Call Us 020 7354 3550
Sign Up

Posts Tagged ‘cortisol’

London Personal Trainer: FREE Fat Loss Magazine!

Monday, October 26th, 2009

magazine cover

Yep, it’s here!

The first edition of HEALTHY Islington, the new publication that I’m distributing locally within my community in London.

This issue has a focus on fat loss with articles on supplements, training and diet as well as workout videos that you can watch online.

Grab your copy by clicking on the magazine cover above (no opt in subscription required)

Enjoy!

Dax Moy
The UK’s leading Personal Trainer
http://www.mylondonpersonaltrainer.com

P.S – Don’t forget to leave me a comment!

London Personal Trainer Reveals The 5 Dietary Disasters That Are Keeping You Fat

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

It’s frustrating isn’t it? You’ve tried practically every type of diet you’ve ever heard of and yet still that stubborn fat that sits around your waist, thighs and butt just doesn’t seem to shift.

In your quest to go from flab to fab you’ve ‘been there, done that and bought the T-shirt’ on every diet from high carb-low protein to low carb high protein and everything in between.

You’ve lived on ’skinny shakes’, pills, powders and even gone to the extremes of 100% juice diets and the dreaded cabbage soup concoctions that have left you feeling light headed, nauseous and plain awful yet, when the smoke cleared on them all you found that nothing had changed.

Sure, maybe a pound or two here and there but nothing really amazing. And the worst thing is that these couple of pounds here and there ALWAYS seem to come back faster than they left and usually with an extra few pounds to keep them company!

Does this sound like the kind of experience you’ve always had whenever you’ve tried to shift weight, burn fat, tone up and get back into shape?

If it does, don’t panic, you’re really not alone. In fact, this is the experience of the overwhelming majority with only the lucky few be able to boast of dramatic results in short time frames that stay off permanently.

Well, not ‘lucky’ exactly, they’re simply doing things differently to you. Things that work consistently to generate results in terms of losing fat.

One thing’s for sure, they’re not committing the 5 dietary disasters that most people who are struggling with their weight seem to be on an almost daily basis.

Dietary Disaster #1- Eating Refined Carbs: Now, before you go thinking that carbs are bad, think again. They’re not only good for you, they’re vital to your health… as long as they’re eaten in their natural form.

Trouble is, most of the carbohydrates in modern diets are of the the processed, refined kind rather than those coming from fruits and vegetables.

We’re talking white rice, breads, cakes, cookies, pastries, confectionary and plain old sugar, all of which are so refined that the body can’t extract any real nutrition from them. Worse still, the huge surges of insulin that these foods create within your body are literally commanding your body to store fat.

Avoid this dietary disaster by avoiding all refined carbohydrate and eat only those that are still in their natural forms like fruit and vegetables. Not only will you consume less calories overall but you’ll be getting tons of vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients that will guarantee speedier fat loss.

Dietary Disaster #2 – Consuming Processed Foods. Almost the same problem as disaster #1 but this extends to all foodstuffs and not just carbohydrates.

Consumption of processed foods is now the rule rather than the exception for the vast majority of people and it is this factor, perhaps more than any other, that practically guarantees you’ll be struggling with both your weight and general health for far longer than you have to.

Simply put, processed foods are denatured. Most of the vitamins, minerals and nutrients that contribute to making a food a useful addition to our health is extracted or changed so much during processing that our body doesn’t even recognise the foods as food.

Because of this, our bodies store much of it as fat and then take on and hold more water beneath the skin to ‘dilute’ the toxic effects of these non-foods. The result is a gain in both weight and fat that goes far beyond the actual calories consumed.

Avoiding this dietary disaster is simple. Eat only fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, fish and poultry. Give the boxed and packaged foods a miss and you’ll soon see the pounds fall off.

Dietary Disaster #3 – Consuming Too Much Caffeine: Talk to anyone about giving up their morning cup of tea or coffee and it’s almost like you’ve asked them to give up one of their children. They’ll fight you every step of the way and probably call you names too.

There’s a reason for this; caffeine is hands down the most widely used drug on the planet. That’s right, it’s a drug, just like cocaine, heroine or crystal meth.

Not only does it change your emotions, your reactions, your physical performance and your metabolism, but it also gives you all the nasty side effects of mainstream drugs when you try to quit it.

Just ask anyone who’s gone cold-turkey from caffeine and they’ll tell you about the massive headaches, irritability, aches, pains and flu-like symptoms they had to go through in order to get clear of the stuff.

Caffeine is powerful stuff. So much so that it pushes the nervous system into fight or flight mode with every sip and, in doing so stimulates your stress hormone ‘cortisol’ which has the effect of making it much harder to lose fat over time.

In fact, it’s worse than that. High cortisol levels will practically guarantee that you’ll lose muscle and gain fat; the exact reverse of what most people are hoping for.

To avoid this dietary disaster drop coffee, tea and sodas from your diet and drink herbal and fruit teas and good old water and you’ll soon see and feel a difference.

Dietary Disaster #4 – Cutting back on dietary fat: Most people who’re desperate to lose fat tend to think that consuming fat in their diet will doom them to failure and so they cut back on practically all the fat they can find in their daily meals.

Big mistake! You see, fat is a vital component of a healthy body and healthy metabolism. Drop the fat consumption too low and your body perceives a threat to it’s survival and does the very opposite of what you want it to do.

Instead of speeding up, it slows down the metabolism and does its best to hold on to those precious fat stores that you so desperately want to be rid of.

Let’s be clear here once and for all. Fat does not make you fat. Certainly not the good fats anyway.

It’s those trans-fats in vegetable oils and margarine that are the ones you want to be rid of most, not the good fats that you find in organic farm-reared beef, free range poultry and net caught fish.

Likewise, the fats in nuts, seeds and legumes are really good for you too and should definitely not be cut from your diet if you’re serious about losing fat.

Fat is not bad. It’s not your enemy and no, it definitely won’t make you fat if you’re consuming it in reasonable amounts. In fact, the opposite is true.

To avoid this dietary disaster, cut only the trans fats and vegetable oils from your diet but maintain a healthy intake of natural oils and fats from your foods, especially coconut oil and omega 3 fish oils which are practically a miracle food.

Dietary Disaster #5 – Cutting Calories: Most people who are trying to lose weight use calorie restriction as their FIRST resort rather than their last.

As soon as they decide to lose a few pounds they start upon a program of semi-starvation where they miss meals, reduce all their portion sizes, opt for low calorie and ‘fat free’ options at the supermarket and even sacrifice 2 meals a day in favour of ’skinny shakes’ that promise to get them thin.

Little do that know that calorie restriction is both unnecessary and, in most cases, counter-productive and that there is no reason whatsoever why they should ever have to weigh or measure a food to decide whether or not they’re ‘allowed’ to eat it.

Despite what they’ve been told, weight management has little to do with a mathematical equation such as calories in vs calories out. The body doesn’t work that way at all!

The human body is more concerned with nutrients than calories. If you’re getting all the vitamins, minerals and other essential elements that you need through following a healthy and complete diet you’ll never have to count calories at all!

On the other hand, if your calories are high and the nutrition is low (as is the case in most processed foods) then your body will simply not stop sending you signals to eat regardless of whether or not you’ve eaten your daily requirement.

Hunger and compulsive eating are about malnutrition NOT calories. As long as you eat healthily you’ll never need to count a calorie ever again.

Avoid this dietary disaster by following the guidelines for the previous four. Only consume good quality, preferably organic natural foods that are not processed or tampered with in any away and your body will soon re-establish correct eating habits to maintain optimal health.

Well, there you have it. The five most common dietary disaster keeping you from losing fat and keeping it off for good.

They’re not exactly rocket science are they? In fact, they’re just common sense but, like all common sense advice, it’s not that common to see many people following it.

Try following it yourself by putting the advice you’ve learned here to the test and avoid these dietary disasters for just 30 days and see what kind of results you get.

I know you’ll be more than pleasantly surprised.

Dax Moy
The UK’s Leading Personal Trainer
And Fat Loss Expert Based In London

P.S – Why not download a copy of my Elimination Diet for more guidance in losing fat?

It’s free and it’s right here at the top of this page on the right.

You could have it in your hands in 30 seconds! : )

London Personal Trainer Reveals Secret To Losing 5lbs Or More This Week… WITHOUT Changing Your Diet Or Exercise (Or Spending a Single Penny)

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Is that possible?

I mean, is it REALLY possible that you could drop 5lbs in a week without making a single change to how you currently eat or radically changing your exercise program?

Most personal trainers and fat loss experts will tell you ‘no’. In fact, they’ll probably go further than that by claiming that such a feat is pretty much impossible as losing fat is about nothing more or nothing less than calories in vs calories out.

Burn more calories than you eat, they’ll tell you, and you lose fat, eat more than you burn and you’ll gain.

But they’d be wrong.

On both counts!

Whilst it’s true that calorific intake contributes to overall body mass it’s not the only, nor indeed the most important factor. If it were then those who go on very low calorie diets would ALL drop tons of weight (and they don’t) and those who eat chocolate and cake and pizza every week would all be super-obese and, as we know, neither case is true.

We all know many people who seem to be permanently on a diet yet who struggle to lose even the smallest amount and we also know people who can eat what they want in the most obscene portions yet never gain an ounce or, worse still, show off amazing six-pack abs despite ‘doing everything wrong’.

What gives?

Well, it’s not too tricky really. No smoke and mirrors or ’secrets’ that any of the rest of us couldn’t employ immediately to get great fat loss results for ourselves.

It’s not just calories and activity that’s for sure.

It’s about hormones.

It’s about balancing the hormones that course through our veins every waking moment of our lives so that they work in our favour rather than against us.

And this first ’secret’ I’m going to share with you is about rebalancing one of the most important hormones of them all.

Cortisol.

This ’super hormone’ is our body’s anti-stress hormone which is designed to help us re-stabilise and rebalance the body when our system becomes overloaded with physical, emotional and environmental stress. Trouble is, if it remains elevated for too long because our daily stress refuses to come down then it wreaks havoc on the body, cannibalising your muscle tissues, affecting the other hormones in your body and, effectively, putting your metabolism in reverse gear.

There are numerous things you can do to re-balance your cortisol and we’ll be discussing many of them over the coming weeks but by far the most important approach you can employ right away is the very simplest of all.

It costs you nothing, requires no pills, powders or shakes. It doesn’t ask you to count calories, change your eating habits or start exercising daily in order to melt off fat.

It requires just one thing.

Go to bed earlier.

Seriously, the most important thing you could possibly do to bring your cortisol levels down and immediately start to reboot your metabolism into fast fat burning mode is to get to bed earlier.

Why does this work?

Well, without getting super technical about it, the body works on what’s called a ‘diurnal rhythm‘ meaning that a cycle of activities repeat themselves on a daily basis.

Part of that rhythm naturally sees cortisol reach its low point between about 10pm and 2am with a peak in growth hormone and testosterone/estrogen at the same time. This is a perfect design from a fat loss perspective as it allows for maximum muscle repair and growth (meaning increased metabolism) and minimal stress and breakdown (meaning slower metabolism).

The problem is, when you habitually stay up watching TV or answering emails beyond 10.30 at the latest, you’re causing your metabolism to shift the other way. Cortisol stays high, growth hormone stays low and your internal environment simply cannot do what it’s supposed to do in terms of efficient fat burning.

If all of this talk of hormones is freaking you out, don’t.

The message is VERY simple.

Get to bed by 10pm to 10.30pm at the very latest is you’re serious about burning fat fast.

You may not 100% believe that this’ll work for you but that’s not necessary right now. Just suspend your disbelief and give it a go and see what happens.

If you’re like the majority of my personal training clients after just a week of earlier bedtimes and better quality sleep you’ll see a 5-7lb reduction in fat levels from this one strategy alone.

In fact, this fat loss technique is so powerful that when combined with proper nutrition, exercise and a hormone rebalancing supplement program many people will lose twice that amount over the course of the week.

Why not try it for yourself?

Get to bed every night by 10.30 and then come back here and post to this blog what kind of results you’re getting. Go on, put me on the spot and make me prove that this works : )

You game?

Dax Moy
London’s Leading Personal Trainer

Get Your FREE Elimination Diet And Workout Program




FREE Elimination Diet And Workout From London's Leading Personal Trainer.