Whitney Hills...The food and exercise lady: fat loss

Weight loss by the numbers...

20:25Whitney Hills

Why aren't I losing weight? And other common questions

09:57Whitney Hills

I've been blessed in getting a few new clients the last few weeks and decided to cover some groundwork in writing here rather than explaining and re-explaining things and leaving out key points in person. So follow along and I will try to stay focused on weight loss, muscle building and body transformation.

1. Not eating carbohydrates, not eating enough food in general...
The bottom line is most people I see are stuck at a desk and then stuck on a streetcar for 8-10-12 hours a day. This is a very sedentary lifestyle. These types of people do not require much fuel. However the type and amount of fuel really depends on when a workout is getting done and what type. I would highly recommend these types of people try to strength train 3 days a week, and have 2 days of cardio training. If you can get 5 days of weights in, mixed with cardio, all the better. The reality is most people can only commit to 3 workouts a week. These three workouts should be very intense an non-stop. If you workout early am, you can save your first meal to after the workout and combine some complex carbohydate with protein. If you train after work, be sure to have carbs and protein following your workout. A lot of people are concerned about night time carbohydrate intake, but carbs are necessary for repair and recovery.

Eating one meal a day is just plain stupid and a good way to sabotage weight loss. Being too busy for lunch or a snack before your evening training sessions is a bad excuse only. Plan ahead and bring your food prepared, even if you have to eat in transit.

2. Not sleeping or consuming water...
This is slave labor. To my fellow horsey people...would you expect your show mount to preform well unrested or thirsty and dehydrated? Would you expect your car to run without gas? Nope. So why would you change the rules for yourself? If we did this to a pet it would be abuse. Treat yourself as nicely as you would your pet.

3. Overdoing it...

If there's one thing my nutrition degree taught me it is that moderation is the most important thing. Training like a maniac while cutting back on calories (and nutrients like fats) will stress your body and increase cortisol production. Rest is when your body repairs muscle (and makes in grow!). Under eating to lose weight is counter productive because you can lose muscle and slow your metabolic rate slightly. You know you are lacking something if food is on the brain constantly.If you are fuelling your body in a healthy way you should not be preoccupied with food. Check with a health professional if this is the case. All food groups are ok once in a while if you do not have allergies.

4. Stepping on the scale..

The scale is clearly lying..

As you start to exercise your blood volume can increase, and muscle takes up much less space than fat. If you are building muscle and losing fat your weight can stay the same. Pay attention to how good you feel and how your clothes fit.

5. Trust your trainer and COMMUNICATE!!!!
I have seen every diet there is, and there's a reason you are not it. Carb cycling, intermittent fasing, low carb, fitness model diet...I know it's out there. Chances are the reason I have not put you on one of these regime is that I know that most people don't have the motivation or time to eat 6 meals a day. Sure if you'd follow it you would see results faster, but I know you probably won't commit to it and it will frustrate you. Do what is practical for your life. Don't copy your neighbour, don't trust any fads. What you put into your training and diet is what you will get out of it. Bottom line. Be patient, Rome wasn't built in a day, neither is your new fit and fantastic body. As I always say, consistency is the most important factor in changing your lifestyle.

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New York Times Article: How fat may hurt the brain

10:45Whitney Hills

This article is taken from the New York Times By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Check out the link for comments if you'd like. Interesting stuff...exercise is so important for all aspects of your life including cognition and brain function. Even if you don't lose weight exercise, it is still very beneficial..and here's the article...

Obesity may have harmful effects on the brain, and exercise may counteract many of those negative effects, according to sophisticated new neurological experiments with mice, even when the animals do not lose much weight. While it’s impossible to know if human brains respond in precisely the same way to fat and physical activity, the findings offer one more reason to get out and exercise.

It’s been known for some time that obesity can alter cognition in animals. Past experiments with lab rodents, for instance, have shown that obese animals display poor memory and learning skills compared to their normal-weight peers. They don’t recognize familiar objects or recall the location of the exit in mazes that they’ve negotiated multiple times.

But scientists hadn’t understood how excess weight affects the brain. Fat cells, they knew, manufacture and release substances into the bloodstream that flow to other parts of the body, including the heart and muscles. There, these substances jump-start biochemical processes that produce severe inflammation and other conditions that can lead to poor health.

Many thought the brain, though, should be insulated from those harmful effects. It contains no fat cells and sits behind the protective blood-brain barrier that usually blocks the entry of undesirable molecules.

However, recent disquieting studies in animals indicate that obesity weakens that barrier, leaving it leaky and permeable. In obese animals, substances released by fat cells can ooze past the barrier and into the brain.

The consequences of that seepage became the subject of new neurological experiments conducted by researchers at Georgia Regents University in Augusta and published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience. For the studies, the scientists gathered mice bred to overeat and grow obese, which, after a few weeks of sitting quietly in their cages and eating at will, the animals had obligingly accomplished. As they grew rotund and accumulated more fat cells, the researchers found, their blood showed increasingly hefty doses of a substance called interleukin 1 that is created by fat cells and known to cause inflammation.

In these mice, as interleukin 1 migrated to the head, it passed the blood-brain barrier and entered areas such as the hippocampus, a part of the brain critical for learning and memory. There, it essentially gummed up the works, the researchers found when they examined tissue from the animals’ brains, which had high levels of interleukin 1 together with widespread markers of inflammation. While inflammation can represent a healthy response to invading molecules, it hurts cells if it persists.

The researchers also noted extremely low levels in these mice brains of a biochemical associated with healthy synapse function. Synapses are the structures that connect one neuron to another and shunt messages between them. Healthy synapses respond to demands on the brain by slowing or speeding messages, keeping the brain’s nervous-system traffic manageable. But low levels of the marker of synapse health suggested to the researchers that in these obese animals’ inflamed brains, synapses were no longer functioning properly and messages between neurons likely jerked, hiccuped or stalled.

That possibility was borne out by subsequent tests on the memory and thinking of some of the remaining obese mice. They performed miserably.

But whether excessive fat cells alone were the underlying cause of the changes in the animals’ brains was not clear. Other physiological factors “could have been contributing,” said Alexis Stranahan, a professor at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents, who oversaw the study. So, to isolate the impact of the fat, the researchers simply removed most of it, surgically excising the large bands of fat that each mouse bore around its middle.

After recovery, these slenderized mice showed almost no interleukin 1 in their bloodstreams and, Algernon-like, soon were acing cognitive tests that had stumped them before surgery.

Conversely, when the scientists implanted the preserved fat pads into previously lean mice — and haven’t we all had nightmares about something like that happening to us in our sleep? — the animals almost immediately grew dimmer, performing far worse than previously on cognitive tests, although nothing else in their lives had changed.

The results convincingly implicated fat cells as the primary cause of the mice’s cognitive decline.

But while provocative, the findings had little practical value for people, the scientists realized, since even the most extensive liposuction procedure in humans would remove far less fat than had been excised from the obese mice.

So the scientists turned, as a less-invasive alternative, to exercise. Gathering more of the obesity-prone mice, they allowed all of them to grow heavy, but then started half on a daily 45-minute program of treadmill running, with encouragement provided by small puffs of air if they began to flag. The other mice remained sedentary.

After 12 weeks, the running mice still weighed about the same as the unexercised animals. But they had lost significant amounts of fat from around their middles, while adding lean muscle. More telling, they did much better on cognitive tests than the sedentary mice and, when the researchers examined tissue from their hippocampi, showed little evidence of inflammation and robust levels of the chemical marker of synaptic health. The results suggested that, as the scientists write in the study, “treadmill training normalized hippocampal function,” even in animals born to be fat and that remained heavy.

Of course, these studies were conducted in mice, not people, whose brains may respond very differently. But the possibility that humans, too, may respond in similar ways is tantalizing, Dr. Stranahan said, and the takeaway from her study worth repeating. “Get out and move,” she said, even — and especially — if you carry extra weight. Talk with your doctor about a safe and tolerable exercise program, and then try to stick with that routine so that extra pounds won’t weigh too heavily on your mind.

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Accountability and change

19:31Whitney Hills

I recently had a new client ask if she was too old to see results with a workout program and diet. I had just been thinking that a lot of my senior clients had been seeing some great results lately, but the ones that were successful were the ones that were consistently exercising and eating well. They are busy lawyers that get up at 6am to get 45 mins of at-home training done 4 times a week. They are the ones that don't miss sessions and stick to a healthy eating plan most of the time.
I reassured the client that she would be fine, and she came back the next week having lost over a pound with 2 weeks of clean eating. Another client got told by his doctor that he needed to lose a significant amount of weight in a short period of time due to a health and medication issue. He had not been serious with his diet, and due to his job as a pediatric surgeon (requiring travelling and conferences and writing deadlines) was often MIA from sessions for months at a time. Last month we got together, wrote a meal plan, and agreed to reunite in a month. Well the time came, and he had lost about 15 pounds in the 4 weeks. He made it to the gym every day after work, stuck to his diet 100% and didn't even want his allocated cheat days. He was amazed at how much better he felt, and told me his stress had caught up to him and taken over his life. Now this man is the busiest person that I have ever met, and he managed to make his health a priority. There is no excuse.

These ladies have transformed their lives in the last few years!
Effort and energy=results

Now don't get me wrong. Life can be exhausting, busy, we get sick, side tracked, unmotivated. We get presented with irresistible treats and opportunities, family issues. At the end of the day it is our own responsibility to make things happen. You don't need to go to the gym and feel wiped out and nauseous to be successful, but you do need to be consistent getting your sweat on and eating healthy. We may slip off the wagon, but we must get back on and get serious about being well. It does not need to be to lose weight or look a certain way, but to maintain health and prevent disease. If it comes a time when one does get sick, you don't want to look back and say "what could I have done differently".
If weight loss is important to your health and you are gaining or maintaining despite your efforts, it is time to ask yourself what you are doing wrong. Sometimes it takes time to see a difference, and if you are honest with yourself about your efforts, it is ok to be stagnant and hit a plateau. Especially in women it may take a few months for a weight shift if you are not drastically overweight. However if nothing is happening and you are not getting to the gym 3 times a week or following your nutrition plan, it may be time to re-evaluate how you are going to fit in your workouts despite your schedules.

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Guest Blog: Transformation

09:04Whitney Hills

I have been crazy busy and a bit MIA, but I would like to share a lovely transformation from another Ryerson grad. This lovely fellow and myself often found ourselves at the same parties. I was so delighted to see the changes he has made and asked him to share some of his experience!

When I graduated university I was fat. Plain and simple. And the worst part of it was I was ok with being fat. I loved beer, I loved food and I wasn’t active. I had been bigger for most of my life but once I got to university things got a lot worse. My physical activity dropped and my food and alcohol intake increased drastically. I went from about 235 lbs. in my first year to about 280 lbs. in my fourth. I wore a size 44 pant and XXL shirts and sweaters. I noticed my knees and back started to ache and I felt self-conscious in public and around new people. I was losing confidence in myself. My wake-up call was my dad going into the hospital for issues with his heart, which by itself is scary, but my dad was nowhere near as big as me and was a regular at the gym. It was then, that I decided that I needed not only to lose weight but change my lifestyle completely.

I started walking everywhere. I didn’t use transit unless I absolutely had to. I stopped eating out all the time and made a pact not to drink during the week. A few months later I was down 20 pounds. My clothes were hanging off me. My walks felt too easy so I started jogging. I got discouraged when I could barely jog for 3 blocks so I started jogging at night when there were less people out. It was a slow progression but after year I was down almost 40 pounds. I started researching healthy eating and found that there were a lot of different opinions about diets but one main idea. Put proper portions of good, natural foods in and cut out the processed junk. It’s something I still abide by whenever I can, if there is a fresh alternative to something processed I’m all for it. I discovered I loved spinach. Like LOVED it. I learned how to make salads about 50 different ways so I wouldn’t get bored. I tried to cut out sugar wherever I could. I made my lunches instead of buying them because it gave me greater control over the choices I made. I learned to broil and grill meats and fish instead of frying them, it was an adjustment but also how I discovered my love of cooking! I gave myself cheat days as rewards but found myself making healthier choices on those days too. I vowed I would not let myself ever be the “fat guy” again. Over the last year and a half my goals have changed pretty drastically. I no longer care about the number on the scale as much as I do about how I feel.
I’ve been around 185 lbs. for the last 6 months but have packed on some solid muscle (I have pecs!). With the help of a nutritionist and a few sessions with a personal trainer my waist has shrunk to a size 33 and I’m a size medium in everything. I still have a little pot belly and love handles that are taking the longest to get rid of but my butt, chest, arms and thighs have all lost fat and gained muscle. The most rewarding thing is knowing I did it the right way. I didn’t drop all the weight at once because of a fad diet or starving myself, it was a slow trek and I sacrificed a lot to get here. I fell off the wagon more than once and have had cheat days turn into a cheat week. But setting goals and following through with them is what has benefitted me most. And boy was it worth it!
A little over a year ago I met a girl who stole my heart. Thank god I had the confidence to ask her out because I’m going to be marrying her this October! My current goal is to lose the belly because I want to look like an absolute stud in my tux when she walks down the aisle! And after that I’ll probably set a new goal…who knows maybe a half marathon or six pack abs are in my future.

Whitney Hills...The food and exercise lady

Weight loss by the numbers...

Why aren't I losing weight? And other common questions

New York Times Article: How fat may hurt the brain

Accountability and change

Guest Blog: Transformation

Whitney Hills, BASc

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Whitney Hills...The food and exercise lady