Free Online Weight Loss Help Exercise To Lose Weight & The 5 Principles Of Permanent Weight Loss

In order to lose weight and keep it off forever, there are just five key principles that you need to understand and follow. Luckily for you, it has all been summarised in this free online weight loss help exercise to lose weight. Stick to these and you will achieve the weight loss you have always wanted. The wonderful thing about this way of eating is that you will never have to feel hungry; you will lose fat and not lean muscle tissue and you will feel better with good exercise and more full of energy than you ever have before – guaranteed!

Scientists have discovered new ways of defining food and the effect it has on us. So instead of the old system of calorie counting, we need to become familiar with new terms like the Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load of foods. These are explained below.

1. Free online weight loss help to Balance your blood sugar

Latest research in weight loss has shown that the most important principle in controlling weight and exercising is keeping blood sugar balanced. For the sake of proper understanding I need to get a little technical here.

1.1 Why sugar and stimulants make you fat

The body runs on energy produced from the food we eat. Carbohydrates are turned into glucose by the body and carried by the blood to the cells, where it is used as fuel. But think of glucose as high-octane fuel – dangerous if left ‘out in the open’ and not taken to the cells where it is needed. If glucose levels in the blood are too high, it can be very harmful, which is why diabetics get nerve, eye and kidney damage. So, as soon as the glucose in your blood moves above a certain level, the body reacts quickly to get it out of your blood and, if you don’t need it for energy, stores it as fat.

The hormone that moves glucose out of your blood is insulin. The more frequently your blood sugar is raised, the more insulin you produce. The more insulin you produce, the more sugar you dump as fat. So insulin can be thought of as the fat-storing hormone. Even worse, high insulin levels inhibit the body’s breakdown of stored fat too. So once overweight, you stay overweight and it makes it impossible to lose weight.

If your blood glucose levels are even, you’ll have a steady supply of energy and a healthy but balanced appetite. But if your blood glucose levels fluctuate continuously, problems start. When your levels are high, you’ll store fat; when they are low, you feel lethargic and it is harder to burn fat. Refined or quick-release carbohydrates cause your glucose levels to rise rapidly. They are easily converted into glucose by the body, which causes a sudden peak – followed by a just-as-sudden drop. This causes your body to crave something to lift your energy again – and what’s usually at hand is another quick-release carbohydrate.

Coffee, nicotine and other stimulants have a similar effect. They prompt the release of adrenalin. This is the ‘fight-or-flight’ hormone, which, in order for us to ‘fight or flight’, immediately raises our blood sugar level – exactly the same effect as eating a jam donut!

Once you are in the high-low cycle, it is difficult to break it. Here’s an example from the free online weight loss help :

You wake up late for work; grab a coffee and a slice of toast. This causes a quick peak in your glucose levels, which is enough to get you through the traffic and to your desk.
At 10am the donut lady comes around. By now, the glucose levels in your blood have dropped, leaving you ravenous and irritable, and in need of something to ‘pick you up’. You have a donut and another cup of coffee. This causes another spike in your glucose levels.
By lunch time you are feeling tired your body is triggering hunger, because you are at the bottom of another glucose descent. You grab a quick lunch, like a sandwich or a pie, and a cola. The cycle starts again, and so on until bedtime.

1.2 Insulin resistance

If you are in this cycle, every time you get a ‘hit’ of sugar or a jolt of caffeine or nicotine, your blood sugar peaks and insulin is produced to escort the glucose out of your blood and into your cells as quickly as possible. It is as if the insulin continually shouts to the cells to ‘open the door!’ – eventually the cells become deaf to the constant message. So the body has to produce more and more insulin, just as if it were shouting louder and louder to be heard. This is called insulin resistance. You end up eating more and more carbohydrates before your body says ‘stop!’ and then, by the time the insulin does kick in, your blood sugar levels will have plummeted too low, leaving you craving something to give you a lift again. When you are in the grip of this vicious cycle, the lift is likely to be a quick-releasing carbohydrate like white bread or a donut and, for up to four hours afterwards, insulin resistance will mess up your body’s response to it. The result is brain fog, sleepiness and low mood after a meal, or another craving for something else to raise your blood sugar levels – something sweet and starchy, or coffee or tea.

If this carries on for an extended period, your insulin becomes less effective at getting the glucose out of your blood vessels and into the cells. As we saw earlier, glucose in the bloodstream is very damaging and, as it spends more time in your blood, it damages the arteries and paves the way for heart disease. Diabetes is one step further, where a person becomes so insulin-resistant that the cells in the pancreas become exhausted and just cannot produce enough insulin.

Are you insulin-resistant?

If you tick 10 or more of the following points, chances are that you are insulin-resistant, and struggling to keep your blood sugar even.

You are seldom wide awake within 20 minutes of getting up.
You need tea, coffee or a cigarette to get you going in the morning.
You really like sweet foods.
You crave bread, cereal, popcorn or pasta nearly every day.
You feel as if you ‘need’ an alcoholic drink most days.
You are overweight and struggle to lose it.
You often have energy slumps during the day, or after meals.
You experience mood swings or difficulty concentrating.
You fall asleep in the early evening or need a nap during the day
You avoid exercise because you feel you don’t have the energy
You get dizzy or irritable if you go 6 hours without food
You often overreact to stress
You get irritable, angry or aggressive unexpectedly
You have less energy now than you used to
You get night sweats or frequent headaches
You lie about how much sweet food you have eaten
You keep a supply of sweet food close to hand
You go out of your way to make sure you have something sweet
You feel you could never give up bread
You think of yourself as addicted to sugar, chocolate or biscuits

1.3 Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load

The key to controlling glucose levels in the blood is not just what you eat, but how and when you eat it. Some foods and food combinations stabilize blood sugar better than others and so help to burn fat.

Key to this is whether a food or food combination is a fast-releasing carbohydrate or a slow-releasing one. Fortunately, scientists have developed a way of categorizing food according to how quickly or slowly it releases energy. This is called the glycemic index (GI).

However, helpful as this is, it doesn’t tell you how much of the food is carbohydrate. So for example, the GI of carrots is very similar to that of chocolate – but you would have to eat 2 large carrots to get the carbohydrate content (or points) of 4 blocks of chocolate.

Carbohydrate points tell you how much of the food is carbohydrate, but don’t tell you the effect of that carbohydrate on your glucose levels. It takes a combination of these two pieces of information to tell you how much weight you will gain if you eat a particular food, and this is called the Glycemic Load (GL). So, using the example above, chocolate has a high GL value and carrots have a relatively low one.

Another way of understanding Glycemic Load of a specific food portion (i.e., what you would reasonably eat at one sitting) is an expression of how much impact (‘oomph’) or power the food will have in affecting blood glucose levels. It is thus a measure that incorporates both the quantity (two large carrots or four small blocks of chocolate) and quality (fast- or slow- releasing) of the carbohydrates consumed.

Some examples:

The GI of watermelon is high (GI = 72), but its glycemic load is relatively low (GL = 7), because the quantity of carbohydrate in a serving of watermelon is minimal, as it contains a lot of water.

The GI of apples is 38 but the GL of one medium apple is 5. This means that eating one apple will have hardly any effect on blood glucose levels. A 500 g packet of dried apples (a large quantity of concentrated food), has a GL of 50, which means that it will have a huge effect on your blood glucose levels, despite apples having a medium GI.

The GI of brown bread is high (GI = 81) and the GL of two slices (2 x 40 g slices of bread) is also pretty high (GL = 32). This means that a sandwich made with two slices of brown bread will have a marked effect on blood glucose levels as the bread has an “oomph” of 32. On the other hand, if you use one thin slice of bread (30 g bread) as part of a mixed meal containing low GI baked beans, ham and salad vegetables, the GL of the meal will be lower and more acceptable (GL = 22). Note that the two slices of bread on their own have a higher GL than an entire meal, in which only one thin slice of bread is used in combination with other low GI foods.

The GL of one slice of seed loaf is only 8. In contrast to this, a slice of brown or white bread has a GL of 16. This means that ordinary brown or white bread will spike blood glucose levels (they have a higher GL), and the seed loaf will not (it has a lower GL).

The GL of a roll (equivalent to two slices of bread) is more than 20, and that of a bagel (equivalent to three slices of bread) is more than 30.

The key to losing weight is to eat no more than 40 GL’s per day!

Obviously, if you choose high GL foods, you won’t be eating much. You could lose weight this way, but your appetite will not feel satisfied, and you will not be able to maintain a good level of health.

The GL of Common Foods (link to Glycemic Load of Common Foods) is designed to help you get a feel for which foods have a low GL score and to make it easy for you to adopt a new way of eating. The idea is to gradually adopt a new way of eating. You will soon get used to which foods have a low GL, as well as your own combinations of low-GL and protein foods to make delicious meals.

1.4 The New ‘Food Combining’

Glucagon is one of the hormones produced by the pancreas. It enters the picture when your blood glucose levels are very low. It raises glucose levels by telling the body to break down fat and burn it for energy. In the process, glucagon reduces cravings for sweet things. If insulin causes fat storage, glucagon causes you to burn fat. The more glucagon you produce in relation to insulin, the more you are programming yourself to burn fat.

The first trick to doing this is to eat the kinds of food that keep your blood glucose level steady (slow-release as opposed to refined carbohydrates). This will produce only small amounts of insulin and, whenever your energy is low, release glucagon to burn fat.

The second trick is to combine protein-rich foods with slow-releasing carbohydrates. The reason is that protein foods tend to trigger a small and equal release of both insulin and glucagons. Carbohydrates alone trigger the release of a lot of insulin with little or no glucagon. Eating carbohydrates with proteins ‘takes advantage’ of the release of glucagon and helps to burn fat. For example, pasta made with the same amount of white flour as bread has a lower GL than the bread, as it is mixed with egg (protein).

1.5 Fiber

Fiber refers to all the parts of plants that digestive enzymes cannot break down. It is a carbohydrate but it is neither slow- nor fast-releasing. While it cannot be digested, it does serve a purpose. When you eat a food high in fiber, it tends to slow down the release of sugars in the food – which is good news as far as weight control is concerned!

High-fiber diets are good for a number of health reasons. People who eat more fiber don’t usually suffer from constipation and have a lower risk of getting diabetes, bowel cancer and other bowel diseases. The best form of fiber is that found in fresh, raw fruits and vegetables, lentils, beans, seeds and whole grains. Be warned: it does not work to have a diet high in refined carbohydrates and to try compensating for this by supplementing with a fiber supplement!

Fiber is calorie-free and a diet high in natural fiber is more filling. For example, a large carrot salad is far more filling than 2 biscuits, even though they contain the same amount of calories; seed loaf is more filling than white bread. The main reason high-fiber foods are more satisfying is that fiber absorbs water, so the food becomes bulkier in the gut. This makes you feel fuller.

There are 2 types of fiber, soluble and insoluble. Many foods contain both. Insoluble fiber bulks up faecal content and ‘brushes’ the gut like a broom, preventing constipation. Soluble fiber dissolves in the gut to form a jelly-like substance that slows down the release of glucose into the bloodstream.

Whole grains contain both kinds of fiber and slow down glucose release the most. Ground fiber (found in whole meal bread) has little effect. Fruit and vegetable juices are devoid of fiber, which is why the sugars they contain are so fast-releasing.

The soluble fiber found in beans, lentils and oats is particularly effective in slowing down the release of blood sugars.

Insoluble fiber reduces appetite immediately after eating, while soluble fiber reduces appetite for up to 9 hours later. So eating fiber-rich foods is an excellent way to control appetite and hence weight. If you have to supplement, try oat fiber, psyllium husks or konjac fiber.

Four ways to stabilize your blood sugar level using the free online weight loss help exercise to lose weight:

1. Reduce sugar, stimulants and stress.

2. Eat low glycemic-load carbohydrates. Aim for no more than 40 GL a day.

3. Combine carbohydrates with protein at meals.

4. Eat a fiber-rich diet.