How to lose fat - effectively

Elwin writes on weight loss, how most diets don't work and what you can do to ensure success

What long term activity would you say is the most unhealthy of all? Smoking? Drinking? Eating junk food? Working in a nuclear power plant?
Ultimately the most draining and therefore, unhealthy activity you can be involved in is to be at war with yourself. What does this mean? It’s a complex subject, but most commonly it’s where your head wants one thing and your emotions and instincts want something completely different.
Here’s an example that I see all too often, that can really tear people apart: being overweight. You tell yourself, in your head, that you want to lose the fat and be thin and attractive, and also fit and healthy. So you decide to eat less, eat better, and exercise more. Only problem is: you didn’t ask your body how it felt. Your body just wants to feel good. And, if you’re overweight, that probably means eating lots of food, preferably sweet, and exerting yourself as little as possible. So the war between the mind and the body begins!
Who wins? If the statistics on dieting are anything to go by, where 97% of people who go on a diet regain the weight within a year, the body wins almost every time. But then comes the worst bit. The guilt. The self-punishment. The feelings of apathy and worthlessness.
Is it true? Are you really as weak and pathetic as you tell yourself you are during your darkest moments? Or is it actually the case that the whole approach to losing weight is doomed to failure because it’s ineffective, built on false principles? Almost every overweight person I meet feels confident they know how to lose weight – eat less and exercise more. Yet it doesn’t ever work when they try it. Perhaps there is more to it?
Recently, even the very mainstream American Medical Association admitted that losing fat has almost nothing to do with eating fewer calories and burning more calories. It’s a great, very simple theory, but it doesn’t work in practice. So what does? It fundamentally comes down to three factors which, if overcome, guarantee success in this area. Often just tackling one or two causes weight to just fall off, but doing all three guarantees success. They are:

1 Stress.
What’s stress got to do with it? Stress leads to depletion and a build of acidity. When the body has excess acidity it has to keep some fat. It’s a life-saving mechanism. Nothing will shift it because your body’s primary goal is to stay alive. Dealing with this acidity, and the root of it, depletion of the kidneys, manifesting as exhaustion and stress, is essential to health and usually to lasting weight loss.
Lots of green juices are helpful short term, and my Rejuvenate blend is excellent for dealing with the root causes.
I created a program to talk you through every step of overcoming this issue, The Easy Exhaustion Cure, which I could just as easily have called the Easy Stress Cure.
An example of how depletion can cause weight gain: through stress and bad eating habits, among many other factors, you can easily become depleted in the mineral zinc. Zinc depletion has the curious effect of either turning off the appetite altogether (skinny people) or causing you to eat compulsively, while simultaneously never really feeling full-filled. Estimates are that over 60% of the population are zinc deficient, and it’s always low in a vegetarian diet.
Supplementing zinc can be excellent for this.

2 Toxicity. The value of cleansing or detoxifying is already well known in the western health world. But, as with acidity, did you know that if you have a lot of toxicity, you body will, as a preference, store it in the fat cells? In fact, the body can store 100 times as much toxicity in a fat cell than it can in a blood cell.
What does this mean? It explains why you start to feel terrible whenever you purify your diet or start to exercise. Your body starts breaking down your fat cells, which is what you want right? Except...where do all the toxins go? Straight into your bloodstream, which can make you feel awful despite all those endorphins you can get from exercising.
This in turn can place a massive burden on your eliminative organs, which is even potentially dangerous. Then, despite all the best intentions in the world, you find yourself eating a box of doughnuts, or a Happy Meal. The body, in response, immediately stops releasing toxicity, as you’ve started poisoning yourself with junk food again, but... you feel better.
So what do you do? Give up? No. First, strengthen or tonify your organs so they can cope with the toxic deluge. See here for more information on what it means to tonify.
Then, do a cleansing regime that works for you. Many great systems are out there – my own detox program, with Philip McCluskey, is due out soon!

3 Sugar
The hardest thing of all to deal with, and not always necessary. Sometimes just step 1, or steps 1+2 are sufficient. But, often this is the most important step.
Ultimately it’s pretty simple. If you want your body to burn the spare fat on your body as fuel, you have to get it used to burning fat as fuel. If your body is used to burning carbohydrate as its main source of fuel, which is easier for it, what will happen when it runs out of fuel, say while you’re ‘dieting’? It will look for more carbohydrate to burn. And it will find very limited supplies in storage, mainly in the muscles and liver, in the form of glycogen, which it converts to glucose.
What happens when that runs out? You feel really, really bad. Possibly weak and faint, sometimes in a murderous rage. Then before you know it, you’ve eaten a whole pack of biscuits, and you wonder: how did that happen? Again I’ll reiterate: there’s nothing wrong with you. Your body just took over and potentially saved your life. It is actually possible to slip into a coma if your blood sugar drops low enough.
Fat is an immensely efficient fuel. Carbohydrate is not. If you can imagine a fire, carbohydrate is like feeding it with newspaper or kindling. Fat is like feeding it with logs and coal. Obviously kindling has its place. But most of your fuel needs to be fat if you want a constant steady fire. If you drown a fire with coal, that can put it out. But just feeding it twigs guarantees it can go out unless you feed it constantly.
To be honest, going from burning sugar as fuel to burning fat as fuel can be difficult. It’s made considerably easier by following the first two steps thoroughly first. Most people don’t manage it if they just try to cut out carbs in a haphazard way. I gained more health benefits from doing this than anything else I’ve ever done, including quitting all stimulants and going 100% raw. It was also harder than anything else I’d done, but, thoroughly worth it.
I was inspired by man named Stu Mittleman. He managed to break the marathon running world record by running 3 marathons a day for 10 days in a row, running 21 hours a day. The most extraordinary thing? He said he felt more energised than ever by the end, like he could have kept going and going. That level of endurance, he said, was only possible because he’d learnt to burn fat as his primary source of fuel.
I’m in the process now of creating a product to guide you through all three steps, in an easy, clear, realistic step by step way, as is the style I’m becoming known for. Small steps, done consistently over time, can lead to massive achievements that really last. It will be available next year.
For now if you’d to work with me on any or all of these steps I’m available for consultations. For more information see here.
What do I want you to take away from all this?

1 Stop beating yourself up. If you’re using an approach that doesn’t work, failure is inevitable. My favourite speaker, Anthony Robbins says: “No matter how fast or how long you run, you’ll never find a sunset by heading east”.

2 Realise: there is another way. When you follow an approach that works, health and fitness are inevitable. It’s just a matter of time.

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