Sunday, August 17, 2008 Paquiao: Diets don't work By Calixto S. Paquiao fitness & you
A LOT of figure conscious and fitness enthusiasts believe that dieting or skipping meals will hasten their goal to lose weight.
But did you know that dieting slows your metabolism and makes it harder for you to burn fat?
Dieting also makes you light-headed and weak making it harder for you to complete your daily exercise in high intensity.
No, dieting doesn’t work. You can’t even lose fat that fat cells; you can only shrink them. And every fat cell you shrink by skipping breakfast, for example, is a cell that is eagerly waiting for lunch for that piece of pizza and that handful of French fries to swell it right back.
I know most of us get confused, especially when you’ve heard from your friends or read in some magazine that you must go on diet and suppress you appetite by taking some supplements that block your hunger.
But believe me, you can never be successful in losing weight and keeping it off if you continue your starvation diet. So you don’t need to give up food. You can continue enjoying it.
Have you seen those Japanese sumo wrestlers? You will notice that sumo wrestlers have love handles the size of big watermelons. They need them so that their opponents can’t get a good grip around their bodies.
One of the techniques they use to grow those big, fat, love handles is skipping breakfast. That drives up their hunger and slows down the metabolism. So when the next meal comes, they eat as much as fat they can from the dozens of sushi combo platters they can devour.
The point is skipping any meal or substituting a small snack for a meal is detrimental to your battle against losing weight.
One of the secrets of losing fat is to eat a balanced diet, which is 65 percent carbohydrates, 15 to 20 percent protein and 20 percent fat.
You have to eat three square meals a day plus an optional snack. You must also exercise intensively: doing a combination of jogging running and sprinting and at the same time training with weights.
Training in these type of regimens will make you to succeed and get what you want for your body.
(Coach Paquiao Wellness and Fitness Center, 2nd Floor JY Square Discovery Mall, Salinas Drive, Lahug, Cebu City/ 234-2811)
