As we age, our metabolism slows up to 5 percent per decade, according to AARP’s October/November 2012 edition. The magazine states that to help fight seniors’ susceptibility to chronic inflammation associated with heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis, it’s important to “shed excess pounds, eat a good diet, and exercise.” The same can be true for fighting mental decline and unnecessary surgical procedures as we progress in years.
John Voelz, therapist and partner of Healthy Habits Key To Wellness of Algonquin, also mentions the dangers of belly fat.
“The resulting consequences include heart disease and stroke, type 2 diabetes, and various types of cancer. A large belly also puts a mechanical stress on the lumbar spine resulting in low back pain,” he said.
It is for all of the above reasons that I have chosen weight loss and maintenance as a top New Year’s Resolution suggested for myself and all of my Sun City friends. On Jan. 3, PBS aired a show titled “10 Things You Need to Know About Losing Weight.” The 60-minute show, admitting that losing weight can be “the hardest thing that we attempt to do,” discussed recent British research uncovering simple ways that any aged person can do to shed pounds and keep them off. Here are the ten tips resulting from their discoveries and how we, on our own, can “shed weight without starving (no fad diets) with the help of science:”
1. Don’t skip meals. Especially when skipping breakfast, an MRI Scan revealed the hungry brain chose fattening foods over lower calorie items.
2. Change plate size. A simple change of plate size from 12 to 10 inches will help you eat less. You’ll eat less because we tend to eat all the food on our dishes.
3. Choose low calorie food over high calorie food. Even small changes in our diet can reap huge results over a period of time. An example of this is choosing skimmed milk over 2 percent milk and definitely over whole milk.
4. Count your calories even of healthy foods. Tests using urine samples to determine indviduals’ metabolism found that the body’s rate of burning calories was not always to blame. Instead, when these same dieters kept track of their daily calorie count, researchers discovered that the dieters did not take into account the fruits and vegetables they consumed.
5. Protein controls hunger pains. You can “fool your brain” by eating protein such as meat, beans, eggs, and fish, which keep you feeling full longer.
6. Liquid foods also make you feel fuller longer. For example, the water content in soups increases the overall volume of this food in the stomach. It, therefore, takes longer for the liquid in the soup to drain out of the stomach, thus, fooling the brain into a more full status longer. In fact, soup can still burn off calories and weight while we sleep.
7. Limit your selection of food colors. Due to early choices of food made necessary for the migratory, hunting prehistoric man, evolution still plays an important role in our selection of food items today. Under testing, we still choose a multi-colored diet or variety of food colors over solid-colored foods, which might tend to be much more healthy. This becomes a real problem at the multi-colored buffet where we also tend to choose and eat 30 percent more food than on a limited plate.
8. A calcium-rich diet proves effective in burning fat and calories. Choose low-fat dairy items such as milk, cheese, and yogurt for best results. In just two weeks of testing, double the amount of fat in the high calcium dieter (as opposed to the low calcium dieter) was removed through the individual’s feces.
9. Exercise as strongly as your health will allow. Fat has been found to continue to be burned off in an “after burn” as late as 24 hours after the initial exercise performance. Strenuous exercise using cross-training and intervals of different intensities of exercise have proven to use up carbon dioxide, oxygen, and fat and calories initially. The next day, the body is then forced to burn fat or more calories off in the body.
10. Even small changes made in your daily “movement” routine can burn more calories. You don’t have to join a gym to become more active. Just move – climb the stairs, walk more, stand and bend, and reduce your sitting time. Become more active, but choose your diet carefully, and you don’t have to eat more!
