weight loss exercise

There are varieties of tips available on weight loss if you go through health magazines regularly. Some of these tips actually work, and others don't. Those of them suggesting pills, weight loss supplements and fad diets usually don't work. Exercise and Diet are those tips that work most of the times. However, the weight loss industry is ridden with myths and deceptive information, and people often tend to twist the truths, either because of their own advantage or out of plain ignorance. In this article three such weight loss myths are discussed.

First Myth: Relying on Cardio exercises alone will help you lose weight: Even though it is true that cardio exercises can help you loose fat, it is not true that this is the only type of weight loss exercise available. Another good and effective option is aerobic workout. As a matter of fact, the amount of fat you will lose doing either cardio or aerobics is almost same. On the other hand, weight lifting is better than both cardio and aerobics, in the sense that it not only helps you burn fat during the workout, but even after that!

Second Myth: Instant reduction of fat is possible: This is not at all true and I am sure that any weight loss expert will agree to this. Under any conditions you cannot force your body to reduce fat instantaneously no matter what type of workouts you perform. If you do only crunches and leg lifts frequently in the hope of reducing belly fat, you will notice that instead of reducing your belly fat, you will reduce the muscle mass that resides beneath the abdomen. For this purpose you should eat a healthy diet that would speed up your metabolic rate and burn up your excess fat, instead of just focusing on crunches and leg lifts alone!

Third Myth: A rapid cut down on the intake of calorie reduces your body fat: This myth has tempted many obese persons to undertake crash dieting. In the hope of losing those extra pounds, people generally undertake a crash dieting programme; least realizing that crash dieting harms their bodies instead of helping them. The fact is that when you are fasting or starving, your body realizes that you are going to kill it and then it goes into the starvation mode. The metabolic rate of the body is slowed down while in the starvation mode and the muscles are burnt (instead of fat, which is kept in reserve) for producing energy. This way, you don't lose much fat at all; if anything, you lose your valuable muscles. You will gain extra weight more than you had previously once you return to your normal diet!

I sincerely hope that this article has successfully brought the real weight loss truths before you!

The Mayo Clinic Diet: Eat Well, Enjoy Life, Lose Weight. 254 Pages. Good Books. $25.99.
The Daily Beast’s William Boot reviews bestsellers to see which, if any, are readable. This week: The Mayo Clinic Diet.

Book: The Mayo Clinic Diet
Authors: The weight-loss experts at the Mayo Clinic
Pages: 254
Readable pages: 254
Sample line: “Carbohydrates, fats, protein…oh my!”

Listen up, fatso: The Mayo Clinic Diet is the best-selling diet book in America. It’s not because of the weight-loss prescriptions, which are rather obvious (“eat a healthy breakfast”). It’s because of the book’s writing, the happiness-enriched prose that can make even the girthiest among us feel like a swimsuit model. It’s the feel-good book of the year.

“This diet is not a fad,” writes the Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Donald Hensrud, a handsome, Charlie Crist-looking figure. What Hensrud and his team want is to make your diet as unobtrusive as possible. There will be no humiliations as in NBC’s The Biggest Loser. The Mayoites urge you to “find your eating place”—the part of house you’d like to diet in. “The cool thing about burning calories,” they write, “is that the possibilities are almost endless.”

In an introductory lesson, the Mayoites suggest that you, the dieter, try to estimate half a cup of dry cereal—the point being that you’re probably eating more food than you think. Now, I know of no one, outside of a Kellogg’s executive, who would feel threatened by the outcome of this exercise. But the authors feel moved to add, “If you overestimated, don’t feel discouraged.”

Every diet promises comfort—no calculators, no food scales, etc. But The Mayo Clinic Diet is beatific in the extreme. The authors may work for one of the most cutting-edge medical facilities in the world, but they address the reader as if he or she had never before been in a supermarket. “Common opinions hold that vegetables and fruit don’t have much flavor or that they all taste the same,” they write. Held where, in kindergarten? Elsewhere: “Lettuce or fresh spinach is generally the foundation of a healthy salad.” Still elsewhere: “Keep in mind that you don’t need to like all varieties of vegetables and fruits, just some of them.”

The first section—called “Lose It!”—told me I could lose six to 10 pounds in two weeks. The advice is hearteningly intuitive. I should eat whole grains, fruits, vegetables (not all of them, just some of them). I should exercise 30 minutes a day. I should cut out sugar and snacks, and I shouldn’t eat while I watch TV. Flipping the pages, I kept waiting for the provocative angle, the hook that made The South Beach Diet or Atkins’ New Diet Revolution so memorable. But it never came, nor did any command I couldn’t perform while sitting in the business class section of Virgin Atlantic. The authors later say that this part of the book is “kind of like a boot camp.”

As the book moves from “Lose It!” to “Live It!”—aka, Week 3—a few hard numbers begin to appear. I should lose one to two pounds per week; I should eat 500 to 1,000 fewer calories a day; I should eat one-quarter of the Snickers Bar I find lying around Beast headquarters instead of the whole thing. There is plenty of smart advice: My daily serving of protein, for instance, should be no bigger than the size of a deck of cards.

The author of a diet book must be a gentle psychologist. Anyone who has picked up the thing has done so because they feel bad about themselves, because their vow to run a mile every morning has become a brisk walk to the pastry shop. The Mayo Clinic Diet tries the gentle approach. It’ll cite a “negative attitude” (“Exercise is painful and boring”) and contrast it with a “new attitude” (“I’ll call a friend to go walking and enjoy the beautiful day”). I’m guessing that most of us fall somewhere between clinical depression and unbearable happiness—and even that makes us feel better.

The Mayoites have performed a kind of provocative stunt here: they’ve done nothing provocative. They’ve put some brightly colored jogging shorts on some age-old wisdom. And one more thing: The Mayo Clinic Diet makes a bid to be the official diet of the Obama administration. The book is chock full of helpful hints called “Yes, I Can!” This is a diet for an optimistic age, for those who still believe in the audacity of hope.

Read it? Yes.

Previously reviewed William Boot:

U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton
I, Alex Cross by James Patterson
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Noah’s Compass by Anne Tyler
Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert

Plus: Check out Book Beast, for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books.

William Boot covered the war in Ishmaelia and wrote the Lush Places column for The Daily Beast. He now reviews bestsellers.

For more of The Daily Beast, become a fan on Facebook and for more books coverage follow Book Beast on Twitter.

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Losing weight and getting fit preoccupied Americans in 2009:

• Nearly one out of two American women, including high school girls, were on a diet.

• Over 40 billion was spent on branded diet plans.

• Children as young as 9 to 11 years old were sometimes or very often dieting.

Yet an epidemic of obesity continues to affect more people than ever before:

• Less than a third of adults enjoyed normal weight.

• Children were two to three times more likely to be overweight today than they were 30 years ago.

Can we begin to reverse these worrisome trends in 2010?
We can if we update our old views with new ways to look at fitness in the coming year.

Old View: It's hopeless! Efforts to lose weight are inevitably doomed to fail. Even if a person manages to lose weight, he or she will eventually regain the weight and add back even more.

New View: You can do it! Strategies for making healthier choices involving diet, physical conditioning and improved self-care are available to you and can be learned. Championing this view is Kelly Brownell, Ph. D., who heads the LEARN Program for Weight Management at Yale University. And thanks to widespread access to the Internet, peer counseling in online communities is expanding. Internet support may include food and exercise diaries, weekly counseling, online weight-loss lessons and motivational phone calls.

Old View: Thin is in! Most individuals, especially women, seek to lose weight because they have internalized the media's ultrathin ideal.

New View: Healthy is in! Health is replacing vanity as the primary reason for pursuing fitness and weight loss. In 2009, researchers reported that four healthy habits could reduce or eliminate 80 percent of major medical problems: eating a healthy diet, not smoking, exercising regularly and maintaining a normal body weight. This insight, combined with rising medical costs, is triggering a focus on fitness.

Old View: If you are fat, you are a bad person. Obesity is a personal problem caused by a lack of willpower.

New View: Obesity is a disease that is treatable. The cost of providing medical care per person has skyrocketed from $356 in 1970 to $8,160 in 2009. Moreover, in 2009, the cost of treating obesity-related medical problems reached $147 billion. Given these costs, obesity has become a public health concern requiring a multifaceted community-based approach. In response, community leaders in Albert Lea, Minnesota, implemented a comprehensive lifestyle program to improve the health and longevity of the city's residents. To increase employee productivity and reduce health insurance costs and absenteeism, corporate wellness programs are proliferating.

Old View: Low-fat diets are required to lose weight. Eating fat makes a person fat. To lose weight, a dieter needs to stick with low- or no-fat foods.

New View: Total calories actually determine weight. The total calories consumed by a person, whether from carbs, fats or proteins, determines weight. Since the goal is a balanced diet, the Mediterranean diet, which includes healthy fats, is recommended by the Mayo Clinic and the American Heart Association as a nutritionally sound and healthy eating plan. Nuts, which until recently were on dieters' “do not eat” lists, are making a comeback because of their health benefits, especially almonds, walnuts, cashews, pecans and macadamia nuts. Momentum is growing for mandating information on the caloric content of fast foods and food products.

Photo courtesy of everystockphoto.com

Old View: Medical intervention is needed. Weight-loss drugs or bariatric surgery can solve the problem of surplus pounds for many people, and advances in medicine can address obesity-related problems such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke and cancer.

New View: A healthy lifestyle is the best way. Prevention, rather than treatment of obesity-related medical problems, will move to the forefront because of the rising cost of medical insurance and healthcare. While the number of bariatric surgeries will continue to skyrocket, family physicians will increasingly write exercise prescriptions in lieu of drug prescriptions.

Old View: Ignore overweight children. Children who are overweight will outgrow their chubbiness, so kids' surplus pounds can be ignored.

New View: Help overweight children now! Dr. Robert Murray, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on School Health, is alarmed that nearly half of kids and teens are overweight or obese and, as a consequence, children's life expectancies are lower than their parents'. Treating childhood obesity is a serious medical problem that if ignored will place the child at risk for heart disease, diabetes and other serious medical conditions.

Old View: Don't ask, don't tell. Asking employees to modify their unhealthful behavior is an invasion of privacy and violates employees' right to choose their own lifestyle.

New View: Offer help, incentives and access to experts. In 2008, medical insurance premiums reached a record $15,609 for a family of four. Employers are proactively seeking to reduce costs (medical insurance, workers' compensation claims and absenteeism) by restructuring benefit programs. In increasing numbers, employees are being offered incentives to quit smoking or lose weight. They face penalties if they refuse to change habits that drive up the cost of healthcare.

Old View: Hard-core exercise one hour daily. Going to a gym daily for a 60-minute workout on a treadmill and resistance equipment is the best way to exercise.

New View: Diversity, fun and enjoyment. Thanks to popular television programs, dancing for fitness is back, particularly Zumba, a one-hour workout that fuses Latin rhythms with calorie-burning dance movements. Exergaming, such as Wii and Dance Dance Revolution, continues to grow in popularity with young and old alike. Michelle Obama has made the Hula-Hoop popular once again. The use of technologically sophisticated feedback gadgets, from pedometers to heart monitors, will expand. To attract members to the gym during tough economic times, more fitness centers will offer cardio cinema so members can watch a movie while exercising.

Will we continue to get fatter until 2018 when, according to research by Kenneth Thorpe, PhD, of Emory University, 40 percent of us will be obese (and another 33 percent overweight)?

If we are to succeed in reversing the obesity trends and mounting medical care costs, we'll have to find new approaches. And the more readily we learn from the past and update our understanding of the complex nature and causes of obesity, the more quickly we can successfully move into a healthy future.