Build Health, Lose Weight, Tone up and Eat as much as you please!

Hello Brides to be,

Bespoke Bridal Fitness is a brand new high end personal training company based in London drawing on experience training numerous women to lose weight, look and feel better in themselves through a prescribed exercise regime and dietary and lifestyle modification. We are here to offer you as a forum member free advice on losing weight and toning up for the biggest day of your life. Now more than ever is the time you really have the motivation and drive to lose those extra pounds and look your best for the big day, making it more important than ever to follow the correct course and see amazing results.

This post will be followed up with information regarding the benefits of and how to effectively combine diet and exercise to maximise results, what a goal driven exercise program should look like and how to lose weight whilst never going hungry.

As information is posted please feel free to ask as many questions as you like and we shall clarify for you.

Believe me, the results YOU can achieve will be almost too good to be true.

Eating For Weight Loss, Not Mathematic Distinction

Unfortunately losing weight is not, as most believe as simple as expending more calories than you are intaking. This is a huge oversimplification and most of you probably know somebody; it may even be you, who eats like a bird yet just cannot shift those extra inches around the middle. Thats not to say that calorie restriction never leads to weight loss, it does 9 times out of 10..but at what cost?

A calorie restricted diet is not maintainable long term and is not especially healthy, feeling hungry, lacking energy, suffering headaches, aches and pains, bowel dysfunction. These are not desirable side effects from your weight loss attempts. Usually after the distress of dieting there will come a time when you stop restriction yourself, and lo and behold the weight you worked so hard to shift pops straight back (often with a little added extra for good measure).

What if you could look better, feel better, have more energy, sleep better, perform better all without ever counting a calorie, a point or remembering whether today is a green day or what you will do if you go to work without your shake? On top of these clear benefits, you will be losing weight. Intrigued?

"A calorie,is a calorie, is a calorie" right? Afraid not, research has shown time and again that food quality and type is far more important than food quantity during weight loss. Did anybody ever really believe 1000 calories worth of brocolli and 1000 calories worth of donuts had the same affect on your body composition? Probably not, but most fat/calorie restriction diets are set up on this assumption.

You should: be able to eat to satiety

  be able to eat unlimited nutritious food

  enjoy what you eat

  be relaxed and comfortable in your dietary habbits

  lose weight without it adversely affecting other parts of your life

There has never been a proven link in the scientific literature between dietary fat intake and weight gain. People find this astounding when you consider the reputation fat has received from the media and unfortunately also the government. However there is a huge volume of work documenting a link between excess carbohydrate intake and weight gain. Again, surprising to many. It seems Dr Atkins was along the right lines with his diet as far back as the early 1970's, it is just unfortunate that his thinking completely went against conventional wisdom at the time and as such he was cast out and the research was largely ignored. Through the low fat craze of the 1980's and 90's people continued to gain weight at an alarming rate. In recent years this has started ringing alarm bells for the scientific community and people are once again concluding that dietary carbohydrate intake is the root of weight gain.

The next 2 posts will outline first the ins and outs of how your body processes food and gains/loses fat and then how to implement a healthy, enjoyable fat loss diet.

Your diet should be aimed at building health. Base your actions in science instead of marketing hyperbole.

Hormonal Response to Diet

As some of you may well be aware, a number of hormones act as messengers to control the inner workings of your body. The jobs of some of these hormones among other functions is to signal fat release from storage cells to be burned as energy (good) and to trigger fat storage and accumulation (bad). 

Let me say at the outset, no hormone is inherently bad, they are all essential and you would not function without them, however the body should be in hormonal balance (homeostasis) and when this balance is tipped in favour of certain hormones issues will start to arise.

Insulin is the most important hormone relating to weight management. If you master insulin control you will master your weight. Insulin is responsible for controlling blood sugar, storing energy in the liver and transporting glucose (sugar) from the blood to the cells. Insulin is like the key for the lock on your bodies cells, without insulin the cells cannot unlock to allow glucose to transfer in from the blood.

Insulin is released in response to dietary carbohydrate intake, all carbohydrates (sugars and starches) break down to glucose as this is the form the body uses for energy. If too much carbohydrate is taken in, especially high glycemic load carbohydrates that trigger a large insulin response the bodies cells get overloaded with too much glucose and start building an immunity to it - this is known as insulin resistance. A nasty downward spiral follows as the body produces more and more insulin to try and overcome the problem, leading instead only to further resistance and damage. The resistance means your body becomes inefficient at allowing glucose into the cells to be burned as energy, leaving no choice but for it to be kept in the blood stream and turned into triglycerides to be dumped in the cells as bodyfat.

Over time this insulin resistance leads to increased fat storage, particularly around the midsection and eventually type 2 diabetes, as well as being linked to things such as atherosclerosis, heart disease and cancer - not good.

The key therefore to controlling your weight is managing insulin, if you can increase your insulin sensitivity, by minimising the amount of glucose the body has to deal with the cells will regain their sensitivity and insulin will once more be able to unlock the door to the cells and allow the energy to be burnt off instead of stored. Gladly it really is not that difficult either, restrict the intake of carbohydrates, particularly highly processed fast absorbing (think sugar, white flour) ones and the weight will begin to drop off consistently. 

Eating to Manage Insulin

Nutritional guidelines should be based upon the relevant scientific research, unfortunately most in mainstream society are designed simply to sell products. There is a huge amount of research on low carbohydrate diets for weight management, proving it works. There are plenty of options all bracketed under the 'low carb' approach, while the minor details vary the general guidelines are the same throughout. Avoid high glycemic load, carbohydrate dense foods such as sugars, grains, dairy and processed foods/drinks.

A favourite is the paleolithic diet (http://www.thepaleodiet.com/) - it is amazingly healthy and very easy to follow, no counting or measuring it just ends up being low carb by default.

The premise is mankind evolved to eat certain foods and since the invention of agriculture not enough time has elapsed for the human genetic code to significantly change therefore we should still eat the foods we evolved to eat. Meaning anything that can be hunted (meat, fish, poultry) or gathered (veg, fruit, eggs, nuts, seeds, berries, mushrooms). Food processing should in all but a select few circumstances be avoided (such as olive oil), meaning, bread, pasta, readymeals, takeaways, fizzy drinks etc. are out.

By definition eating like this leads to good macronutrient (protein, fat, carbohydrate) ratios because you are avoiding the processed nutritionally useless high carbohydrate foods that are so common in the modern diet.

I highly recommend this diet to anybody/everybody, whether to lose weight or simply look and feel better and improve health. The science is there and cannot be argued with, IT WORKS!

Wouldn't you like to lose weight and feel better/not feel hungry/have lots of energy/increase health?