The Mini Fast!

November 18, 2010

AN EASY WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM

 

According to the Whitaker Well-ness Institute, a new Mini-Fast program is the easiest, fastest and least expensive way to lose weight, especially fat.

Heres how it works:

You get up in the morning and drink a glass of water or a cup of coffee or tea. You can use a little creamer or low-cal sweetener. But, do not eat breakfast or drink anything other than coffee, tea or water.

Then put on your workout gear and do some aerobic exercise. You can walk briskly, jog, cycle, use a treadmill, stair-stepper etc. The important thing is that you exercise for 20-45 minutes with moderate effort. (Don’t go over-board. You don’t want to burn yourself out before you get started.)

After you exercise, get on with your day, but continue fasting until lunch. Drink water, of course and feel free to drink coffee or tea. Don’t worry about being too hungry to make it through the morning. You may have to try this to believe it, but this fasting/exercise combo seriously damp-ens your appetite, and the caf-feine in the coffee and tea helps blunt hunger as well.

At lunchtime, break your fast and eat normally for the rest of the day. Get plenty of lean protein and low-fat, low-glycemic carbohydrates. You don’t have to count calories, but you don’t want to pig out at lunch or dinner either. Fortunately, you will find that eat-ing sensibly for two meals a day requires far less discipline than cutting calories all day long.

If you miss one meal per day everyday of the week, you will make a significant dent in your overall food intake.. This calorie restriction by itself contributes to weight loss, plus the exercise also burns calories. The key is exercising while in the fasting state really ratchets things up!

The mini-fast takes advantage of and expands upon the 10-12 hours you nor-mally fast during the night. By morning, your body is beginning to deplete the glycogen in your liver and is starting to rely more on fat for energy. As your gly-cogen stores are progressively ex-hausted, your liver starts to turn fat into ketones, which the brain and other tis-sues use as fuel. This fat-burning state is called ketosis.

Aerobic exercise is a crucial part of the mini-fast program because it rapidly puts you into ketosis. Overnight fasting is a start, but exercise really kicks things into high gear! The fuel used during that morning walk you’re taking in place of eating breakfast comes from burning fat, which is exactly what you want when you’re trying to lose weight. Even better, if you continue fasting after exercising, you will stay in the ketotic state, further reducing stored fat.

Everyone knows that exercise is neces-sary for weight control, but little focus is placed on the timing of exercise. If you eat breakfast before your morning work-out, you will do a wonderful job of burn-ing the carbohydrates you just ate. But the point is to use the exercise to burn fat, not carbohydrates.

Similarly, if you eat carbs right after your exercise, you turn off the rapid fat burn-ing that exercise has triggered. But again, by exercising during a mini-fast, you will be burning off stored fat for hours. And, if your subse-quent meals are relatively low in fat, you won’t be replacing it…. So every-day, you’ll be chipping away at your stored fat

Study Results

This program is not new, it has been used successfully for years by a medical researcher in Austria.
Study participants lost an average of 9 pounds and an even more impres-sive 16 pounds of fat in 12 weeks! Insulin sensitivity improved and blood sugar, blood pressure, choles-terol and triglycerides all were re-duced! What a plan!!

If you want help in starting this pro-gram, call Denise for an appoint-ment at 875-1127 and I will be happy to help you!!!