There may be a good reason that those little areas of extra weight on our sides are called love handles… recent studies have shown that while overall a happy romantic relationship is great for our mental health, for women it can also mean weight gain. Today we welcome guest blogger Alise Frye of TightForm DC. Alise is a personal athletic coach,as well as an experienced Crossfit, Yoga and Russian Kettlebell instructor. She’s got some thoughts on how we can strike a happy healthy balance in love and diet.
The “diet industry” is a multi-million dollar endeavor, but not one on which we should want to hang our economic future. If we are spending so much money on all these fixes, why do we keep getting fatter?
Because no industry can save us from ourselves.
Most of us, and I mean pretty much all of us, carry excess fat because we eat too much. It is that simple. There are exceptions, disease, medications, genetic anomalies, but most of us don’t have an out. The odds are that if you have excess body fat it simply means that you have eaten more calories than your body needs.
This is especially true for women. Our bodies are, on average, smaller than men’s. We are shorter, we carry less lean muscle mass, and our bone structures tend to be smaller. This means we have less wiggle room in how many calories it takes before our bodies start storing fat.
There are all sorts of interesting studies on WHY we eat too much, interesting work being done on satiety, additives creating a layering of addiction to chemicals, and I would offer, plain old American sense of fairness. This is particularly true in our relationships where we want to be treated as equals. How many of us have plated a meal with equal portions for ourselves and the men in our lives, maybe without even thinking about the actual difference in our bodies’ needs? If you’ve been blessed with giant high school boys, you know what I’m talking about – men simply need more calories than we do to maintain their body mass. Yet many of us “share” equally with our male counterparts when dinnertime rolls around.
So what do we do? Eat less. Period. End of story. Don’t tell yourself you can’t or it’s hard, there are a million ways to cut back. The hardest part is adjusting your emotional assessment of what you think you need and getting it in line with what your body actually needs.
There are two simple ways to begin cutting back. The first is to just eat half. Eat half of what you normally would. Usually have two pieces of pizza? Have one. Wait. If in twenty minutes you are till hungry, have half of the second piece. Wait. Twenty minutes later, still hungry? Finish the second piece. They key here is the waiting. So often we put more on our plate than we need without thinking about it and then inhale it all before even realizing our plates are empty. It takes our bellies 20 minutes to tell our brains we are full. Most of us eat so quickly we’ve had several times the amount we need just waiting for brains to get the message. After a few days, you’ll discover you really are satisfied with much less food than you currently think you want or need.
The second method is called intermittent fasting. There are many different ways to experiment with fasting. The simplest is to try skipping any meal. No, you will not “slow down your metabolism.” The key to fasting is to realize that the skipped meal is not an excuse to overeat or make bad nutrition choices. We’ve all said to ourselves, I had a light lunch, I can have a little more at dinner or try that dessert. Fasting allows us to cut out calories, if we replace them at the next meal, then we’ve missed the point.
Fasting for a full 24 hours not only allows us to simply cut out several thousand calories it also does a reset on your body’s biochemistry. Digestion is hard work, give your body a break for a few hours and you may feel better in a number of surprising ways. You don’t have to go a full day without eating. Start by fasting after any meal – say dinner, and then wait to eat again until that meal time the next day; from dinner to dinner or lunch to lunch. Try different times to see what is easiest for you and your lifestyle and of course be sure to check in with your doctor, especially if you have chronic illnesses that may be impacted by changes in your eating patterns.
What you choose to eat can have a big impact on weight as well and is very important for numerous health reasons. But for most of us just trying to slim down, you don’t have to make major changes to what you eat, but you do have to cut back on how much you eat. Being a little hungry is good; when was the last time you actually experienced it? Life’s fairness is not wrapped up in how much you “get” on your plate. You can be happy and satisfied with far fewer calories AND feel good in your jeans.
Meet Alise Frye, TightForm Performance Training
Alise is a certified Crossfit instructor and Russian Kettlebell instructor dedicated to helping you find your inner athlete. More than just a trainer – Alise is a coach by every definition of the word. The real bonus to athletic training versus personal training is that the benefits don’t all come in the gym. How you live in your world and in your own head greatly affect your health, well being, and relationships. Alise can help you retrain your muscles and your mind to live smarter, stronger and happier.
