your fat loss efforts long term.

6. it would be good to get a nutritional evalution. Your doctor can organise this, and it will pinpoint any blood deficiencies of vital nutrients. A friend of mine just had one done. She found that despite her 20 minutes a day plus of full sun exposure, she was still vitamin D deficient. A simple fix - supplement, but the point is she thought her vitamin D intake was adequate when in fact it wasn't.

7. Another stressor on your system is caffeine. I love my morning plunger coffee, but I limit it to one cup a day. And every now and again I take a few days off during a simple detox regime which I use to give my body a rest. Maybe one day I will give it away altogether.

8. Never ever starve yourself. Your body will automatically go into fat conservation mode and slow down your metabolic rate even more.

9. Believe it or not, weight loss efforts are often undermined by friends and family, OR ourselves. Many of us fear long term success, becasue it is a big adjustment to make. Often it is wise to see a psychologist to bring any conflicts into the open, and the right counsellor will enable you to create coping strategies so your weight loss success is permanent, not transitory. 

There are a lot more tactics and strategies to use in your eight loss efforts but these are what I would start with.

Finally, use a weight loss and exercise mentor. A 20 year study at Stanford University proved that 64% of exercisers who used a phone coach once a month were still working out 6 months later. Only 4% of self directed starters were still at it. Fitness by Phone has results showing over 90% of clients stick with their program with our weekly mentoring calls.

Don't destroy your best chance of success at long term weight loss. Get the right support professionals to help you know what you are working with by discovering deficiencies, overcome any self sabotage behaviours and create new exercise and eating habits that stay with you for the rest of your life.