Here are the Top 3 Ways to become leaner and slimmer, and avoid obesity, without exercising!

Eat 5-6 Mini Meals a day

Eating 5-6 Mini Meals a day, is not nearly as hard as it sounds. In fact, you could eat the same stuff as you normally do, but spread your meals out throughout the day.

Having 5-6 smaller meals every couple of hours speeds up your metabolism, helps to even out blood sugar levels and prevents you from overeating because you are having food regularly throughout the day.

Eat Balanced Meals

Each of your 5-6 Mini Meals should contain a balance of nutrients, including protein, carbohydrates, vegetables and good fats.

As a rough guide, your lean protein (for example fish, chicken, beef or Tofu) should be the size of your palm. Your carbohydrate portion (bread, pasta, chickpeas, potato or rice) should be the size of you clench fist. A portion of fat, would be the size of your thumb, and you can eat as many vegetables or as much salad as you like.

Eating a balanced meal helps you get all the nutrients your body needs to be healthy and speed up your metabolism so you burn more fat.

Drink 3 liters of Water each Day

We often think we’re hungry, when we’re actually thirsty. So when you next feel like snacking on something you shouldn’t, have a glass of water before hand.

Drinking 3 liters of water a day helps to ensure your body stays hydrated and flushes out toxins, while filling you up with no-calorie water instead of high calorie snacks.

Approaching your weight problem from a nutritional angle is the right start. Achieving a healthy body weight and feeling comfortable in our skin is 80% nutrition and 20% exercise. But remember, to achieve truly outstanding results, you will need to start exercising as well.

Avoid unnecessary high calorie foods like mayonnaise salads, fast food etc. Instead of a high calorie salad dressing for instance try cottage cheese, yogurt and fresh vegetable salads to improve the salads taste and peel of the pounds.

Hormone therapy plus physical activity reduce belly fat, body fat percentage after menopause

Older women who take hormone therapy to relieve menopausal symptoms may get the added benefit of reduced body fat if they are physically active, according to a new study. The results were presented at The Endocrine Society’s 91st Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

The study provides new information on the health benefits of any type of physical activity, not just exercise, said the presenting author Poli Mara Spritzer, MD, PhD, a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and chief of the Gynecological Endocrinology Unit at the university’s Hospital de Clinicas de Porto Alegre.

After menopause, a woman’s percentage of body fat tends to increase and redistribute to the abdomen, Spritzer said. Excess belly fat is a risk factor for diabetes and heart disease. Postmenopausal women who exercise have a lower percentage of body fat than sedentary women, past research shows. However, Spritzer said less is known about the influence on body fat composition of physical activity in women receiving hormone replacement therapy, or HRT. Some data suggest that estrogen treatment may add to the effect of exercise in reducing fat.

Spritzer and her colleagues studied 34 healthy women who had an average age of 51 years, had experienced menopause for less than 3 years and sought HRT to relieve hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal dryness. They evaluated the women’s cholesterol levels, body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (a measure of abdominal fat) and percentage of body fat before and after 4 months of HRT. The women received estrogen plus progesterone therapy in either non-oral (nasal and vaginal) or low-dose oral preparations. For 6 consecutive days before starting HRT and 6 days at the end of HRT, women wore a pedometer to estimate their level of physical activity. The device measured the steps they took, including walking, working, and doing house chores and leisure activities. They were instructed to not change their usual activities. Most of the women did not play sports or do any structured physical exercise, according to Spritzer.

Results showed that 24 of the women were physically active-defined as taking 6,000 steps or more per day-and 10 were inactive (less than 6,000 steps a day). For a woman who has a step, or stride, length of 2 feet (60 cm), 6,000 steps would be around 2.25 miles (3.6 km), Spritzer estimated. For active women, the higher the number of steps they took, the lower was their waist measurement and the better their level of “good” (high-density-lipoprotein, or HDL) cholesterol, the authors reported. The inactive women did not have any changes in body fat or cholesterol. However, when all 34 women were considered in the analysis, body fat still declined significantly after HRT.

“Data from our study suggest that active women could benefit from hormone therapy beyond the relief of menopausal symptoms-by preserving a good body fat percentage and distribution,” Spritzer said. “Further studies with a larger number of subjects are needed in order to answer whether a specific physical activity is better than others.”

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The Brazilian National Council for Science and Technology and the Brazilian National Institute of Hormones and Women’s Health funded this study.

alohr@endo-society.org
240-482-1380
The Endocrine Society

Let’s liken our body to an automobile, you wouldn’t think about getting in your automobile and trying to go a half a mile to the grocery store with no fuel in the tank.  Just like your car, your body needs fuel.  You have to have fuel in your vehicle for it to run and not only do you have to have fuel, but you have to have the proper fuel.  We would not think  of putting diesel in a gasoline engine, we would put only gasoline.  So, let’s think of our bodies as our vehicle and we need to start our day with food because we have been fasting overnight and our reserves are exhausted. They are down in the bottom; in fact most people’s blood sugar is the lowest in the morning.

Your reserves are down and you need to refuel, that is why breakfast is so important. Another fact that most people are unaware of about our bodies is that about  four hours after we have eaten our last meal our body begins to revert from using our fat store to using our glycogen and our muscle stores of energy, this even happens during the night. Luckily we don’t need as much energy during the night, but it still will switch us from the fat stores to glycogen and muscle stores.  By getting up, running around, getting ready  and getting to work, and not first refueling our self, we are setting our selves up for muscle loss.  We are not giving our body a good source of protein in which to fuel the energy need. Another time we will talk about proper fuel.

Until then…

Have a great day!

Dr. Jo Lynn Hawthorne