How To Diet and Exercise Without Raising a Sweat

What follows is a back-to-basics approach to achieve a good level of fitness and health using simple, easy to follow steps anyone can implement.

Basically there are two underlying, causative factors for excessive weight gain.

• External, and
• Internal

Let’s look at the background for each one:

External factors include lack of exercise, eating the ‘wrong’ food types and or too much food.

A severe injury which prevents a person from being able to maintain an active life style which included a high amount of physical activity, may well gain weight without changing their food intake, simply because they are still eating the amount of food they ate when their life style was much more active.

On the other hand, there are internal factors related to health problems that can lead to excessive weight gain. Problems with an individual’s metabolic rate, and similar disorders can cause a sudden rise in weight.

Organic diseases such as diabetes and other organ pathologies may lead to an increase in weight.

A diet regime for a person who has recently been injured and is gaining weight due to lack of physical activity is going to need a different diet approach to an other individual who is suffering from an organic disease and is unable to utilise the nutrients efficiently.

There are some basic considerations for each of the two basic causes. Lets look at these separately in an attempt to create some basic rules, which you may wish to follow.

Generally speaking there are some overriding factors that may play significant roles in excessive weight gain:

Eating the main meal of the day at the end of the day will have a similar effect for many people. Remember that after the sun goes down, the body is starting to prepare for rest, not activity and digesting food is activity. A large, heavy meal may take several hours to digest and our body’s normal physiological functions are interrupted when we eat a large meal and go to bed soon after.

Lack of exercise: These days most people live a very hectic life style allowing little or no time for a regular exercise regime. This is combined with sedentary work often involving sitting in front of a computer all day or at an office desk. This does ultimately not provide any form of exercise and uses little physical energy and therefore, little of the stored energy from last night’s dinner is converted to energy and used by the body.

You may have noticed that from around mid-afternoon onward you start to feel tired and lethargic. However, about 30 minutes after you eat dinner you suddenly experience a surge in energy.

Internal Factors Leading To Excessive Weight Gain

Emotional factors – can affect your digestion to a great extent. If you have ever had a major event in your life that made you extremely angry, you may not have been able to eat, or if you did you felt nauseous and experience a ‘lump’ in your stomach, some people will even vomit. This illustrates how sensitive your digestive system can be to emotional stress.

Similarly, if you do not sleep well and therefore feel tired during the day, you may find that eating snacks very frequently during the day will give you that energy boost to keep you going, but the result of this frequent intake of food can lead to obesity depending upon what you eat.

Organ pathologies – There are several underlying health problems that can result in excessive weight gain, for example Hypothyroidism (under active thyroid gland), which is quite common in the community, is just one of the diseases that may lead to obesity. Hypothyroid sufferers find it extraordinarily difficult to loose weight irrespective of food quality/quantity and exercise.

Where there are pathologies, it is necessary to treat the underlying cause not just try to loose weight by what ever means necessary. That is it is important to look at the whole of the person, their life style, diet, exercise regime, health of their body, etc.

It is my opinion, that a balance of all foods combined with a regular exercise regime and a adequate level of hydration are the corner stones to successfully getting control of one’s weight.

I am not going to give you yet another diet and name it after myself or some such silly thing. The following is basic naturopathic advice without any extreme elements or ‘fad’ components.

Lunch-time. Again, keep it simple. A mixed salad (include as many vegetables as you can) with or without some cold cuts of meat, fish or chicken, or tofu and soy or what ever you like. Just make sure it’s unprocessed and fresh.

Fish is another must have (okay, vegetarians may not wish to include fish in their diet), because they contain fatty acids such as Omega 3, 6 and some also contain Omega 9 as well as many other nutrients.

It’s also not a crime to eat a healthy muesli at night, especially on hot, humid nights when a hot meal is not really desired.

Last, but by no means least, you need to consume at least 2 litres of Water and or fresh fruit juices each and every day.

Exercise

Exercise does not have to be and should not be a ‘pain’ to do, rather it should be physical activity you enjoy doing and this activity should make your body work on a physical level. Over time you will build up your strength and your level of fitness.

But you can also turn work around the house into exercise. Washing the car for example can be a form of exercise, polishing it would add to this. Mowing the lawn is another form of exercise and the list goes on.

Lastly, don’t rush into exercise, work up to increasing levels of fitness using little steps. Each week or two, make the walk a little longer, or try and do the same distance a little quicker, swim a little longer or further, take your bike out and time yourself over a few kilometres, than 2 weeks later, see if you can decrease the time it took by a minute or so on a regular basis.

Hints: Time your exercise to be either in the cool of the morning or early evening. Going for a walk at lunch-time in a city is not healthy. The pollution you breath in will end up doing you more harm than the benefits you get from the exercise. What ever you do, do not go jogging along major traffic roads, especially not during the day and definitely not during the hottest part of the day.

Danny Siegenthaler is a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and together with his wife Susan, a medical herbalist and Aromatherapist, they have created Natural Skin Care Products by Wildcrafted Herbal Products to share their 40 years of combined expertise with you.