Does God Punish You For Being Fat?

Creative Summary By Mateus Suban

Does God punish you for being fat? A recent column in an issue of USA Today answers, “weight loss is hard enough without feeling that the almighty is on your back, too”…

Recently, I was sitting in a wonderful little breakfast “parlor” on Main Street in Santa Monica (California), enjoying a bowl of oatmeal, a mountain of fresh fruit and a “sexy omelette” (the bodybuilder’s favorite). Although the usual dietary temptations are omnipresent everywhere, I noticed a lot more healthy eateries and healthy options on menus out here, which is okay by me! It seems like people are much more health conscious in Southern California compared to back home in the New Jersey/New York City area.

You can’t hide under those winter coats in this weather! When I left Newark airport it was a blustery 37 degrees. It’s 77 degrees and sunny as I sit here on my hotel balcony, laptop on my lap, overlooking the palm trees and Pacific ocean.

A friend of mine once said that “Palm trees are God’s way of saying, LIVE HERE!”

Speaking of God, that brings me to the subject of this article. The column, written by Christine Whelan, a professor of sociology, said that religious diet groups are growing in number and some of them say that “God might not approve of that second piece of pie.” In fact, some of these groups, reported Whelan, warn that God will punish you for overeating and being fat. The Weigh Down Workshop, one of the most “hard-line” of such groups, tells their participants that God will “destroy you” if you abuse your body by overeating.

I’m not sure what other people think, but I prefer to think of God as a loving God, who does not punish a person in the hereafter for being fat in this life. Combined with the emotional pain of being overweight and the lower quality (and sometimes quantity) of life, I’d say that’s punishment enough, wouldn’t you?

But enough of my theological viewpoint, I found some tremendously valuable practical lessons in the newspaper article.

I don’t believe that instilling guilt or fear of eternal damnation is an uplifting way to change behavior. For example, metaphors are also powerful motivators, especially because metaphors are language that your unconscious mind can understand. Didn’t Jesus teach in parables and metaphors? What if you said your body was like a temple? In my books, I delve into the emotional, psychological and social aspects of body fat loss.

Some of the chapters are devoted to teaching you how to build a fortress of positive, uplifting, inspiring energy around you in the form of positive, uplifting, and inspiring people. “What do I do if my own family won’t support my new, healthier choices? What if they keep bringing potato chips, cookies and ice cream into the house?” “What if no one supports me?”

Enter spiritual diet support groups. Not all of these groups are so extreme as to pronounce that being fat is a sin. And as Whelan put it, “religion may be the ultimate trump card of many behavior modification programs.”

No matter how independent we are, we all need support in our journeys toward personal improvement. Spiritual communities and religious support groups can be the last refuge of support and encouragement for some people. For anyone with spiritual beliefs, these groups may be one of the best places of all to turn for social support. There’s your church, synagogue, mosque or other place of worship. There are also organized weight loss support groups.

One such group mentioned in the USA Today article is BABES – Beautiful Accountable Babes Exercising Sensibly. The mission of babes is “connecting with others to lose weight and build friendships.” Accountability. Exercising. That all sounds pretty sensible to me! Moreover, according to BABES co-founder, Barb Swanson, “we are not into sin and judgement. As I have said before, body fat is not a person, it’s a temporary physical condition. What we really are is far more than physical bodies.

There’s enough guilt, fear and shame for people who are struggling with weight issues already. They don’t need any more negativity from their spiritual leaders. Instead, if you are a person of faith, use your spiritual community as a source of social support and inspiration, and motivate yourself by focusing on the positive and uplifting side. It will pay you eternal dividends.

Original article

By Tom Venuto
Fat Loss Coach
burning the fat

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7 Smart strategies for fat burning and metabolic health

Creative Summari by Mateus Suban

Research dating back to the 1980’s and 1990’s found that diet-induced decreases in metabolism can extend to the period AFTER the diet is over.  Diane Elliot, an MD and professor of medicine at Oregon University published her research in 1989 about the lasting effects of very low calorie diets. “Resting metabolic rate of our obese subjects remained depressed after massive weight loss despite increased caloric consumption to a level that allowed body weight stabilization.”

In 1999, Arne Astrup published a meta analysis with data from all the studies which had investigated changes in metabolism after weight loss. They found that formerly obese subjects had a 3-5% lower resting metabolic rate than control subjects who had never been obese.

These and other studies suggest that metabolic consequences of crash dieting and rapid weight loss persist after the diet is over. Pursuing weight loss the wrong way (“dumb dieting”) makes the bad stuff worse and aftereffects linger longer. Pursuing fat loss and body composition improvement the smart way minimizes the bad stuff and prevents outright metabolic damage. The Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle (BFFM) program is based – from A to Z – on doing fat loss the smart way.

7 Smart strategies for fat burning and metabolic health

Below, you’ll see 7 of the best fat burning strategies which keep your hormones happy and your metabolism burning hot.

1.Eat more! You can eat less. The smart way is to avoid crash diets and pursue slower but steady fat loss with an eye on body composition. Start with a conservative deficit of only 20% below your maintenance level. Use a larger deficit only if you’re seriously overweight. When you add in resistance training, cardio training and an active lifestyle, your calorie expenditure (metabolism) goes way up, and that’s how you can legitimately eat more and keep getting leaner.

2.Eat natural. When hormonal health declines, body composition outcomes are worse during weight loss and risk of metabolic damage may increase. Furthermore, most natural, unprocessed foods, especially vegetables and lean proteins, are lower in caloric density and can lead to spontaneous decreases in caloric intake compared to the standard American diet (S.A.D.)  For optimal body composition results and  metabolic and hormonal health, it’s not just about calorie quantity, but also calorie quality.

3. Eat often and regularly: I recommend eating like a physique athlete. Spread your total daily calories into 4-6 small meals per day, if feasible, and be sure to include a source of lean protein with every meal.

4.Use carb cycling. The Burn The Fat, Feed the Muscle Method puts you in the optimal healthy calorie deficit, but periodically, you increase your calories to keep your metabolism and appetite regulating hormones up at the normal level. Instead of the carb-phobic diets that millions of people still follow (which can actually suppress hormones like thyroid and leptin), carb cycling with a high carb refeed every 4th day or so, allows you to eat more carbs and you still keep losing fat.

5.Take Diet breaks: Avoid prolonged periods in aggressive caloric deficits. If you have a lot of fat to lose and it’s going to take more than 3 months to hit your long term fat loss goal, don’t do it all in one stretch. Take a week at maintenance calories after 12 weeks of restricted dieting.

6.Do Cardio. If you’re overweight, you can sometimes get away with very low calorie diets without adverse consequences if you’re not doing tons of cardio on top of it.  Exercise research says that extreme amounts of cardio during a diet can actually cause the same type of adaptive metabolic downshift as eating too little food. This kind of overtraining can be counter-productive when you look at the metabolic damage and “cardio dependency” potential. And remember, if you’re not diligent, you can out-eat almost any amount of exercise.

7.Weight training: In the physique world, weight training is a foregone conclusion. But in the everyday world of non-athletes, weight loss = “diet,” not weight loss = “lift weights.”   For Suzy soccer mom, “lift weights to lose weight” probably doesn’t even compute. But weight training is so important for metabolic health and better body composition, that if you were forced to choose one or the other – cardio or weights – the weightlifting would be a NO BRAINER decision. If you have a concern about metabolic damage and you’re not weight training yet, there’s nothing else to discuss.

What if you have long history of starvation dieting and yo yo weight cycling?

Ok, so these 7 strategies are great for avoiding metabolic damage and minimizing the metabolic adaptations that happen while dieting. But what if you’re a chronic dieter and you fear that you’ve already messed up your metabolism?

Take another sigh of relief. In severe cases, it may take a little longer to get back to normal and continue on to achieve your long term goals, but it’s never hopeless.

I figured with at most 20 lbs to cut, this would be a simple and predictable process, but she had a challenging time dropping fat even on a surprisingly low caloric intake.

Easing into more calories and more carbs with a transitional period

If you’re worried about suddenly increasing your calories, you’re not paranoid – you’re prudent.

After becoming accustomed and somewhat adapted to a lower caloric intake, avoid abruptly jumping up to your predicted maintenance level. Instead, increase calories slowly 100-200 at a time and hold them there for one week. Here’s another safe way to ease into a higher food intake. This is ideal if you’ve been on a low calorie, low carb diet and you want to ease out of it. During the post-training window of opportunity, not only will the carbs NOT get stored as fat, (they’ll get sucked right up into muscle glycogen), this strategy can dramatically improve your body composition and workout recovery.

It just takes a little longer.

My dancer client? By the way, her program included serious heavy training with free weights and she ate a lot more (clean) food than she had ever eaten before…

Eat more, burn more. That’s our motto around here at Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle headquarters… And it works!

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