I don’t know how many times you have been down the road of counting calories to lose some weight but I can tell you quite categorically right now for the type of weight you want to lose, calorie counting does not work on so many levels.
The type of weight that I am talking about is permanent weight loss, not yo-yo weight loss, which leaves you back to where you started from. After forty years as a practicing physician in the field of helping people to lose weight, Dr. Barnet Meltzer says this:
‘For short-term weight loss you can focus on calorie counting better known as dieting. For long-term results, the emphasis needs to be on your metabolism – and the calorie and fat burning functions of your metabolism.’
The reason he says this is fundamental to why calorie counting does not work long-term. Calorie counting does not take into consideration that not all calories are created equal because there is a world of difference in the calories of natural unprocessed foods such as those bought from ‘a farmers’ market’ to those highly processed foods bought from the ‘supermarket’ and or ‘fast food outlets’.
Highly processed foods which contain calories obtained from processed sugars like corn syrup disrupt the balance of the body’s blood sugar levels causing a spike in blood sugar in the bloodstream. This disruption causes your metabolism to slow down. Slow metabolism is fatal to your weight loss efforts. Add to that the fact that highly processed sugars are not what your body is seeking and once they enter the bloodstream, insulin is released to thwart their efforts to get into the muscle and organ cells of your body. Insulin will bar their access and direct those volatile calories to the only place that they can be accepted – The Fat Club, which is all around your waist and your thighs.
To counteract this all you have to do is eat and drink natural unprocessed foods and liquids which do not disrupt the natural balance of your body’s systems thus steadying your blood sugar levels, and as a result speeding up your metabolism. Speeding up your metabolism is the only true and realistic way to lose weight long-term and permanently.
Losing weight is not a matter of drastically changing your lifestyle but a matter of knowing what works, and more to the point, what has been proven to work by the use of clinical trials from eminent physicians and universities. Please do not fall into the trap of believing the unproven hype that you see all over the internet because when you fail, it is very hard for you to pick yourself up, especially when the wrong information and not your desires and efforts have caused this failure in the first place. Take the time to find out what really works and why, and when you stand on the beach in your bikini or swim shorts, you will be glad that you did.
Peter McLoughlin
Author of How to Lose Weight Without Diet or Exercise Permanently
Winning and losing are like night and day. Winning puts you on a high, losing brings you low, but here’s the thing…How can you hold onto a winning belief if you have only ever experienced losing. This was my dilemma aged 42. Twice I had attempted to reach a first Dan grade in shotokan karate. I knew that there was around 90% chance I would fail because that was the average for the people going for the grade. I knew I could be hurt because a friend of mine nearly lost all his teeth from one kick and still failed the grade. I had tasted the bitter pill of failure before and went back to my class and put the brown belt back on again. So how do you win in the midst of failure?
Stevie Wonder, My Mother, Our Blind Friend Helena and Mrs. Beneduci
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I have a long association with Stevie Wonder.
Not in person, you understand, but through his music.
I have never met the man and probably never will, but I remember racing down to the local record store to buy a copy of ‘Yester -me, Yester- you, Yesterday’ when I was just 17 years old. You had to be fast in those days because any new Tamla Motown single that came into the store sold out very quickly.
There was no need to rush home because once you managed to get your hands on the object of your desire; you could breathe a sigh of relief as you left the store, safe in the knowledge that you got there before some other poor soul who was just as desperate as you to hear Stevie’s music. But not just Stevie; The Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Edwin Starr, Jimmy Ruffin, in fact any record that bore the stamp ‘Tamla Motown’ because there was no other music like it for us.
This is strange really, when you consider it, because I was brought up in a small working class town built on coal and cotton 20 miles from Liverpool, the home of The Beatles. The USA wanted the Beatles but we wanted Tamla, because nothing else came close.
Strolling home with this new 45, I knew how I was going to play it. Add it to the stack of my other great Tamla 45’s in the big wooden stereo record player with its big separate, wooden speakers. Drag the speakers to where they faced each other and lie down on the floor with my head in between them, and hit the play button on the automatic feeder and just escape.
I never considered Stevie Wonder’s blindness as an asset or a liability in his rise to stardom, in fact, I never considered it at all because I was too caught up in my own little world. Five years previously, as a 12 year old, I was not in a good place. I was afraid my mother might die. At that time, my mother was in hospital with breast cancer. My father had to work to pay the bills, and I, as the oldest of eight kids had to try to keep everything together even though we were all frozen with fear. I had fear; my mother had faith. She started every day from her hospital bed with prayers of gratitude for what she already had.
The day I bought, ‘Yester -me, Yester- you, Yesterday’ I was rejoicing because my mother had just completed five years of gruelling chemotherapy while rearing the eight of us and thank God, the cancer had gone.
It is only in recent years that I have come to realise what an inspirational figure Stevie Wonder was back then because this last year my wife has been caring for a blind girl, Helena, who is also an inspiration. Helena recently celebrated her 30th birthday and at the party in her honour she never saw the colourful balloons, or the birthday cards, or the cake, or the smiles of her family and friends. She never saw the party dresses, or the disco lights but what she did see in her heart was that she was loved because her birthday speech that night was one of hope, thanksgiving, and gratitude for what she already had.
The same love that had been lavished on Helena by her family was probably the same love that Mrs. Beneduci, the teacher of the 9 year old blind boy, Stevie Morris used when she asked him to use his extraordinary hearing skills to find the mouse loose in the classroom. That love exchanged Stevie Morris’s low self-esteem for one of self-confidence because now, here was something he was good at. He could not see, but he could hear and use that hearing to outstanding effect and with this gift he could become Stevie Wonder.
For me, what brings Stevie Wonder, My Mother, Helena and Mrs. Beneduci together is that they are all figures of towering inspiration. And when you are feeling low and unloved, you need people in your life like this to calm your fears and raise your spirits because in the end all there is; is love.
The wooden stereo system is long gone, and my mother and father have gone to their eternal reward. And if you were to ask me what brought this blog on, it’s not because I recently watched Stevie Wonder’s inspirational playing and singing at Whitney Houston’s funeral. It’s not because Helena recently attended a Tamla Motown Night, but because I have just found that Stevie Wonder record, still in its Tamla Motown dust jacket, that I bought in that long gone store over 42 years ago and the old memories of fear, pain, joy, thanksgiving and the love that was lavished on me as a child that I try to lavish on my family, as you do with yours, all came flooding back to me within the dustsheet of that old 45. So here I pause to thank Stevie, to thank my Mother and Father, to thank Helena and Mrs. Beneduci because without them, we would be living in a lost world.
Thanks for taking the time to read this blog. And may your God go with you.
Peace.
Peter McLoughlin
Author of How to Lose Weight Without Diet or Exercise Permanently