Are you fed up with losing weight only to gain it back all again? Hi everybody, this is Mike Uhrlaub and another episode of Power Your Life by Flex PT. It’s great to see everyone today. I want to talk about how you keep the weight off once you have lost it. One of the issues with diets is that when you don’t change your lifestyle, after you’ve lost the weight, you will put the weight back on. If you don’t make a commitment to make a complete change in how you live and what you eat, you continue those bad habits and your weight will come back on. There’s no question about it. This is a common problem and we see this all the time. It’s very, very frustrating for the diameter for everybody as you spend all that time and energy to lose weight in the first place.
For a diet to become a lifestyle change, it must be sustainable for the long-term, which is one of my requirements. One of the things that I learned in my weight loss journey over time was that if a program is not something that you can fit into your life easily, it’s not something that will allow you to change. You’re not going to be able to change what you do. For that diet to be sustainable for the long term, it must be flexible and customizable to fit into your life. I’m like everybody else, we are all busy today and if you don’t have a way for your food plan to fit into your life, you’re just not going to be able to continue to follow through with it.
Like I mentioned before, that’s when the bad habits start to return. Next thing you know, that’s when you’re back to eating pizza, McDonald’s, and Taco Bell, allowing the weight to return. Even if you’re working out every day, that weight will return if you don’t stay on track with your diet. Staying on track with your diet is the key, as I can’t stress that enough. I always say you can’t exercise your way out of a bad diet, and that’s one of the reasons why I really like intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting fits in well with a busy lifestyle and it’s easy to keep up with. Personally, I follow the 16 and 8 program, meaning I only eat during an eight-hour period each day. However, when you do eat during that eight-hour period, what you eat is very important.
One of the diets that is out there, which works very well with the intermittent fasting method, is the Paleo diet. What exactly is the paleo diet? Well, it’s a healthy whole foods approach that makes the perfect companion diet to intermittent fasting. If your goals are improving your health and losing weight, transitioning to a Paleo diet it’s worth exploring during intermittent fasting, The idea behind the Paleo diet is to eat food that our bodies are genetically engineered to thrive upon ,obviously cutting out all the processed foods and junk food. To give you a very basic idea, the foods that you can eat would be things fruits and vegetables, meat, seafood, nuts and seeds, and healthy fats. The foods to avoid would be sugar, processed food, grains, legumes, starches, and dairy.
For some people, they will eat dairy if their bodies tolerate it. However, many will consume butter even if they avoid all the other dairy, since it mainly consists purely of fat and it doesn’t have the milk proteins, which commonly cause problems. One of those things that’s nice about the Paleo diet is that it’s very flexible and customizable. You can make it as loose or as strict as you want to. You can tweak it and change this diet to fit your own needs. Basically, you just want to start by implementing what’s easy, focusing on cutting out sugar and processed foods first.
Something that’s important to realize is that fat isn’t all bad for you. While you certainly want to stay away from fried chicken, donuts, and vegetable oil, generally, there are healthy fats that are good for you. This would include things like grass-fed butter, avocado, olive oil, and coconut oil. Those fats will keep you healthy and satisfied and eating these fats will also help you lose weight.
Let’s talk a little bit more about intermittent fasting and how it can fit in well with the Paleo diet. So light paleo, intermittent fasting is flexible. It’s also easy to do and it’s something that you can give a try, no matter what your dietary restrictions or your budget is. The idea is that you simply don’t eat for long stretches of time. Now, I don’t want to let that word “long” scare you here.
There are a few different ways that you can approach this, but what it boils down to, is that you want to not eat for a least a 12 hour long stretch period of time. Ideally though, you want to be able to build that up to more to about 16 hours of not eating. For a lot of people, that may seem like a taught long time to go without food; however, keep in mind that you are actually asleep for 8 of those hours, which means that 12 to 16 hours without food doesn’t seem quite so impossible anymore. Let’s say for example, that you eat a nice healthy filling paleo dinner with lots of healthy fats in it, around 6:00 PM. Since you’re nice and full, it’s going to be easy to skip your usual late-night snacking. Then, let’s say you go to bed around 10:00 PM and then you wake up at 6:00 AM the next morning. Instead of eating a breakfast, all you do is grab yourself a big cup of coffee and you go about your morning routine. You might get through to maybe 9:00 AM and then you might start to get a little hungry, but it’s nothing that you can’t manage. The good news is that you’re already about 14 hours into your intermittent fast with two more hours to go. Then, you grab an early lunch or have a late breakfast, or you might have a glass of water or another cup of coffee. It’s easy to make it for the full 16 hours.
If you stick to this routine for a few days, your body will get used to it. Once that happens, you’re going to notice that you’re not even hungry until about 11:00 AM rolls around. Since you’re eating healthy meals with lots of filling protein and fat, don’t be surprised to find yourself having only two meals a day instead of the regular three meals and two snacks. Why is it important though, to not to eat for at least 12 hours at a time? The answer to that is because that’s about how long it takes for your insulin levels to go down to a point where all sorts of good stuff starts to happen and that’s where you can switch from burning sugar to burning fat.
We want to get ourselves into that fat burning mode to avoid putting more weight back on. We can lose the weight that we want to lose, and then we can have a sustainable weight loss method. When you get into that mode where you’re burning fat, it starts to do all sorts of internal repairs on a cellular level, which is why fasting is actually thought to be a way to help heal your body and actually prolong your life. When you combine a paleo diet and intermittent fasting, there’s a lot of crossover between those two. First, the paleo diet is naturally low in carbs and sugars, unlike processed food and sugary treats.
On the paleo diet, you can indulge in a little honey or real maple syrup. You can have some fruits or some Carbridge veggies, like sweet potatoes for example. Overall, the paleo diet is much easier on your blood sugar levels than the typical Western American diet. Why is this important when it comes to intermittent fasting? Well, that’s because of the sugar, the blood sugar levels, and insulin. They all work together. If your blood sugar levels are high for getting up there, your body will produce a lot of insulin, causing it to take longer for those levels to go back down once you get back to fasting. This means that it takes longer for the beneficial effects of fasting, like burning body fat and the internal repairs, to kick in. However, there’s other reasons why eating a paleo diet can be very beneficial when you’re practicing intermittent fasting and vice versa. When you’re eating a paleo diet, you’re eating a much healthier diet than the standard American diet. You’re having lots of fresh fruits and veggies, quality proteins, and healthy fats, and those are the building blocks in nutrients that your body needs to do the internal repairs. Along the same lines, incorporating fasting into your paleo diet will enhance the beneficial effects of eating in a healthier way. Going back to blood sugar, spikes with blood sugar and consuming wheat and sugar can cause a lot of food cravings. For example, you had a slice of pizza or a plate of pasta and 30 minutes later, you’d go back for more. The same goes for cookies, cake, and donuts. The more you eat, the more you start to crave these foods. Eating a paleo diet will help you cure a lot of cravings. Eating foods that are full of protein and healthy fats will also keep you full longer. This makes it much easier to stick to a fasting schedule. The result will be a leaner, healthier version of you. I would recommend giving paleo diet and intermittent fasting a try. Lastly, we will be live this Thursday at 1:00 PM. Until then, stay healthy and keep moving forward.
