Diet Tips

Hi, this is Bill Chan again with The 5 Elements of a Fulfilling Life at 5Element5.com, and I'm also a health coach, and this evening I want to talk to you about Dr. Michael Greger's excellent book on "How not to diet."

In this book, he talks about many tips on how to lose weight. After I read the book, I listened to many of his webinars and seminars.

I picked out six tips that I found most helpful, and I tried them on myself, and it's beautiful.

I want to share that with you tonight, and the first tip is to drink a lot of water.

Now we all know this when you drink water, that's the most important.

Okay, not just drinking the water, the tip is first thing in the morning, have a glass of warm water with some lemon; it helps your constipation so you can go to the bathroom more accessible.

Next, have a big glass of water right before your meal. Then it fills your stomach up; you can eat less.

His second excellent suggestion was exercising; now we all know exercise is good for our health.

We might think that exercise is an excellent way to lose weight, but a famous saying says: "you can't work yourself out of a bad diet."

 

Okay, so you can't exercise yourself out of a bad diet, which means exercise doesn't lose a lot of weight; what it does is help you manage the weight that you lost, and it allows you to maintain.

There are two types of exercise: the first type is called anaerobic weightlifting, which helps you build muscle mass and metabolize fat much faster in your body.

The other way he was talking about is like an uh aerobic exercise, like running, you know, jumping ropes, it helps your heart beat faster and allows you to metabolize a lot quicker.

 

One trick he mentioned is adding two teaspoons of vinegar to your meal every day, and I noticed that the Chinese love vinegar.

I used to live in China for many years, and especially Shanghainese add vinegar to everything, and I noticed that all the ladies in Shanghai are very slim, and that might be one of the tricks; adding vinegar to your meal, it could be to your salad, it could be directed to your feed.

Eat a salad, eat an apple before your meal, so have your fruits before your dinner; fruits contain a lot of fiber and fill you up, so you can eat less with your feed.

Let's say you usually have a thousand calories of spaghetti because you ate your salad first (have a big salad or an apple); let's say if you have about 100 calories of salad, it doesn't mean that you have after the salad you're going to have 900 calories of spaghetti. The funny thing is that you ate that salad. First, you eat only 800 calories of spaghetti, which also carries to the next meal, so for two meals, you're eating 100 calories deficit in each meal.

So if you can do that every day, think about it you lose 200 calories every single day. Because of all the fibers on your salad or your apple, you don't digest all of it in yourself; not only does the microbiome help you to digest a lot of the calories, but also because all the calories are wrapped around by the fibers it goes out the other end so you're not consuming all the calories you eat now.

Here's the trick: don't put the dressing onto your salad; the Italian sauce and French dressing carry more calories than the salad itself, so you're not doing yourself any favors; add the vinegar. That's all you need.

Okay, now turn your thermostat a little bit colder; okay, don't make your room too warm or too hot because it helps your brown fat; not many people may hear of brown fat, but all of us have about five percent brown fat, and that brown fat the funny thing is it burns off the uh regular fats on your body so if you're a little bit colder in your room, it helps activate the brown fats.

Okay, if you're too warm, the brown fat doesn't move, so you're not activating it.  Babies have a lot of brown fat; as we age, we lose a lot of the brown fat, but the remainder can still be very functional if we activate them again.

Sleep is critical, so sleeping seven to nine hours daily helps you lose weight.

The reason is we stay up too late and get hungry at night, and what do we go after when we get hungry at night? We go after comfort foods, sweets, oily, or fatty foods; that's human nature.

So we're eating supper late at night; it doesn't help the digestive system.

So go to bed early and get seven to eight hours a night.

Okay, so these are some of the favorite tips I have learned from the book, and if you want to take a deep dive, please get this excellent book.  Okay, thank you very much.