Living Lean: The Larry North Program - Softcover

North, Larry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684837005 ISBN 13: 9780684837000

Verlag: Atria, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

In Living Lean, fitness expert Larry North breaks through all the confusion of fad diets, exercise programs, deceptive fitness frauds, and "low fat" products and starts you on a program to lose fat, get lean, and look fabulous. Whether you'd like to lose five, ten, or a hundred pounds or reshape your whole body, what you want to know is HOW DO I DO IT? North's motivational yet realistic grogram, featuring a six-week plan for eating the Larry North way, easy-to-make recipes, and fuel-burning, muscle-toning exercises, brings immediate results. You'll gain more energy and feel better about yourself, and you'll soon want to see how far you can go. So take the first step toward the body you've always dreamed of.
In Living Lean, Larry North cuts through the jargon and tells you
* how to examine your relationship with food and why you've failed in the past
* how to eat more to lose weight
* how to go from a size 16 to a size 10 (and beyond!) and never look back again
Empathetic and inspirational, in Living Lean Larry North shows you how to get results without starving or overexercising and keeps you focused on achieving your fitness goals.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Larry North is a true powerhouse of the fitness world. He is host of a national TV and radio fitness show, the owner of Larry North Total Fitness facilities, a motivational speaker, restaurateur, and civic leader. He lives in Dallas.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

In Living Lean, fitness expert Larry North breaks through all the confusion of fad diets, exercise programs, deceptive fitness frauds, and "low fat" products and starts you on a program to lose fat, get lean, and look fabulous. Whether you'd like to lose five, ten, or a hundred pounds or reshape your whole body, what you want to know is HOW DO I DO IT? North's motivated yet realistic program, featuring a six-week plan for eating the Larry North way, easy-to-make recipes, and fuel-burning, muscle-toning exercises, brings immediate results. In Living Lean, Larry North cuts through the jargon and tells you how to examine your relationship with food and why you've failed in the past, how to eat more to lose weight, and how to go from a size 16 to a size 10 (and beyond!) and never look back again. Empathetic and inspirational, in Living Lean Larry North shows you how to get results without starving or overexercising and keeps you focused on achieving your fitness goals.

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Chapter 1

THE MYTH OF DIETING: WHY DIETING MAKES YOU FATTER

I probably shouldn't say this, but I will be the first to admit that if you want to lose ten to twenty pounds quickly, just put this book down right now and start starving yourself. I promise you, with some effort you'll lose weight right away.

But study after study of dieters shows that almost all of you will not last two weeks on a diet. Most don't last a week. And here's the saddest news of all. If you do lose weight through diet programs, you will gain it all back within a year. Here are the facts: There is simply no scientific evidence to suggest that dieting does anything other than create a temporary weight loss. Think about it. If losing weight were simply a matter of going on a diet -- that is, cutting calories -- then why aren't all of us able to do it? If all these diets really worked, then why are we collectively getting fatter?

Now I am not going to load you down with highly technical jargon about nutrition. But over the years, I have learned the one irrefutable science lesson that should make you forever abandon the idea of losing weight by starving yourself. What happens when you diet is that you force your body to slow down its metabolism, one of the most important words you're going to come across in this book.

Your metabolism is what burns calories to create energy. Think of it as your inner engine. The higher the level at which you can keep your engine revved up, the more fuel (or calories) it will burn. But if there is no fuel for your engine, your metabolism slows down. It tries to preserve every calorie it can. According to some studies, if you drop from 2,000 calories a day to 1,200, your metabolism decreases by 5 to 10 percent. If you drop to 800 calories a day, your metabolism lowers by a whopping 10 to 20 percent.

After a couple of weeks of a very strict diet, your body readjusts and starts cutting back on its own caloric needs. Suddenly, that paltry 800-calorie-a-day diet can feel like 8,000 calories. Because your metabolism is working at a snail's pace, you actually stop losing weight.

But that's not your only problem. With your slower metabolism rate, you're very vulnerable to gaining back huge amounts of weight. And you will gain it back, because at some point you will have to start eating again. You may think you're different, that you have the willpower to stop eating, but scientific research shows that when your body is starving, it is stronger than your brain. Your body will send such strong signals to your brain that you will break into Fort Knox if there's a candy bar in there. Come on, you know it's true. If you diet, you will also overeat.

And the minute you start eating again, two things will happen to you. First, your depleted carbohydrate cells, desperate to soak up any fluid they can, will act like sponges and regain every bit of water weight that you lost during your diet; and second, your slowed metabolic rate won't be able to speed up in time to burn off the new food you have just put in, which means the food will go right to your fat cells.

"Hold on," you say, "I thought I had gotten rid of my fat cells when I dieted!"

Sorry, you've been duped again. For the most part, what you lose when you diet is your muscle tissue -- the most valuable part of your body for maintaining a high metabolic rate. Granted, your body will pull calories from some of your fat cells, but it will first look to your muscles for nourishment. The truth is that your body wants to get rid of your muscle tissue. Why? In its dietstarvation mode, your body, desperate to preserve itself, is doing everything it can to save calories, not burn them. And what's the one thing that burns calories? Your muscles! Fat is metabolically inactive because its function is to serve as a big old greasy warehouse for the storage of fat cells. In other words, fat tissue does nothing but collect fat. Muscle tissue, on the other hand, is the critical element in maintaining a high metabolism. It's what makes your body act like a powerful furnace, burning up the calories that come in. It follows, then that the fewer muscles in your body, the less food fuel you need to consume. Some studies say that up to 50 percent of the weight you lose on a diet will come from your muscles, the very component of your body you should keep and build to keep the weight off. On top of that, when you diet, your body can potentially double the number of its fat storage enzymes to hoard more calories. Visualize that -- multiplying fat cells! -- while you're starving yourself.

At the end of a diet, you end up with shrunken muscle cells and a higher percentage of body fat. You're fatter! Instead of weighing 160 pounds with 30 percent body fat, for example, your diet has dropped you to 135 pounds but given you 40 percent body fat.

Wait. The nightmare continues. When your diet fails and you start eating again, your body fat is going to get even higher, because all that food is going straight to your fat cells. Without an exercise plan, you're not developing muscle to burn it up. So now you have even more fat to lose in your next diet! And the cycle begins again.

You've probably noticed that every time you go on another diet, it takes longer for your body to lose the weight and it regains weight faster. In frustration, you might turn to one of these "new, improved" lines of diet pills, hoping to jump-start your weight loss. Sure enough, your weight goes down -- for a while. But if you don't know how to eat or exercise correctly, you won't know how to achieve permanent results.

More bad news. If you have certain problem areas, dieting only make them more problematic. Fat, it has been said, is like a river. It flows right to that part of the body that offers the least resistance. In men, it goes to the middle, creating those dreaded pot bellies. In women, it goes to the buttocks and thighs. In other words, dieting does not reshape your problem areas. It makes them worse.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL HELL OF DIETING

What else do you need to know? I've seen people who have been on so many low-calorie diets that they have a medically dangerous fat-to-muscle ratio. Furthermore, such a yoyo pattern of dieting -- losing and regaining, losing and regaining -- significantly increases the risk of heart disease. And even if you don't die of a heart attack, you'll be so sick from your starvation that you won't be able to enjoy life.

And that's what bothers me most. Ultimately, a diet does nothing but make you deeply unhappy. You can't enjoy the life around you, because you're obsessing about not eating. Yet the more you obsess, the more you think and dream about food.

I know firsthand just what a disturbing emotional issue dieting can be. My mother spent most of her life consumed with worry over her weight. By the time she was six years old, my mother was the fattest kid in her neighborhood. When she was eleven, her mother, who then weighed nearly 300 pounds, took her to her first diet doctor. The doctor prescribed diet pills and two boxes of appetite suppressant chocolate candy. By the time she got home, my mother had eaten all the candy in both boxes. Although she was considered a jolly, cheerful girl, she cried herself to sleep.

It didn't get any better when she reached adulthood. By then, she was so addicted to diet pills that she needed them just to stay awake through the day. She would take her pills all week and try not to eat, then binge all through the weekend. She was in the very first Overeaters Anonymous chapter in the country. She joined Weight Watchers. She sent off for every weight-loss program advertised in the backs of magazines. She tried a diet that required daily injections. After trying the Beverly Hills Diet, she went around for days with her lips puckered...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atria
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1997
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0684837005
• ISBN 13: 9780684837000
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande