I am always looking for ways to keep moving that are fun and burn lots of calories as part of my weight loss program. What could be better than belly-dancing? If you have ever seen professionals who have trained for a long time, you know it is an art form, as well as using many different parts of the body. Also, in order to practice, you have to look into the mirror. That in itself should provide incentive to keep it up as you move from not-so-svelte and not-so-skillful to ever more svelte and ever more skillful. Might do great things for your romantic life as well.

Can you believe so august an institution as the Mayo Clinic is actually saying good things about belly-dancing for weight loss on their web site?

Actually, many types of dancing are also excellent forms of exercise. So pick one that fits your style and go sign up for classes. See you on the dance floor!  –Di

Belly-dancing: A good exercise for weight loss? - MayoClinic.com

technorati tags:lose, weight, loss, belly-dancing, dancing, exercise

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Once you hit the mid-forties, or so the conventional wisdom goes, unless you’re a PC (physical culture) Queen or King, progressive middle-aged spread is unavoidable. I even know of a highly publicized female M.D. who sends a lot of emails saying that women over forty can’t lose weight (unless they buy her $70+ program that gives you the startling advice to eat green things - but that’s another story). 

But no less an authority than USA Today (see link below) has reported on studies from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of North Carolina saying that walking helps keep those pounds at bay. The UNC report said that if people start walking at least four hours a week when they’re in their twenties (18 - 30), they were much less likely to have gained weight 15 years later.

In a controlled study from Pittsburgh, researchers found that if overweight middle-aged people would walk fast for 30 minutes to an hour a day, they lost seven pounds, on average, over the course of a year and a half, without doing anything about their diet except trying to “eat healthy.”  Those who didn’t exercise regularly gained an average of seven pounds, victims of middle-aged spread. That’s a fourteen pound shift from just taking a brisk walk every day. Could you imagine what would happen if they threw in a couple of push ups?

So let’s park our cars at the farthest end of the parking lot and spend half of our lunch hours wearing the soles off our shoes while enjoying the lovely fall weather first hand.  –Di

Middle-aged people can walk off extra weight (USA Today)

technorati tags:weight, loss, lose, weight, walking, middle-aged, spread, exercise, diet

I used to think my body was some kind of machine. I thought that losing weight was a simple matter of cutting the intake and/or increasing the output and soon I would look like your average Hollywood starlet. If I wanted to lose a pound, all I had to do was eat 3500 calories less than my maintenance level of 2000 calories a day or walk 35 miles or some combination of those. If you were of the same opinion you have probably noticed, like me, that the reality isn’t quite so simple. In fact, the August/September issue of ACE (American Council on Exercise) Certified News has an article by Ralph LaForge various factors that interact to determine just how many calories you burn during a given period of exercise.

If you just starve yourself, you get unhealthy and the body gets to be very efficient at maintaining your weight on very reduced levels of calories. You are always hungry so you get crabby. What weight you did lose was muscle and water, with some fat, so when you relent, as you must if you have any survival instincts, you gain back all the pounds plus some extra ones and they are NOT attractive, firm muscular pounds.

So you have a look at the magazines at the grocery checkout or your local newspaper and they convince you that you need to get moving, you need some horizontal movement, to get started down the road to slim, along with reasonable amounts of vegetables, fruits, protein sources, and whole grains. The idea is to create a 500 calorie per day deficit and then you’ll lose a pound a week.

I ran out and bought a pedometer and vowed to let no day go by without at least 10,000 steps, which is around four miles for average walking strides, and cut out that 3:00 PM latte. That should be a 500 calorie a day deficit, I thought. A week later I stepped expectantly on the scales and perhaps saw a tiny bit of shift to the left. Oops, maybe I miscalculated. Have you tried this? Did it work for you?

Didn’t think so. Actually that idea doesn’t take into account the basal metabolism rate (BMR), which is the most important factor in determining our overall metabolic rates. The BMR determines the calories that you would be burning even if you were fast asleep, which need to be subtracted from your projected deficit total.

Our BMR is in turn affected by a number of factors, some of which are beyond our control. We can’t really do much about our genetics, your gender, your age, your internal body temperature, or how much thyroxin or adrenalin your body is releasing at the moment. But it also depends on how much you weigh, your body surface area, your lean body mass, whether you’re in starvation mode, and other things you can influence over time. Taken together the number of factors that can influence you BMR and their interactions make it hard to estimate accurately. But when it comes to determining how much effect it has on calorie burn during exercise, the other major component is how much energy you’re putting out during the exercise itself.

Your current weight affects how many calories you burn doing any given exercise, which makes perfectly good sense. The more mass you are moving, the more energy it takes to do it. But the point is to reduce that mass, right? Especially the fatty part of it.

The duration and intensity of the exercise is the major factor in determining its calorie and fat burning effects both during and after the exercise. For example, as Mr. La Forge points out, if a 154-pound person walks a mile at a rate of 3.5 miles per hour, she burns 54 calories. If she walks faster, say in the 3.5 to 5 m.p.h. range, it’s 97 calories, and 107 calories if she jogs it. So it’s not just the distance but how much effort you exert in covering that distance that counts. Using a treadmill reduces your effort and so also reduces your calorie burn. Exercise that doesn’t fight gravity, like swimming or cycling, use fewer calories to cover that distance, too.

So now we know it’s good to do 10,000 steps every day but it is better to slowly work up to doing them faster. The basic aerobic exercise formula says you should determine your maximum heart rate (220 minus your age in years) and strive to maintain a level of exertion that keeps your pulse at 70 to 85 percent of that for 30 to 60 minutes in a row for at least 5 days of the week. That would be a good thing.

Seems there’s an even better thing called interval training. That’s where you start slowly, say about 50 percent of your maximum heart rate for 5 minutes, then put on a burst to about 90 percent of max for 60 seconds, slow down again for 75 seconds, then another minute at close to full throttle, slow down for 75 seconds, and so on for four or so more rounds. Then take five minutes at 30 percent to cool down. That’s just one example of a schedule you could use.

So what do you accomplish with that? There was a study done at Laval University in Canada that compared results after standard aerobic conditioning (endurance) versus interval training. The standard aerobic group worked out longer, 45 minutes per session, 6 sessions per week for 20 weeks in a row (90 sessions), while the interval group did 30 minute sessions, 6 sessions per week for 15 weeks (60 sessions). The endurance group also burned twice as many calories during each session as the interval group. One would expect that the endurance group would have lost more fat, assuming similar diets for the two groups. But it turns out that the interval group reduced their body fat NINE times more than the endurance group. The reason is that the interval training boosts the resting metabolic rate so they burned more calories even when they weren’t exercising. Sound good?

Don’t just get up off the couch and start sprinting. You have to work up to this and check with your doctor. But, as part of an overall training program, along with weight (resistance) training and flexibility/balance training, interval training is a good way to get the fat to burn off. Sometimes being a little breathless isn’t a bad thing. –Di

Let’s say your day went something like this. The dog got out this morning and it took you twenty minutes to find him and get him back inside. So you were twenty minutes late to work. Those were the twenty minutes you were going to use to prepare for the managers’ meeting where you had to present your projections for the upcoming quarter. Feeling a little frazzled, this wasn’t your best presentation, your department looked inept, and your boss let you know about it. Afterwards, you and she discussed how to handle the new client you’re meeting for lunch. She mentioned that he’s a stickler for punctuality so you leave an extra twenty minutes early. This is a make or break contract so you’ve been polishing this presentation for weeks. But two cattle trucks have collided on the freeway and traffic is grid locked for miles while the police try to round up the stampeding bulls. You try to call the prospect to tell him you’re detained but your cell phone’s battery is dead. You’re 45 minutes late for the meeting. Your prospect is fuming and not very understanding of your excuse and he doesn’t even want to hear any presentation from someone with so little regard for possible clients. He’ll let you know if you can reschedule sometime. When you get back and tell your boss what happened she is all over your case. As if you did all this on purpose. You can’t call her what you’d like to (it rhymes with itch), of course, so you stifle. And so on.

Meanwhile, the adrenalin and nor adrenalin that have been released in your body are crying out for fight or flight and you can do neither. The build up of cortisol and other stress hormones is slowing your metabolism, making you crave huge amounts of fat-salt-and-sugar-laden comfort food, and doing strange things to your blood sugar levels. Since you tried to relieve your stressful state with a cheeseburger, biggie fries, a double chocolate shake and two fried pies, you are accumulating a bit of extra fat. Because of the stress, it’s being deposited right in your abdomen, building up your visceral fat to dangerous levels. Oh my, what’s a body to do?

Actually, this picture is not too far off the mark for far too many of us who lead relatively sedentary lives. The pace of our lifestyles and the pressures under which we function are driving our chronic stress levels into regions where they can cause serious weight gain. Fortunately, you can reverse this pattern of weight gain and reduce your stress and your waistline at the same time. Organizations no less august than the American Council on Exercise and the National heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health recommend physical exercise as one of the most effective ways to reduce stress and its effects. And we know it can help a great deal with weight loss and fitness as well. We hasten to mention that exercise means a combination of aerobic exercise in which the heart rate is elevated for 15 to 30 minutes at a time, resistance or weight training in which the weight can be supplied by external weights or our own body weight, and flexibility and balance training, conveniently provided by practices like yoga or tai chi, among others. All these together and individually have profound effects in changing our mental and physical outlook so that we actually make less of the hormones that can cause the stressful effects, we just don’t get stressed out so much, we aren’t affected so much by whatever stress we do have to deal with, and we’re just generally happier. People who have physically demanding jobs might do better by adopting those forms of exercise they don’t encounter in their jobs, rather than overtaxing themselves in a certain area.

Another important consideration is to work the exercise sessions into your busy life in such a way that they can be sanely managed, rather than becoming another stress-inducing “should.” Get up 40 minutes earlier and take a brisk walk. Do some isometrics at your desk. Take half an hour to some squats and pushups before lunch or just when you walk in the door at home. Make your exercise sessions as convenient as possible so you can actually do them After all, you won’t need to stop and the candy shop any more.

Exercise can reduce stress in a number of ways. One is that it can provide a positive outlet for all that fight or flight energy, rather than having it simmer away under the surface. Another way is that exercise causes changes in the biochemistry of the body, including the brain, that help it to function better and provide a sense of well-being. The amount of adrenalin released in response to stress, for instance, is reduced in people who exercise regularly. Exercise can stimulate the production of endorphins, which are powerful natural mood-enhancing agents. Another beneficial effect of exercise is that most people do not worry while they’re exercising. It takes their minds off their problems at least for a while so their brains can rest and regroup and perhaps come to a solution from a different angle. This is not to mention all the positive effects on the cardiovascular system. Exercise helps your body feel refreshed and relaxed and promotes deep and restful sleep.

Aside from these profound effects on stress relief, physical exercise is one of the main paths to managing ones weight. Just eating less is almost never a long term route to slim vitality. Another stress relieving effect of exercise is the pleasant feeling you get from looking at the new slimmer you in the mirror, fitting into attractive clothes, and drawing admiring glances from others. Right? –Di