HEAT Walk Challenge | Week 12

Walking Routine

Frequency: 3xWeek
Duration: 3 mile
Warm-Up: 5 minutes
Walking Pace: 50 – 60% Target Heart Rate or RPE 13-14
Cool Down: 5 minutes

Weekly Tip

Dieting Dangers

When it comes to weight loss, if it sounds to good to be true, it most certainly is. Slow and steady progress may not be as flashy, but it’s healthy, and it will allow you to keep the weight off for good.

Fad Diets

Diets that forbid you from eating one food group (such as bread) or one kind of macro-nutrient (such as fat) might give you a dramatic result at first. The reason isn’t particularly mysterious: when you restrict calories of any kind, whether they’re calories from hamburger or hamburger buns, you’ll lose weight. Restrictive diets will fail in the long run, though, because it’s nearly impossible to avoid one food group or nutrient forever. Your body is programmed to desire a variety of foods. Chances are good that within a few months of banishing all bread (for example) from your life, you’ll be dreaming of rolls, cereal, and pasta, and you’ll fall off the wagon.

Diet Pills

There are hundreds of diet pills available by prescription, over the counter, and on the shelves of health food stores. Though some of them do work, they are too dangerous  to justify using. Though diet pills can suppress your appetite, many of them also:

• Increase blood pressure
• Upset the stomach
• Lead to heartbeat irregularities
• Cause lung damage
• Cause liver damage

Other diet pills, such as those found at health food stores, are completely ineffectual.

Drastic Calorie-Cutting

Extremely low-calorie diets should never been undertaken without a doctor’s supervision. You need a certain amount of calories each day to meet your body’s needs, and diets that are low in calories can be dangerous.

I find when working with clients that they are amazed at how many calories they should be consuming and the amount of food they should be in taking. Often I hear this very phrase “I can’t eat that much and still lose weight.” The reason it is in fact effective is because you’re changing your main source of calories. People consume far more calories than they think. Even when skipping meals. After a few weeks they all come back and say “Ok who would have figured.”

Moving on..

Rapid Weight Loss

Be suspicious of any diet that promises to help you shed more that two pounds per week. And be concerned if you are going so overboard on your own that you’re dropping more than two pounds per week. Rapid weight loss may feel satisfying at first, but it’s almost always short lived or indicative of a larger health problem.

I cover this topic much more in depth in The 12 Week Get Fit Challenge. Losing more than 2 pounds a week is a sign you’ll losing more than fat. In most cases this loss is water and muscle. Muscle is something you do not want to lose as it further slows your metabolism thus leading to gaining the weight back plus more.

Skipping Meals

Skipping meals will not help you lose weight. Fasting is not beneficial either. In fact, both can harm your efforts to lose weight. If you deprive your body of food for too long, it will switch into starvation mode. Unsure of where its next meal is coming from, it will hoard calories. When you’re awake, be sure to eat at least once every 3 to 5 hours. Most experts now recommend eating three small meals and two snacks a day.

You will find that this will control your carving for sugar because your blood sugar will stabilize. You will also find that your energy level will become constant throughout the day.

Weekly Recipe

Pumpkin Pie Shakeology®

1 scoop Chocolate Shakeology
1 cup rice, soy, almond, or low-fat milk (plain or vanilla)
1/2 cup canned pumpkin, unsweetened
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
Ice (optional)