I just watched a fascinating programme on BBC One called “10 Things You Need to Know About Losing Weight“. It is available on iPlayer for the usual limited time.
The programme starts by explaining that visceral fat – fat which fills body cavities and surrounds organs – is the most dangerous kind, and can lead to various health problems including cancer and Type 2 Diabetes. It is this fat which gives people enhanced waistlines even if they aren’t overtly fat, but it is also the first fat to be burnt when a person starts dieting/exercising.
Just stopping eating – as in the classic diet – is no good. You’ve got to consider other things, too.
The 10 things were as follows (all backed up with current scientific evidence):
- Don’t skip breakfast/meals – if you do, your brain makes you crave high-calorie foods to compensate.
- Use smaller plates – if you change your plate size from 12″ to 10″ and you could eat up to 22% less food.
- Calories matter – for example, a chicken dinner with potatoes and vegetables is quite possibly more than you can eat, but a fruit smoothie containing the same number of calories can be knocked back in seconds.
- Don’t blame your metabolism – you’re just eating more calories than you are burning.
- Protein makes you feel fuller for longer.
- The exact same meal served as a soup instead of separate items with a glass of water keeps your stomach full for longer.
- The wider the choice, the more you will eat.
- Dairy calcium causes you to excrete more fat – twice as much as the non-dairy equivalent diet.
- Moderate exercise carries on burning fat for up to 24 hours after you do it. The actual excercise burns very little, but the main effect occurs after you stop.
- Even small changes to the amount of exercise you do burns a significant amount of calories – up to 240 just by going up and down the stairs a few times and maybe walking to the shops.
Obviously, you have to make up your own mind. But it is something that a lot of driving instructors really ought to think about – sitting down all day is not good for the waistline!
What IS interesting is that if you Google for information on weight loss, the advice is all old. It advises just eating less and becoming some sort of herbivore. As the presenter of the BBC show said (and he is a trained doctor), when he was at medical school, they were just taught that calories are calories, when modern science is saying absolutely the opposite.