I was driving to the dreaded city of Gurgaon and it was pouring. Fat water drops were forcefully smashing and surrendering against my loyal windscreen that guarded me against their attack. And the frantic wiper came bolting into the scene, and cleared the battleground like a servile minion clears path for a bigshot politician.
I listened to the Moonlight Sonata for the 48th time and wondered why something written on such sombre, minor scales and conscipiously sad notes made me feel ecstatic. Add to it the incessant beat of the droplets against the glass and rhythmic screech of the wiper - this made some wonderful music.
Sad music, instead of making you worse, makes you magically feel better. The secret behind the serendipitous phenomena are a set of proteins released in the body called endorphins. These chemicals function as neurotransmitters that help regulate moods, sleep patterns and the way one responds to pain and stress. When present in the body, endorphins act as a natural painkiller and are able to provide a sense of comfort, wellness and happiness.
As you immerse youself into the sad undertones of heart-wrenching musical melodies, the body experiences stress. The conscious brain soon realizes that there's nothing as gravely wrong to feel despicable about and the body's natural response is to release endorhpins. This is the same way in which the body handles negative reactions like crying, fear and physical pain. Endorphins are also released while joking, enjoying, dancing and falling in love. However, the activity which produces the maximum amount of endorphins in the body is sexual intercourse. Yes! Without using any rocket science concepts here I can say that sex feels better than even sad music - I think we all agree.
This is probably the reason why you see people who're depressed listening to sad songs, crying and sometimes even cutting their wrists. A friend mentioned once that when emotional suffering became too much to handle, she used to slit her wrists such that physical pain would offset her emotion pain. Now I can say that the underlying reasoning was endorphin release. I want to remind her now, that sex feels better than even piercing skin with blades as well as sad music!
So the next time you're listening to the Moonlight sonata or any other dispiriting music, just hang on and you'll soon feel the bliss.
When you're
talking about a fit body, apart from a healthy heart and brain, I assume you're
talking of well-toned lean body. That is exactly what this article talks about.
Fat loss is a subject I'm extremely passionate about and have been researching for
years now. In fact, I am in the
middle of writing a book on the subject. In the process, I have experimented quite
a few techniques on myself and have learned from research, medical science and
most importantly experience.
I co-founded an
e-commerce company focused on health products called madeinhealth.com last
year. Apart from products, our company used to sell revolutionary and practical
dietplans we created for people trying to lose fat, gain weight or gain muscle.
(A larger e-commerce player acquired our company recently and dietplans are
sold no more... But I still hold the secret formula *wink* )
Disclaimer: I'm not a nutritionist
and neither have I attended any formal course on the subject. People in the UK
should not follow this article - you might lose a "few pounds" and
that is not a good feeling in that country. (Yes, you are allowed to kill me
for the miserable pun). Now lets get down to business.
Why weight loss
is not the same as fat loss
Weight is a
very bad indicator of body fat. Your weight varies throughout the day - when
you eat, when you drink water and after you relieve yourself. One can never be
sure of one’s progress if it is measured in terms of weight. Moreover, bodyweight
includes water weight, muscle weight as well as fat weight.
If you starve
yourself, or miss meals, you might as well be losing muscle (yeah even girls
have muscle, girls) and being happy about losing weight – which is a favorable
circumstance. The first and most important thing to do is stop measuring your
weight and start measuring inches. More so, measure your body at the same time
of the day - immediately after waking up and having refreshed yourself.
Why a calorie
is not just a calorie
When I enter my
cutting phase to accentuate my six-pack, you will find me having oily Chicken
Tikka and Kebabs at night, or maybe even Chicken Nuggets from McDonalds.
Surprised? Don't be. The whole calorie fuss you experience around yourself is
true in principle but without a proper understanding of how the body functions,
using such simple math with cause more harm than gain.
To move ahead,
you need to understand that the villain of this story is called
"insulin". Insulin is a hormone that is released in the bloodstream
that is responsible for slowing down (or ceasing) the process of fat loss and
encouraging fat (and other nutrients) deposition into your tissues. Insulin
(read Gabbar) shows up soon after you have something that is very simple for
the body to digest (these goons called simple carbs). Some examples of simple
carbs are Sugar (Samba), Rice (Raaka), Flour (Kalia), Potatoes (Pappu pager)
etc. As soon as Gabbar shows up, all productive villagers in the bloodstream
who're busy burning fat run away into hiding and the reverse process of fat
gain starts.
The solution
here is to have a lot of complex carbs like veggies (Jai), Pulses (Veeru) and
slow digesting proteins Chicken (Thakur), Eggs (Ramu kaka), Milk (Jaya
Bachchan) in your diet, sprinkled with a few Basantis here or there. These
foods will make sure appearance of Gabbar is minimum and fat burn is carried on
at all times. Don't judge your diet by the amount you eat but by the quality of
the food -and even if you have some fats (Mausi jis) bundled with these foods,
you're in no grave danger. You will eat more calories but it will still lead to
fat loss (and hence a happier Ramgarh)
Why exercise
alone will not get you to your goal
I have often
heard people saying – “I'm joining the gym because I want to lose weight without
changing my eating habits”. And even though I'm all in for exercise let me say
these people will never see substantial or sustainable fat loss. As a thumb
rule, with regards to fat loss exercise is only 25% of the deal and diet
control is the other 75% of the job.
So if you're a
businessman and one customer gives you business worth Rs. 75 and another worth
Rs. 25, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out where to put more
focus. To put things in perspective,
the effect of one long strenuous session of exercise where you sweat
your blood out is as good as not eating a medium size chocolate pastry - choose
for yourself. Exercise does play its role in burning calories and speeding up
your metabolism - all good things - but the effort required to get the same
effect is immense. If you're lazy like me, choose the smarter path. Exercise
hard but rely only on diet control.
Why fatty foods
don't make you fat
As explained
earlier, anything that digests quickly spikes blood sugar levels and hence
insulin levels - the culprit. Fats, on the other hand, slow digestion and
insulin secretion. Infact foods that contain good fats (omega 3,6) actually
help with fat loss. Fats by
themselves cannot deposit in your fat (adipose) tissues without the aid of
insulin in the bloodstream.
Let me chose an
example to shed more light on this. If you’ve seen Sholay as closely as I have,
you will notice even though Gabbar lives a simple life in the mountains, has a
lot of physical exercise (dacoities, murders, horse-riding) he still has a lot
of baby fat on his body unlike today’s villains who have a perfect six pack say
Chhedi Singh (Dabang) – mainly due to the kind of monotonic vegetarian diet he consumes
namely pulses, flour and rice which he loots from the villagers – rich in
carbs, low in protein.
Why regular
measurement is a must
Imagine you ran
a business but there were no books to report the accounts. The only time you
would know how your business was doing was when you had too much cash for a
long time in the bank or went bankrupt. Reporting and analysis is a must. Fat
loss is a science of the body as well of the mind and staying motivated is a
big part of the process. Trust me when I say this - there is no feeling greater
than seeing the numbers decreasing, seeing your effort and self-control paying
off. You measure yourself again just to be sure and you feel blissful. This is
the only thing that will keep you motivated to move further. If you're walking
blind, you will surely lose focus soon.
Below is a plot
of a kind of information I can bet you’ve never seen. This is a graph of my
waist measurement vs. date – taken during my cutting phase two years ago around
the same time of the year. Every time I saw a drop from my previous
measurement, there was no measure of my excitement and this was the best motivation
to tread further onto this path.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCNx399x8i3uCoBOCAcIdlrczmAE4OJhP2pxIg6JVPyve5jqfQZvHnBTrCZlzB9kp3qouZI4AjKPvKM2vj_rXPyd3Q44GtO4vcGGetOMoV-buUmaZkGsSxXKq-4xla2ZXaFSEHjsmcOcQ_/s400/body_gr.png
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCNx399x8i3uCoBOCAcIdlrczmAE4OJhP2pxIg6JVPyve5jqfQZvHnBTrCZlzB9kp3qouZI4AjKPvKM2vj_rXPyd3Q44GtO4vcGGetOMoV-buUmaZkGsSxXKq-4xla2ZXaFSEHjsmcOcQ_/s400/body_gr.png
What is a bad
diet
Dieticians will
give you all kinds of diets just to make money these days. Someone will ask you
to eat only salad, or force you to prepare weird concoctions that require you
to live in your kitchen. Truth is fat loss is possible by eating normal food
(as much as you need to subside your hunger) but knowing what to avoid. Any
diet that is not balanced in macro and micronutrients or that makes your starve
is a bad diet and you might see short term results (because the body has no
other alternative during fasting) but then it causes harm to you in ways you
don’t immediately realize.
A village
cannot survive if there are too few people living in it. You need all kinds of
people – farmers, traders, Thakurs, Tanga-transporters etc to keep the wheel
running. What you really don’t need is too much of those criminals.
Summary
To summarize, a few things that you should
remember when trying to cut:
- For
all practical purposes, don’t worry about how much you eat. Your major concern
should be what you eat.
- Don’t
be so scared of fat (esp. unsaturated fat. Another post on that soon). Be very
scared of simple carbohydrates – sugar, bread, flour, cold drinks, chocolates,
ice-creams etc
- Hitting
the gym will help a little bit but it won’t solve all your life problems
- Follow
a strict diet, exercise and regularly measure progress (in inches and not in
pounds)
- Sholay
gives deep insight into fat loss and fitness
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