7 Essential Rules To Optimal Health (5)

Good Morning All,

The rules I have been giving you are in no particular order. However, this next one is probably the most important rule for me personally, if only because it is the one to which I do not adhere with any degree of consistency.

5. Get Some Sleep

Often the “missing link” to everyone’s weight loss quest is their lack of quality sleep. Healthy adults require 7-9 hours of uninterrupted, good quality sleep EVERY night.

Sleep helps regulate your hormones. It kills off bad bacteria that has accumulated in your stomach throughout the day and it’s the primary time for your body to repair its tissues - especially your muscles. Don’t get enough of it and your immune response will suffer (your ability to fight off disease & sickness), you gain stomach fat (because of the higher amounts of the hormone cortisol) and you’ll experience lows in energy.

Ask yourself the simple question…‘When was the last time I got a good night’s sleep?’. I think if you are honest with yourself it may be longer ago than you thought. 

I wrote an article about sleep that will be beneficial to you (no it will not send you to sleep!). Click here to find out more.

I will give you rule number six tomorrow.

Your Friend and Coach

Adrian Lowther

7 Essential Rules To Optimal Health (4)

Good Morning All,

Ok, so you have had my first three rules to optimal health. Here is rule four.

4. Constantly Strive To Improve In Order To See Change

If you are doing the same thing, day in and day out (lifting the same weights, running the same distance for the same time, etc) without any change or improvement, then nothing is going to happen to your body. Regular readers of this blog will recall I often quote that old saying about insanity...that is 'doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result'. Or...'If you always do what you have always done you will always get what you have always got'.

Your body wants to stay the same, and it is only when you decide to venture outside your comfort zone that you will actually see any improvement. That rule holds true with life as much as it does with exercise. Set goals, break records and constantly strive to get better. If you ran 5km in 30 minutes yesterday, then the next time out, aim for 29 minutes.  If you did 10 push-ups yesterday, then aim for 11 the next time you attempt them.

Force yourself out of what’s comfortable and you will change, both in body and in mind.

Your Friend and Coach

Adrian Lowther

7 Essential Rules To Optimal Health (3)

Good Morning All,

I know you have all been waiting with baited breath for rule number three! This actually goes hand-in-hand with rule number two that I gave you yesterday.

3. Get Outside

I know that sometimes the climate makes outdoorsy things seem like too much effort. For example, it is dark in the morning or you cant ride your bike because it is snowing. But to say there aren't things you can do is hogwash.

Unless it is 110 degrees in the shade or sub-Arctic temperatures outside, there are always options for us to be active outdoors, even if it’s just for a walk after dinner. Our bodies crave the outdoors and being with nature.  It’s hard-wired into our systems. Being outdoors gives us a feeling of freedom and calm that no gym, or office building could ever provide for us.

So get yourself outside. Stuck for ideas?...check out this video I just posted on you tube. Not a barbell, weight or gym in sight. Toby was sent to us! Just about the best Sunday I have EVER had. Outside!

See you in the park.

Your Friend and Coach

Adrian Lowther

7 Essential Rules To Optimal Health (2)

Good Morning All, 

I hope you liked my first rule to optimal health. As promised here is rule number two.

2. Live Life Actively

Our society was the healthiest when there were no such things as Treadmills, Ellipticals and Pec Decks. We used the gym to support our activities (like athletes do).  We rode our bikes, swam, played football, cricket, tennis and walked everywhere.

Now, we go to the gym. We run on treadmills like rats in a cage, partake in bodybuilding programmes that give us bulky, unuseable muscles and create imbalance & injury, and do aerobic classes that give us little to no benefit with the way we look.

As our society transitioned from an active culture to a gym-going culture, obesity, heart disease and diabetes slowly started to increase. Coincidence? Maybe. But staying active and trying new things, playing a sport, going for a hike, being active with family, playing frisbee with the dog etc never killed anyone.

Ask yourself these questions…When was the last time you got excited to go to the gym? And what about when you knew that the weekend was just around the corner and you were going to the seaside or the park?  Or out to the golf course with your buddies to play 18 holes?

Live actively and use the gym to support your efforts.

I would dearly love to hear your thoughts. After all, I may be doing myself out of a job here!

Rule number three tomorrow.

Your Friend and Coach

Adrian Lowther

7 Essential Rules To Optimal Health (1)

Good Morning All,

We live in an information overloaded society. There has not been a moment in history when information has been this available, right at our fingertips. By typing one simple phrase, we now get hundreds, thousands, sometimes even millions of answers to our most desired questions. And now it seems, because of the abundance of information available to us, that a lot of us are confused.

No more confusing has been our struggle with living excessively. As a result, many of us are in debt, have too much stuff and are overweight.

There are too many questions on how to exercise, how to eat, or how to live healthily - cardio or weights? How much protein? Does fat make me fat? Will sit-ups give me abs? Am I going to get big, bulky muscles?

I don’t profess to know the answer to EVERY question out there, but I do know that all things being equal, the simplest answer is most likely the right one (Ockham’s Razor). That holds true in life as much as it does in weight loss, exercise and general health.

So in saying that, I have devised a list of The 7 Essential Rules to Optimal Health.

You may read these rules and be turned off that I’m insulting your intelligence. But let’s face it, now more than ever, we need to get back to the basics in order to save our waning, unhealthy and increasingly obese society.

We’ve veered off the path of “simple” and have really made things more complicated than they are.

1. Eat REAL Food.

For a busy population who doesn’t have time to count calories or how many grams of protein or how much sodium or saturated fat, this is your answer to health and weight loss.

Anything that Mother Nature put on this earth in it’s simplest form is real food - unpackaged, unprocessed, unpreserved fruits, vegetables, legumes, naturally raised meat and fish.  Steak from a cow that has been allowed to eat from a pasture, not an all-beef hot dog. Water, not fizzy drinks. Apples, not apple fritters.

Here’s the truth … if you eat nutritious real food then your body feels nourished and doesn’t feel the need to consume more. If you eat the common processed food products of today with empty calories and little to any nutritional value, then your body needs to:-

1) work harder to digest and assimilate what you’ve eaten thus using energy.

2) still feel hungry because what you’ve eaten provides no nourishment.

3) throw your systems out of whack because your body has no idea what you just ate.

What do you think? If you have any comments please post them below. Otherwise I will let you have my second rule tomorrow.

Your Friend and Coach

Adrian Lowther

How To Eat Cake And Be Slim

Good Morning All,

Yesterday Suzie and I were in All Saints' Cafe taking a well earned break (it is our day off) and there were two women sitting near us and one of them commented about a very slim woman eating cake sitting a few tables away.

The two women commented that the slim woman can "eat whatever she wants and not gain a pound". They seemed to be irritated that the very slim woman had eaten the same lunch that they were eating and was now eating cake but with seemingly different results on her body.

Does this sound familiar to you? Let me explain what these ladies and possibly you are not seeing....

The number of calories you need to LOSE weight, is much less than those you need to eat to MAINTAIN your weight. If you're metabolic rate burns about 1800 calories per day, then you can eat 1800 calories of food without gaining or losing weight. If you want to lose weight you need to eat significantly less than 1800 calories. But once you've lost weight, you can go back to eating 1800 calories. Losing fat mass doesn't change your metabolic rate to any real degree and we have already established that 1800 is your metabolic rate.

In other words, if you and I are about the same height, and have similar amounts of muscles mass (which most people that are the same height do) but you have 20 more pounds of fat than I do...then we have the same basic metabolic rate. The only difference is you need to eat below your metabolic rate in order to lose the 20 pounds of fat. Once those 20 pounds are gone you can return to eating AT your metabolic rate.

This is a big distinction. The amount of calories you need to eat to  lose weight is always less than the amount you need to maintain weight. This is why so many people(who are continually trying to diet) look on with envy at slim people who seem to be able to have their cake and eat it. 

If I had £1 for every time I heard someone exclaim that 'life isn't fair' over this issue I would be a millionaire! 

This is another piece of the weight loss puzzle we have solved for you at Altered Images. We determine your lean body mass and design a meal plan to feed your lean mass and burn fat. Once you've got to your ideal bodyweight you can increase calories to maintain it. Straight-forward, no fuss.

A couple of afterthoughts for you...

1) Experience has shown that many people with food issues make sure they are 'seen' to be eating a lot, when in fact out of the public eye they eat next to nothing (and vice versa too!).

2) When discussing food two people may make the same statement eg 'I eat next to nothing and still put on weight' when the reality is that they eat vastly different amounts. Vastly.

Until tomorrow, train hard and expect success.

Your Friend and Coach

Adrian Lowther