ACCORDING TO RESEARCH, somewhere between 81% and 92% of all New Year’s resolutions fail. That’s eight out of ten people stuck in the same rut this time next year.
At a time when one in every five adults in the U.K. are now overweight, and type II diabetes, which used to be a disease people got near the end of their lives, is now the most common long-term illness in children.
When it comes to losing weight, there’s only one real choice – STOP EATING SO MUCH FOOD.
Many health studies tell us that the food industry plays a significant role in the obesity epidemic. What do you see when you walk into a grocery store? Walls of high-calorie, highly processed food filled with chemicals that are almost addictive to anyone and everyone, especially if you love salt, sugar, and fat! What is concerning is that this is what most people in Britain eat – scientifically formulated foods that make us fat.
The food industry’s PR tactics are like the big tobacco companies once did — confusing the public with denial and doubt. They are making people fat and are also profiting from the slimming industry.
Two of the best-known weight-loss products are owned by multinationals. Heinz owned Weight Watchers and sold to a private investment equity firm, Artial, for £610m, and Unilever owns Slimfast.
For these multinationals, the weight-loss market encompasses gyms, home fitness, fad diets and crash diets. It is a multi-billion-pound industry that features celebs promising an “all-new you” in a matter of weeks.
With the sheer volume of junk food marketing and promotions associated with sports, it’s easy to forget that this type of food is fundamentally unhealthy.
By sponsoring “achievers” and “winners” in sports, junk food companies link themselves to athletes’ top performance. It spreads the false idea that we can eat junk food and stay healthy if we exercise, which is a lie—creating a terrible link between sports and lousy food, which is hard to undo.
I am a Midlife Fitness (age 45-65) specialist. I encourage people to look at exercise differently and to focus on their well-being rather than their weight.
Exercise is the only way you will fend off old-age feebleness, enhance your sex life, boost energy, and reduce the risk of joint pain and osteoporosis.
It will also improve your mood, lower stress, and make you feel more in control of your life. To lose a pound of body fat, you’d have to run from London to Reading – exercise alone is ineffective for weight loss.
Most of our energy is used up just by living. Even if you did nothing for 24 hours, you’d still burn nearly 1,700 calories (average male), and the more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn.
But what kind of exercise should you do if you want to lose weight? On average, a 150-pound person walking briskly for 30 minutes will burn around 140 calories.
That’s equal to a can of Coke— easier to skip the Coke. Age-appropriate resistance training like mine, without the accompanying strain and boredom, should be part of your workout because it helps you build muscle, which is good for losing weight even at rest.
Once you start exercising, you need to keep it up to maintain the same weight. A U.S. study showed that it could be hard to lose weight once you stop exercising and try to start again. And it takes a lot of work to stay at your goal weight once you get there.
Finally, forming a new intrinsic habit takes time, and healthy diets are no different. Food manufacturers use marketing speak such as “fat-free”, hoping you’ll equate it with “healthy” or “non-fattening”- so that you forget about all the sugar these products contain. You know the saying: Crap in….