Category: Friday Fitness fact

Weight loss is not a physical challenge – it’s a mental one.

‘The following behavioural strategies could help your weight loss plan:

1.  Schedule your day to allow adequate time for buying, preparing and eating healthy food. Set an alarm if necessary so you don’t get stuck watching TV or working at the computer.
2. Stock up on healthy snacks that have a pleasing texture and taste. You may like the crunchiness of carrots, the tanginess of cheese cubes, or the smoothness of frozen yoghurt. Drinking a cup of hot tea with your midmorning or midafternoon snack may make it last longer and feel more satisfying.
3. Communicate with family and friends and ask for their support in improving your health. Ideally, working on weight together with a friend or family member means you can encourage and support each other and help keep each other on track.
4.  Stay “in the moment” while eating.  Avoid eating at the computer, while driving, or multitasking while you eat. Tune into the experience of eating, what tastes and textures you feel like, how satisfying the food is, and what it feels like to be hungry or full.
5. Remind yourself several times a day of your weight loss goal and how important it is to you. You could paste a picture of a thinner version of you or write your reasons for losing weight on a note card that you keep with you, or put a picture on your desk.
6. Don’t get caught in thinking traps that can derail you from your diet. If you feel that you deserve something extra for being good, reward yourself with an extra snack or a small dessert that only adds a limited amount of calories. If you have a bad day, don’t use it as an excuse to go off your diet for a week. Remind yourself that you need to get back on track as quickly as possible to minimize the damage.
7. Tell yourself “I can do this.”  Research shows that self-efficacy, or confidence that you can succeed at reaching your goal, is a powerful predictor of future behavior. If you catch yourself thinking negatively, switch to thinking about other situations in which you successfully learned a new behaviorl. Visualize yourself resisting temptation or throwing the extra weight into the ocean to keep motivated.

These strategies, accompanied by a reasonable nutritional plan, and increased exercise should help you develop a new relationship to food and increase your self-control.’

Sources:

To Lose the Weight, Change How You Relate (to Food)  https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-mindful-self-express/201102/lose-the-weight-change-how-you-relate-food

Previous: Friday Fitness Fact #7: Resistance Training

Calories.

You burn more calories in the 23 hours you don’t exercise, than the 1-hour you do.

21 Bizarre Ways To Burn Calories

These results are based on an average 68kg human.

1. An average sized human will burn about 2400 Calories per day without doing any exercise.
2. Singing in the shower can burn an extra 10-20 Calories per song, depending on the volume and pitch of your voice.
3. Laughing for 10 minutes can make you burn between 20 and 40 Calories.
4. You burn about 200 Calories during 30 minutes of active sex.
5. Banging your head against a wall uses 150 Calories an hour.
6. On average, brushing your teeth for three minutes will burn 10 Calories.
7. Pushing a shopping trolley up the aisles for half an hour will burn over 100 Calories, this number increases with the amount you put in your trolley and the heavier it gets.
8. One hour spent sitting in front of the TV burns around 65 Calories.
9. Smoking a cigarette burns roughly 10 Calories.
10. Dancing on a Dance Mat for 10 minutes will burn 50-60 Calories.
11. Hugging for one hour can burn 70 Calories.
12. If you whip your head back and forth to Willow Smith’s song, you will burn up to 50 Calories, depending on how crazy you go.
13. A one minute kiss can burn between 2 and 4 Calories, depending on how intimate it is.
14. A person will burn 7 percent more calories if they walk on hard dirt compared to pavement.
15. You burn more calories than you consume when you eat celery.
16. On average, if you walk your dog for 30 minutes, you burn 100 Calories.
17. You burn more calories sitting in the cold, than heat.
18. Chewing gum burns 11 Calories per hour.
19. You can burn up to 350 more Calories per day if you fidget, rather than someone who remains stationary.
20. Missing a night of sleep causes the body to burn about an extra 161 calories.
21. Constant texting can burn 40 Calories per hour.

Source: 20 Bizarre Ways To Burn Calories, thefactsite.com

[Previous: Friday Fitness Fact #5: Exercise]

Exercise.

You can’t use exercise to target fat loss in specific areas.

‘Targeted fat loss, also known as “spot reduction,” is a popular idea partly because it appeals to our intuition. After all, it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that the fat you burn while exercising comes from the area around the muscles you are using. Yet a 1971 study conducted by the University of California, Irvine on tennis players found that this is not actually the case.’^[1]

10 Myths And Facts About Burning Fat^[2]

1. You Must Eliminate Entire Food groups to See Results
2. Endless Jumping Exercises are Great for Fat Loss
3. Eating Twice a Day is the Best Way to Lose Fat
4. You can Eat Whatever you want, as long as you create a Caloric Deficit
5. Just Eat Less and you’ll Lose Weight
6. All Calories are Equalso Eat Less and you’ll Lose Weight
7. You should feel Exhausted at the end of every Workout
8. You need to Work Out Every Day if you’re Serious about Losing Weight
9. Intense Cardiovascular Training will Burn Muscle and Thin out my Legs
10. You Don’t need to get Stronger to get Leaner

[1] Targeted Fat Loss: Myth or Reality? at Yale Scientific, 2011

[2] 10 Myths And Facts About Burning Fat, ConsumerHealthDigest.com

[Previous: Friday Fitness Fact 4: Muscle]

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Muscle does not weigh more than fat.

“Technically, the statement, muscle weighs more than fat is false. The truth is that when placed on a scale, one pound of fat is going to weigh the same as one pound of muscle – just like one pound of bricks is going to weigh the same as one pound of feathers. Where the confusion comes in is that muscle and fat differ in density (muscle is about 18% more dense than fat) and one pound of muscle occupies less space (volume) than one pound of fat.

So yes, muscle seems to weigh more because there is a difference in the volume between the two. When a cubic inch of muscle and a cubic inch of fat are measured, the cubic inch of muscle will weigh more. As you add compact muscle mass to the body, body weight may increase. However, pound for pound, muscle and fat weigh the same and when tracking progress of a fitness program, it is very important to look at all markers of improvement, and not just the numbers on the scale.

These diagrams visually express the differences between muscle and fat densities

1) Muscle = more dense

2) Fat = less dense

3) Cross section of a skeletal muscle (200x) showing the muscle fibres (red) and the fat cells (white)

Note that the fat cells are less dense than the muscle cells and take up more volume.”

[Read the rest of this article at bamboocorefitness.com]

15 Fun Facts about Muscles

1. The biggest muscle in the human body is the gluteus maximus- your butt
2. The smallest is the stapedius. It is thinner than a thread of cotton and is located in your ear
3. The reason for goosebumps is the contraction of small muscles located in your hair’s roots
4. You use 17 muscles in order to smile, and 43 to frown
5. The fastest muscle group in the human body is the one responsible for blinking. Thanks to them you are able to blink up to 5 times a second
6. You use up to 200 muscles in order to take a single step
7. The strongest muscle in the human body is located in the jaw and its name is the the masseter muscle
8. Your muscles are normally around 40-50% of your body weight
9. Every half a kilo (1 lb) of muscle you gain, your body burns an extra 50 calories a day
10. The fibres you already know about can support up to 1,000 times their own weight
11. 75% of the muscle is water
12. Producing human speech takes 72 different muscles
13. The human tongue consists of sixteen separate muscles, not one as many people think.
14. Did you know that your muscles have their own memory? This is why once you learn how to ride a bike, you can never forget it, no matter how long you haven’t done it.
15. Muscles produce up to 85% of your body’s heat. In fact they produce enough daily heat to boil 2 pints of water for an hour.

Previous: Friday Fitness Fact #3: Dehydration

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Dehydration Causes Major Strength Decreases!

A 2008 study[1] concluded that muscular power decreased by up to 19% at a dehydration level of 3% (that’s 3% of total body weight). Interestingly, the study participant’s perception of fatigue increased by a massive 70%!

What happens when you dehydrate?

Research shows that as little as 1 percent dehydration negatively affects your mood, attention, memory and motor coordination. Data in humans is lacking and contradictory, but it appears that brain tissue fluid decreases with dehydration, thus reducing brain volume and temporarily affecting cell function.

Normal water needs range drastically due to a number of factors, such as body composition, metabolism, diet, climate and clothing.

Surprisingly, the first official recommendation about water intake was made as recently as 2004. According to the Institute of Medicine, the adequate water intake for adult men and women is 3.7 and 2.7 litres per day, respectively.

Around 80 percent of total daily water should be obtained from any beverage (including water, caffeinated drinks and alcohol!) and the remaining 20 percent from food.

But of course, this is just a rough guide. Here’s how to monitor your own hydration:

1. Track your body weight and stay within 1 percent of your normal baseline. You can work out your baseline by averaging your weight (just out of bed, before breakfast) on three consecutive mornings.
2. Monitor your urine. You should be urinating regularly (more than three to four times per day) and it should be a pale straw or light yellow colour without strong odour. If less frequent, darker colour or too pungent, then drink more fluids.
3. Be conscious about drinking enough fluids. Your fluid consumption should prevent the perception of thirst.

— from Here’s What Happens to Your Body When You’re Dehydrated, by Toby Mündel from Massey University, and originally published by The Conversation.

[1] Active Dehydration Impairs Upper and Lower Body Anaerobic Muscular Power – Jones, Leon C; Cleary, Michelle ; Lopez, Rebecca M; Zuri, Ron E; Lopez, Richard, Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research: March 2008 – Volume 22 – Issue 2 – pp 455-463

Previous: Friday Fitness Fact #2: Sit-ups

‘It takes training to increase strength, build endurance and DEVELOP the abdominals, but to SEE the definition in your abdominals – or any other muscle group for that matter – is almost entirely the result of low body fat levels.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but if you can’t see your abs, it’s not an issue of “muscle development” at all. You simply have too much body fat covering up the ab muscles. The lower abdominal area also happens to be the one place that most people – especially men – store the body fat first.’

— from The Great Abs Mistake – Crunches And Situps And Still No Abs

Previous: Friday Fitness Fact #1: Muscle Mass

Metabolism: Converting food into energy

Metabolism is the process by which your body converts what you eat and drink into energy. During this complex biochemical process, calories in food and beverages are combined with oxygen to release the energy your body needs to function.

Even when you’re at rest, your body needs energy for all its “hidden” functions, such as breathing, circulating blood, adjusting hormone levels, and growing and repairing cells.

The number of calories your body uses to carry out these basic functions is known as your basal metabolic rate — what you might call metabolism. Several factors determine your individual basal metabolic rate, including:

• Your body size and composition. The bodies of people who are larger or have more muscle burn more calories, even at rest.
• Your sex. Men usually have less body fat and more muscle than do women of the same age and weight, burning more calories.
• Your age. As you get older, the amount of muscle tends to decrease and fat accounts for more of your weight, slowing down calorie burning.

Energy needs for your body’s basic functions stay fairly consistent and aren’t easily changed. Your basal metabolic rate accounts for about 70 percent of the calories you burn every day.

Read more at the Mayo Clinic…

Next: Friday Fitness Fact #2: Sit-ups