Accelerate Fat Loss & Get Fit for Life in 8 Easy Steps

Introduction for the 8-step series Metabolic Weight Loss & Body Tune-UP Tips

While millions of people starve to death in many parts of the world, the United States has the dubious honor of being the fattest country on the globe, with 50% of us being obese. Meanwhile, Americans are preoccupied with their waistlines. We spend more than 40 billion dollars a year on diet foods, diet programs, diet pills, and other ‘guaranteed’ weight-loss regimens and products. Yet, according to the National Center of Health Statistics, we’re getting fatter all the time. (Throughout my 14-title, life-changing collections — Renew Your Life — I communicate in detail on over 100 topics related to being vibrantly healthy in body, mind, and spirit, including everything you need to know to shed extra weight — easily and permanently.)

Experts call obesity an American epidemic—one that brings with it major health problems. Heart disease, endometrial (uterine) cancer and possibly breast cancer, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, immune dysfunction, osteoarthritis, stroke, gout, sleep disorders, gallstones, and diabetes are all associated with obesity. Because I prefer to see the glass as half full, let's put this in a more positive light: Losing even a little weight may significantly improve your health and well-being. 

On the flipside, eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia are on the rise, and women’s magazines are not helping when they continue to use models who look like waifs. Take Barbie™, a doll that’s part of most little girls’ upbringing. This model of good looks and perfect body is giving the wrong message about what a healthy woman’s body should look like. Were Barbie an actual person, her body fat would be so low that she probably wouldn’t even be able to menstruate. As little girls treasure Barbie, and teens try to emulate her, she has one accessory that is consistently missing—food. Continue on to find out the control mechanism for obesity, and you may be surprised with the answer.

Steps 2 & 3 of 8 in the series Metabolic Weight Loss & Body Tune-UP Tips 

CLICK HERE to start with the Introduction.

Accelerate Fat Loss & Get Fit for Life in 8 Easy Steps

2. Increase your aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise trains muscles to burn fat and increase metabolism. Aerobic exercise means exercising with oxygen, not being winded or out of breath. These types of exercises, which are fairly gentle and nonstop, change your metabolism and also train your muscles to burn more fat. Here’s a key point to keep in mind. Muscles burn fat ONLY in the presence of oxygen. For example, if you’re jogging with your husband and he’s breezing along and singing a song, and you’re so out of breath that you can barely put two syllables together, he’s burning fat but your fat-burning mechanisms have shut down. Muscles burn two kinds of fuel—sugar (glucose) and fat. Your muscles really do prefer to burn fat because it’s more efficient; there’s more of it so it lasts a long time and it produces lots of energy.

Does that mean you shouldn’t do high-intensity sprints every so often? No, as I’ll explain below, but you must make aerobic exercise part of your fitness program at least 5 days a week if you want to lose fat and tone up. By using the big muscles of the thighs and buttocks in an activity that is steady and nonstop (such as cross-country skiing, bicycling, rowing, walking, and hiking), and makes you breathe deeply but doesn’t make you out of breath, you’re supplying oxygen to the muscles, which promotes fat burning in the muscles and makes you burn more food calories. Want to learn how to get fit as quickly as possible? Continue on.

Step 1 of 8 in the series Metabolic Weight Loss & Body Tune-UP Tips

CLICK HERE to start with the Introduction.

Accelerate Fat Loss & Get Fit for Life in 8 Easy Steps

1. Increase your muscle mass. Muscle burns fat. It’s that simple. Exercise increases muscle, tones it, alters its chemistry, and increases the metabolic rate. When you exercise you actually continue to burn calories even when you’re sleeping but you must exercise correctly to get the best results. Before I describe the best exercises to lose fat and increase metabolism, let’s briefly explore why lean muscle tissue is so important. 

As I highlight in my world-renowned Complete Power Package consisting of 14 titles, Renew Your Life: Choose to Live Fully, more muscle means a faster metabolism because muscle uses more energy to exist than fat. Because muscle is a highly metabolic tissue, it burns five times as many calories as most other body tissues, pound for pound. In other words, muscle requires more oxygen and more calories to sustain itself than does body fat. When you have more muscle mass, you burn more calories than someone who doesn’t, even when you’re both sitting still, which is why people who build muscle have an easier time maintaining a healthy weight. They’re simply more efficient calorie burners.

If you increase muscle mass, you increase the number of calories your body is using every moment of the day, not just during exercise, but also at work, play, and even when sleeping. The addition of 10 pounds of muscle to your body will burn approximately 500 extra calories per day. You would have to jog 6 miles a day, 7 days a week to burn the same number of calories. Ten extra pounds of muscle can burn a pound of fat in one week (a pound of fat is 3,500 calories)—that’s 52 pounds of fat a year! Want to know how to increase your lean muscle tissue and my favorite fitness tips that I currently teach clients worldwide and also previously taught to students, staff, and faculty at UCLA for 30 years? Continue on.