The average American gains 4 pounds every year. Half of that weight is gained during the last two months of the year.
Couple that with “weight loss” being the number one New Year’s resolution and all of this happens to coincide with the coldest part of the year, where 60% of us are dealing with some level of seasonal affective disorder, which affects our motivation and zest for life.
Plus, being that it’s cold out, outside activities become more difficult, making exercise a much more cumbersome activity. You either need to physically drive to the gym or get bundled up to go outside and exercise.
Yes, there’s a lot working against people who want to lose weight during the winter, but it’s important so let’s kick around some ways that you can shed pounds, burn fat and emerge from the winter months looking and feeling your best.
Intermittent Fasting
To lose weight almost definitely requires a change in your diet. And that has nothing to do with it being cold outside. The first thing you can do is start intermittent fasting.
What this means is that instead of waking up, eating breakfast and having three meals a day (plus however many snacks), you skip breakfast and only eat lunch and dinner.
Basically, you limit your eating to an 8 hour period between noon and 8pm. You do not, under any circumstances, eat anything before noon or after 8pm. If you want to be even more intense about it, limit your eating window to six hours—say noon to 6pm or 2pm to 8pm. Whatever is easier.
The reason you do this is mainly because it takes your body 12 hours to process any food you’ve eaten, use it’s energy-creating properties and even begin the process of moving on to using stored energy sources (i.e., fat).
Basically, you will have a very difficult time losing weight if your body is ALWAYS able to use what you just ate as energy instead of your stored fat.
Intermittent fasting is also fantastic for balancing hormones, which have a major impact on your ability to lose weight. Cortisol production (when you’re under stress) signals fat storage. Human Growth Hormone (HGH) causes muscle growth and fat burning. Ghrelin signals your hunger response whereas leptin signals the feeling of being full. Intermittent fasting really helps these hormones even out and only be applied when appropriate, not all the time, out of whack and chaotic.
What you shouldn’t eat
Contrary to what many of us believe, fat does not make us fat. Sugar makes us fat. If you want to get serious about losing weight, get rid of the sugar AND get rid of the grains and carbs—pasta, bread, beer, pastries, cookies, baked goods of all kinds, etc.
The reason for that is because carbs are immediately converted to sugar in your body during digestion and your body treats it exactly as it would a spoonful of sugar. Blood sugar levels rise, insulin is released, your cells absorb it for energy and whatever is left is stored as fat. And with the amount of sugar and carbs most of us eat, there is almost always quite a bit left to turn into fat.
Also, watch out for artificial sweeteners. You might just think, oh it’s fine, I’ll just drink diet soda. Artificial sweeteners contribute even more to weight gain than sugar—if you can believe it. Splenda, for example, suppresses the creation of important thyroid gland hormones, which are crucial for maintaining weight. With those hormones suppressed, you get an increased appetite, lower metabolism and weight gain.
What you should eat
What you want to eat is almost totally composed of good fats and proteins. You can add in just a little bit of green, leafy vegetables as well, which contributes complex carbohydrates to your diet.
You want the ratio to be as close as you can get to 65% fats, 30% proteins and 5% green veggies.
There is a lot of overlap, so keep that in mind. For example, a salmon fillet counts as both fats and protein because of its high omega-3 fatty acid content. Raw cheese is more fat than protein, but is still high in protein. Try to balance these things best you can.
Other than that, great fats include coconut oil, avocados, grass fed butter, raw cheese, nuts (in moderation because too much turns into sugar), olives, olive oil, flax seeds, flax seed oil, avocado oil
Speaking of oils, don’t be fooled into thinking that all oils are good. Hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils are going to derail any weight loss efforts, clog your arteries, make you gain weight and cause inflammation, among other things. So that means no canola oil, no sunflower oil, no corn oil.
The good news is, amidst all the foods you CAN eat, you can eat AS MUCH as you want during your 6-8 hour intermittent fasting regimen.
Exercise
Exercise as it is related to weight loss is one of the most misunderstood components of health in the modern world. Sounds dramatic, but it’s true.
If I were to ask you, if you want to lose weight, how would you go about exercising? 90% or more of people would say something along the lines of “the more the better.” If you can jog 5 miles a day, or do crossfit, or run up a hill as fast as you can and back over and over, lift weights until your muscles fail. People tend to think of exercise as “the more extreme, the more effective.” This couldn’t be further from the truth.
If you want to exercise to get big muscles, there is a way to do that. If you want to exercise to have endurance (suppose you’re doing an Iron Man competition) there is a way to do that as well.
If you want to exercise to lose weight, there is a way to do it–and it’s called burst training.
This only requires 21 minutes per day of your time and it works like this:
Rather than, say, running at a steady pace on a treadmill for 40 minutes, you vary the intensity of your workout for 21 minutes instead. You want to get to as close as possible to your maximum heart rate—but only for a short “burst.”
A great example is what sprinters call “telephone poling”. They sprint the length of two telephone poles, then do a nice easy jog to the third telephone pole.
That’s measuring it by distance. But you can measure it by time as well. Sprint for two minutes, then do a nice jog on the third minute. Ideally what you want is two-thirds high intensity, one-third is low intensity.
I used jogging and running as examples, but the best part about burst training in terms of winter is that the activity itself doesn’t matter and it’s easy to find things to do in the comfort and warmth of your own home.
How about jump roping in your garage? How about push ups in the basement? How about burpees in your bedroom. It doesn’t matter as long as it is strenuous enough that it can maximize your heart rate for two-thirds of the time period in which you do it.
Follow these three guidelines, and you’ll be shedding pounds in any season.
