How can I decrease my intake as compared to my expenditure?

The best way to check the imbalance is to measure your weight daily after getting up in the morning, peeing, and not taking anything by mouth (as mentioned in some other post). Over a period of 1-week data will tell you whether you are more at intake or vice versa. Most probably, it is the former case.

First of all, you have to check your daily routine. Is there any way you can increase your expense, e.g. if you can take long brisk walks, or do certain things which you usually miss, for example using stairs rather than lifts or escalators, doing kitchen chores standing up, surfing and browsing standing up, doing most of your work yourself, etc. While a bird’s eye view of your daily routine will let you know that you can tremendously increase your expense, whilst keeping intake the same. It will make a lot of difference. Checking your weight, after increasing your expense for another couple of days will tell you the difference.

A point of caution here is about two things, which you might want to adopt, but follow this:

• 1   When you keep your intake the same and increase daily expenses, of course, your body will require more energy and so you will feel hungry hours after eating. This is the proper challenge; you have to say no to any extra intake. Just bear with the hunger. Believe me, there are no adverse effects of these and there is no other way.
• Enthusiastic ladies may want to increase the expense rapidly to such an extent that intake will fall way behind and thus will lead to a strong urge to eat. The body will feel totally energy less, which may lead to over-eating. What you have to do is to change your routine in such a way that things which you were not doing previously now will be adopted by you, no more and keeping the intake the same.

Do it for 3-4 weeks and see the difference for yourself. I will talk about exercise and its role in reducing weight and living stylishly healthy in some other post.

I encourage you to comment on this, send me emails or talk with me on Skype for a one-to-one discussion.

First thing first, drop weight

To start stylish fitness, one thing which is of utmost importance is to keep yourself within the range of acceptable weight. Easiest, but no so a perfect way is to measure your Body Mass Index or BMI. Weigh yourself and then measure your height. Use this formula to determine BMI

= weight in KGs/ (height in meters²)

A crude evaluation can be done as follows:

Underweight = <18.5

Normal weight = 18.5–24.9

Overweight = 25–29.9

Obesity = BMI of 30 or greater

BMI applies to adult women and men who are 20 years or older. Children who are two years and older are best assessed through BMI percentile.

Now it is established that your BMI is more than 25, you have to be serious in taking care of this.

It means only one thing; you are taking in more than you are spending. So, it’s not just the amount you are eating, but we have to take into account the whole lifestyle you are living. It may be that you are eating far less than your neighbor but still are gaining weight. Are you getting my point?

My husband is a doctor and when we use to visit our friends or family, most of the time he is asked for advice to lose weight. His answer was always simple, which even I grabbed it after a long time. He used to smile and says, “Don’t eat!” Ironically, the gross over-weight friend of ours always used to say, “I don’t eat much, but still am gaining”.

The culprit is not how much you eat, but the imbalance between input and output. Suppose, your intake is 15 gram (equals to 1 Tablespoon) more than you can spend every day. Even this small amount will collect over a period of time. Let’s calculate, in 30 days you have 15 x 30 = 450 grams (roughly half a Kg), which is 12 months will amount to around 5.4 Kg. Although, the daily increase seems to be so less, over time, say around 5 years, a total of more than 30 kg of extra you.

That was a hypothetical situation we have seen for the fact that 15 grams are too small a unit used here, secondly, imbalance of intake fluctuates and finally, we even don’t realize that we have accumulated.

To start with, you should have data to compare yourself to. If you don’t have it, buy yourself a weighing machine. A simple digital scale should not cost more than 10 USD (700 INR, 1500 PKR, 850 BGT). Every day, after getting off the bed in the morning, pee and without even drinking water, you have to weigh yourself. Record this in a table of daily reading.

Now that you have got your daily weight record, you can easily see that if you are gaining daily, i.e. you are taking in more than you are spending. We will not talk about calories intake or type of complex foods you must take etc., which may be the topic of any other posting, but here we want to put it very simply, without going into the trouble of calculating caloric value of food or type of food you are taking. We are merely measuring the imbalance between intake and output.

Just by weighing yourself each day will give you an idea that a slight increase from the previous day means you took in more than you have spent the last day, so either you have to reduce your intake or to increase expenses.

Simple & easy English explanation of relation of over-weight or obesity with Diabetes

If you are not aware of this hormone ‘Insulin’, then I have to tell you some facts in very simple language. Insulin is produced by a few million cells present in our Pancreas, which is always released in response to increased blood glucose (sugar) level in addition to high protein intake. This is the only hormone which lowers blood glucose level. There is no other hormone in our body that will do this. We call this hormone as hypoglycemic or lowering blood glucose hormone. It is also anabolic, which means it builds body tissues.

We are not going into symptoms, signs, or complications of Diabetes, much has already been said elsewhere or we can leave this for some other time, if need may arise. Here, the focus remains on what goes wrong when due only to high weight and increase fat and/or sugar content of our diet leads to diabetes, more commonly known as type-2 diabetes.

Here the word “sugar” needs to be explained a little. Sugar encompasses all the carbohydrates we eat. It does not only mean table sugar or something sweet. Carbohydrates are found in most of the things we eat, e.g. flour, whether wheat, corn or others, rice all kinds, lentils, seeds, etc.

While we develop the habit of eating lots of carbohydrates or sugars and most of the time relatively continuously, it will always lead to the release of insulin to combat the increase in blood glucose levels. Over time, these cells cannot cope with the unceasing burden of being stimulated by increase blood glucose and start to worn out and die, which leads to a state of either insulin insufficiency or altogether no insulin. At times, cells become resistant to the actions of insulin, whose only job is to send glucose into the cells whenever blood level rises. These cells also become fed-up with all this glucose and decrease their production of receptors through which insulin will exert its action. Hence, the body is left in a state where either insufficient insulin is present or no insulin or cells have become resistant to it. In any of the cases, now normal functions of the body are impeded and it has gone into a pathological state of “Diabetes”.

Point of emphasis over here is that if you are eating more carbohydrates than you can burn (in other words: unstylish life), in the presence of insulin all these extra sugars will be converted to fats and will be stored as reserve in usual storehouse of the body, i.e. buttocks, thighs, breasts, and abdomen, etc. When even these are full, fat will find unusual places, e.g. under the skin everywhere in the body, to name one. So don’t be fooled that you are not taking much fat so your diet is better.

So, positive thinking is to stylize this approach and eat as many carbohydrates as one can burn. Let’s talk about this in some other post, but I welcome ladies and gentlemen out there to pour in their knowledge about this and let’s discuss as to how we can achieve this.