Tag: Couple Weeks

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Weight Loss Exercise

Where did my emotions go?



This is only a little bit about fitness and health, maybe not much. I have had a crazy last few months and I am not sure where it all leads but one thing that I have really noticed over the last few months is that I seem to have been repressing lots of feelings and have pushed down my emotions.

I know that this is likely unhealthy

I think this really started a couple or three years ago when I started struggling with panic attacks and with the help of a bit of Luvox I was able to crawl out of the fear and panic. Whew, snuck by that one…

Then we buy a house in the suburbs, and I am set. A wife, two kids, a minivan, a dog and cat and the Canadian dream apparently.

My sick kid comes next

I have written a bit about my daughter with her kidney disease. When we first found out about the kidney disease we didn’t know anything about the journey ahead of us but the whole family fell apart in fear, uncertainty, and doubt. When this happened I knew I had to stay strong and so I took emotions out of the picture and I worked toward making sure I would be able to do whatever needed to give my daughter a kidney.

Over the last year we seem to also be hitting all sorts of terrible money issues, regular family issues, and even a boy down the street getting cancer. I know that this does not all seem to be abnormal, we all have stresses in our lives and problems but yesterday I realized this might now be a problem.

Uh oh, Maybe I have a problem…

Where did my emotions go?So a couple weeks ago I met with the transplant doctor and he approved me for transplanting a kidney to my daughter as soon as her kidney level drops to 15% (probably in a few months) and he also found a spot on my lung in an xray that he suspects is not cancerous and is sending me for another chest xray in 4 months. Trouble is that I was not as excited as I should be about the kidney, and not at all worried about the spot on my lung.

That can’t be a good reaction.

And then yesterday the little boy down the street died of his cancer and although I feel terrible for his family and there was a lot of tears shed in my house, none were mine.

I am watching Biggest Loser tonight with my wife and daughter and they noticed that the guy on the Blue team, David, was really repressing his feelings and feeling like he was responsible for everyone around him instead of letting others help. My wife and daughter looked at me and said, hey just like you!

So here I am as a writer of a super popular fitness and health blog and I still don’t have it all together. This may or may not be a cry for help but I am betting that I am not the only one around that has these feelings.

So guys, help a guy out. I may seem to have it all together but how do I get my feelings back? How do I let go of control?

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Weight Loss Exercise

Leptin – Fat Hormone Regulation

Leptin is a hormone in our body that controls fat regulation. This post is going to be a work in progress but I wanted to point out a hormone that we all have to deal with when it comes to hunger and fat loss and fat storage (getting fat).

One of the problems that I have found, and my wife as well, when Leptin is explained is that science is not very nice to us common folk. I suspect that you want to know how to lose weight and are not really too interested in becoming a biochemist to do it.

How Leptin controls fat stores

Leptin is that starvation hormone that decides that our body has to store fat if we are in a starvation situation (like animals getting ready for winter hibernation) or to burn our calories quickly (like when animals are in a hunting or hunter situation).

Basically when we eat too much food and do not exercise enough we store fat. Leptin controls that storing of fat in our body just like it would in animals but we as people with supermarkets, fast food, and easy access to the smells and tastes that we like. We kind of mess things up as far as eating when hungry comes in and do have to do something to regulate it on our own.

Okay, have you got that straight? Hope so. So when we are on any kind of a regular diet what will happen is that we lose weight for the first few days or couple weeks and then we plateau. The other crappy side effect is that our energy drops and we have trouble working out. The plateau is caused by our our Leptin levels dropping which causes our metabolism (energy burning) to slow down and at the same time our body stores as much fat as possible.

This means that we have to do something to take us out of this fat storage problem

How to Reset Leptin Levels

Leptin Fat Hormone Regulation

Reset Leptin Levels

There is a simple way to rest our Leptin levels and this is to stop our bodies from thinking we are starving. What will happen is that you will diet for a week or week and a half and then take a day or two off and remind our bodies that we are not in a starvation phase. Some diets do this already and they call it different things. Fat Loss for Idiots calls it calorie shifting, in 24/7 Fat Loss Joel Marion calls it a cheat day.

On any diet that uses this strategy you don’t just go and gorge, you eat normal size meals until satisfied but not worrying about fat content of the foods or carbohydrate types.

The important thing about this method is to make sure that you are reminding your body that you are safe, you are not starving, and to bring your Leptin levels back so that you are again able to lose fat and not have your body store fat.

Diet and Leptin Levels

Now that you know how this Leptin business works you have all the information you need to make your current diet or to further evaluate a diet. What you need to do is never diet hard for more than a week or two without taking a day or two off. Although these cheat days can cause a bit of weight gain if done incorrectly you will be doing more help then any single diet day to making sure that you are going to have long term weight loss success.

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Weight Loss Exercise

Biggest Loser TV Show Week 3



A little late as I forgot ot post this yesterday. As usual I am hearing a lot about the biggest loser. This week the contestants had to only have food delivered or to dine out for the entire week. One good thing that the trainers taought was to make sure there are no bad condiments on the food like butter or mayo and that YOU choose what to eat. You have a certain number of calories you are able to eat in a day and if you watch what you order you can still eat a good meal, if not you do not get to eat very much.

Another thing that was evident was that after the huge weight losses the first week everyone now in the last couple weeks is really losing 3-6 pounds a week. The extreme amount of exercise is probably helping the contestants lose less total weight as they are probably losing a lot of fat and gaining a lot of muscle at the same time so we will probably wee everyone start losing more weight per week after a few weeks as the metabolism of everyone increases a lot.