People gain weight for a mere handful of reasons.  Get a handle on these and watch excess weight melt away.

Your Food

There are three main dietary culprits to blame for weight gain.

• Excess carbohydrates
• Bad fats
• Too many calories

Carbohydrates

Most people do not possess the right kinds of genes to thrive on a lot of carbohydrates, simply because this not the diet consumed by their ancestors for millenia .  For the largest part of human history, people ate mostly vegetables, fruits, nuts, fish, and lean meat.  Grains and other starches pack more carbohydrate calories into one bite than vegetables and fruit do.  A cup of white rice has about three times as many carbs as your average cup of vegetables.

The upshot is that our bodies are left struggling to know what do with all the resulting blood sugar.  When blood sugar overwhelms, the energy system breaks and starts turning excess blood sugar into body fat.

Bad Fat

Harmful fats include:

• Meat fat: beef, lamb, and pork
• Dairy fat: there are substantial amounts of bad fat in anything but non-fat dairy
• Egg yolks: egg whites are fine
• Fried fat: the fat is damaged by heat and works abnormally in the body
• Partially hydrogenated fat: found in baked and packaged goods
• Omega-6: canola oil, grapeseed oil, Smart-Balance, etc.

These bad fats increase unwanted immune activation called inflammation.  Inflammation joins excess carbohydrates to gum up the energy making system and force you to gain weight.

Calories

Weight gain is, in part, a math problem.  If you eat more calories that you spend, you gain weight.  You can decrease your formation of fat by eating less carbohydrates and avoiding bad fat, but you need to keep the calories in check, too.

To lower calorie consumption, it's important to manage your appetite.  People don’t want to overeat, they just find it hard to feel satisfied.   Satisfiy your hunger by signalling your brain that you are full.  Lean protein and good fat like olive oil, avocados and nuts, as well as fiber from vegetables and fruits team up to calm your appetite in the immediate term.

As the hours wear on after a meal, eating this way will keep your blood sugar at a good level for longer and you will ultimately consume fewer calories.

Supplements

Get a fat burning boost with a few supplements.

• Vitamin D is an unsung hero in weight loss.  It plays a central role in regulating metabolism.
• Fish oil helps reduce the inflammation implicated in weight gain and can curb hunger if you are dieting.
• Alpha Lipoic Acid is an antioxidant, a metabolism booster, and a hunger reducer.  Is it any wonder that overweight people lost weight with this gem alone?
• Synaptalean increases dopamine formation in the brain.  It increased food satisfaction and decreased the amount of food people eat.
• Relora slashes stress hormone levels.  Lower cortisol can mean lower sugar and starchy food cravings, particularly in women, who tend to have higher cortisol levels.

Exercise and Stress

Your metabolism takes a beating when stress is in play.  Stress will put you squarely in fat storage mode.  You can’t escape stress, but you can cope with the biological effects of it with exercise.  The kind of exercise that copes with stress most efficiently is called interval training.  Interval training can put you in fat burning mode within minutes.  Take look at the Interval Training page.