Lose Weight Naturally

1. Put Out The Fire – How to cool down weight causing inflammation

Nowadays you often hear about inflammation and its negative impact on our health. But most people don’t realize that reducing inflammation plays a huge role, if not one of the most critical, in your ability to lose weight, have a healthy metabolism and most importantly keep it that way long term.

Inflammation doesn’t just make us have arthritis or knee or back pain, or feel stiff and achy. Though those things happen too.

Inflammation is like a fire in our body that can wreak havoc:

• Inflammation plays a critical goal in why we gain weight.^1,2,3
• Inflammation causes our mitochondria to be dysfunctional. When your mitochondria stop working correctly, so does your metabolism.^1,2
• Inflammation causes insulin resistance.³
• Inflammation causes leptin resistance.⁴
• Inflammation contributes to high blood pressure, high triglycerides, and cholesterol problems.⁵

And that’s not all!

Now, I wish there was a pill you could just take to completely get rid of inflammation— but it’s not that easy. Sure, turmeric or omega 3’s can help but it’s a bit more complex than that, but it can also be quite simple to start fixing.

So we know it’s bad so how do we get rid of the inflammation then?

• First, you try to reduce it in your body
• Second, you try to avoid it coming in more.

To do both we have to understand where it comes from

If we break it down into some basic categories these would be the main areas:

• Processed foods
• Stress
• Poor sleep
• Sitting too much
• Exposure to toxins

Out of all of this, I have found there is one key thing that makes the most significant difference in reducing inflammation and increasing your metabolism. Though the rest of the things I mention in this article will help, the one that moves the needle the most is changing our food.

Not changing how much food but the kinds of food is the key to reducing inflammation.

Which most people have backward. They focus on how much they are eating.

3. Ice Ice Baby: The Cold Connection To A Faster Metabolism.

Cold water or ice baths and other forms of cold exposure have become very popular in the last few years and for good reason. The more we study cold exposure, the more benefits we find.

And boosting our metabolism and helping with weight loss is one of the key things that happens.²¹

It does this by activating brown fat, also known as brown adipose tissue or BAT. BAT is metabolically active and increases your ability to burn energy. BAT also helps with many other things like improving insulin resistance²⁴ and better cardiovascular health.²⁵

But this is not all. Cold exposure helps with:

• Boosting the immune system²²
• Improves hormone function²³
• Improves mood and relieves depression²³
• Improves cardiovascular health and circulation²³
• Reducing pain and inflammation²³

So do we have to go jump in a frozen lake to get the benefits or buy an expensive ice bath? Of course not.

Here are a few things you can do to get started or even enhance your cold exposure.

• Water temperature doesn’t matter as long as it makes you shiver. 60 down to 33 Fahrenheit can work, as long as it is uncomfortable (kind of takes your breath away) and makes you shiver is the key. So even tap water can work, but it may need to be adjusted as you get used to it and during different seasons.
• It doesn’t have to be water; going outside in cold weather can bring similar benefits. The less clothes the better.
• You only need 1-2 minutes per cold exposure session to get significant benefits, and a total of 11 minutes per week, of course, you could go longer. It’s not always about how long you stay in, sometimes it’s more so about breaking through the desire to not get in or to get out and overcoming that to create resilience.²⁶
• Alternating heat and cold is also a great method- Ideally, you have a cold bath and a sauna— doing cold for 1-2 minutes, then 10-15 minutes in the sauna, then 1-2 minutes of cold. Always end on a cold session.
• If you don’t have a cold bath or sauna, just use a shower, or shower and bath and alternate between a couple minutes of cold and a couple minutes of hot. Always end on cold.
• Avoid heating up in a shower or bath afterward, and instead, let your body naturally heat up. That’s where much of the brown fat activation comes in when you start to shiver while warming up.²⁷

And for most, even the thought of getting in the cold makes them shiver, which is a good thing! Once you take the first step and do it, you’ve overcome a huge wall into becoming more resilient and can improve your mood as well.

4. Lift Heavy Things

We hear a lot about exercise when it comes to weight loss. Typically it’s to do more of it! So most people spend hours doing cardio, hitting the gym, trying Orange Theory or CrossFit, hiring trainers, signing up for marathons, and feeling guilty if we don’t “get it in”, thinking we’ll never reach our goals.

But after having worked with thousands of people helping them lose on average 20-45 pounds in 6 weeks without exercise, and most of them being women over 40, we know exercise really isn’t working for weight loss. Research also shows that even if you are exercising, weight loss results are modest at best— and sometimes can backfire.^28,29

So when it comes to weight loss, nutrition needs to be the focus.

But exercise, and particularly building muscle, helps keep the weight off once you’ve lost it.

Exercise is also critical to stay healthy physically and mentally:

• It helps reduce insulin resistance³⁰
• Helps reduce hunger and cravings³²
• Improves depression symptoms³³
• Improves sleep³⁴
• As we age it allows us to avoid falling or accidents and makes us more functional³⁵

Don’t exercise to lose weight, do this instead…

To give you some context of the most effective way to use, or not exercise, here’s how we do it. It depends on your goals of course and who you are. If you are a woman over 50 looking to lose fat versus if you’re active in your 30s and want to tone up— it will be different.

When we work with someone in our Metabolism Reboot program who wants to release fat, our first focus is to get their body healthy, which we drop 20-45 LBS on average in 6 weeks. Some say you can build muscle and burn fat at the same time, which is true, it’s just harder and slower. So we focus first on releasing fat while maintaining muscle and then focus on building after for a few reasons:

1. This is far more effective because you’ll see faster fat loss results which is more motivating.
2. You feel lighter and have more energy to want to work out.
3. Your body, hormones, insulin, cells, etc. all function better which will help your body recover faster and build muscle more easily.

During the first 6 weeks, we do incorporate some movement that is more restorative and low impact. But the goal is to restore and heal our bodies so we can release fat, and intense exercise isn’t going to help with that. Once we’ve lost the weight then we bring the intensity back in to focus on building muscle.

And when I say build muscle you don’t have to be a bodybuilder or Iron Man athlete (unless that’s your goal). Consistency each day is going to be the name of the game here.

I know sometimes it’s overwhelming or scary to know what to do and get started, so let me give you the basics, but it could also be all you really need.

The “Best Bang For Your Buck” when it comes to fitness…

Most people overthink exercise and make it too complicated and hard. Again, if you have specific goals for fitness like competing on stage or running a race it’s different. But here are the basic principles to follow that give you the most benefit with the least amount of effort required.

1. Develop the mindset that movement is a non-negotiable every day (this is key).
2. Walking is critical: Set aside time for a 30-40 minute walk daily (if you don’t have 30-40 minutes do whatever you can. Just set the time aside and do it).
3. Avoid sitting for long periods. If you sit for 45-60 minutes then stand up and move your body a bit. It’s not good to exercise hard and then sit all day. If you had to choose, it would be better to take an hour-long walk and break it into 5-10 minute increments throughout the day to break up your sitting.
4. Do strength/resistance exercises 2 or 3 times weekly for 30-40 minutes. Just start small and work up. You don’t even need a gym membership. Just use your body weight.
5. Incorporate some cardiovascular training for 90 minutes a week. It should be harder than a walk, but not so hard that if you were trying to have a conversation you couldn’t.
6. Find things you enjoy, because you’ll likely do them more.

The best routine for exercise is the one that is consistent.