7 Laws of Leaness

A good friend of mine puts out a periodic newsletter. This last one covered a subject I thought worth passing on. I hope you get something good from this. I sure did.

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7 Laws of Leaness

The essential rules that separate the fat from the fit!
Why do some people seem naturally thin—able to torch cheeseburgers and never gain a pound? And why do some of us—okay, most of us—sweat and diet and sweat and diet some more, and never lose enough to get the body we want? Because those "naturally thin" people actually live by a series of rules that keep them from gaining weight. And if you know their secrets, you can enjoy meals without packing on the pounds. Follow these 7 Laws of Leanness for effortless weight loss. 

We’ve spent the past two decades interviewing leading experts, poring over groundbreaking studies, and grilling top athletes, trainers, and celebrities for their health and fitness advice. And we’ve learned that what separates the fit from the fat, the slim from the sloppy, the toned from the torpid, is a set of rules. And what’s amazing is that none of them involves spending hours on a treadmill, eating nothing but grapefruit and tree bark, or having part of your small intestines replaced with fiberfill. Follow these simple rules and weight loss will be automatic.


LAW #1: Lean People Don’t Diet, They Adopt a Lifestyle
Lean people practice good habits and adhere to a lifestyle that allows them to be lean and stay that way. If you are caught in a spin cycle of going into overdrive to take weight off only to return to the old habits that that made you plump out to begin with (and will most certainly return you to that same state), then you are dieting, NOT practicing a healthy lifestyle. 


LAW #2: Lean People Don’t Go Fat-Free
A European study tracked nearly 90,000 people for several years and discovered that participants who tried to eat “low fat” had the same risk of being overweight as those who didn’t. You need fat in your diet to help you process certain nutrients, like vitamins A, D, and E, for example. And many “fat-free” foods are loaded with sugar, and therefore have even more calories than their full-fat cousins. Even the American Heart Association says that fat-free labels lead to higher consumption of unhealthy sweets. A bit of fat helps keep you full and satisfied. Fat-free will amp up your sugar intake and send you running back to the fridge in an hour, hungry for more. 



LAW #3: Lean People Slow Down, and Sit Down to Eat
In fact, the more and the longer you sit down and enjoy your food, the leaner you’re going to be. Greek researchers recently reported that eating more slowly and savoring your meal can boost levels of two hormones that make you feel fuller. 


Note: researchers at Cornell University found that when people sat down at the table with plates already set up with appropriate portions of food, they consumed up to 35 percent less than they did when eating family-style—that is, by passing serving dishes around the table. 



LAW #4: Lean People Know What They’re Going to Eat Next
Planning your responses to hunger may help you shed pounds faster, say Dutch researchers. They posed their subjects questions like “If you’re hungry at 4 p.m., then . . . what?” Those who had an answer (“I’ll snack on some almonds”) were more successful at losing weight than those who didn’t have an answer.


LAW #5: Lean People Eat Protein
In a recent European study, people who ate moderately high levels of protein were twice as likely to lose weight and keep it off as those who didn’t eat much protein.

A New England Journal of Medicine study looked at a variety of eating plans and discovered that eating a diet high in protein and low in refined starches (like white bread) was the most effective for weight loss. Protein works on two levels: First, you burn more calories digesting it. Second, because your body has to work harder to digest a chicken breast than, say, a Ho Ho or a bag of chips, you stay fuller longer. 



LAW #6: Lean People Move Around More

Simply put, fit people augment their fitness by having fun just moving around. Scientists have a name for how you burn calories just enjoying yourself. It’s called NEAT: non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Sounds complicated, like something only policy wonks at a global warming summit are qualified to discuss. But it’s pretty simple: Pick a few activities that you enjoy, from tossing a stick for your dog to bowling with your best friend, and just do them more often. The average person makes 200 decisions every day that affect his or her weight. That means you have around 200 chances each and every day to do better, to make better choices, to improve yourself, and to make progress!

LAW #7: Lean People Watch Less TV
Instead of calling it the boob tube, maybe we should call it the man-boob tube. Of those who watch more than four hours of TV a day, nearly 30 percent have a BMI that high—the cutoff line for obesity, according to a study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. In contrast, only about 18 percent of people who watch less than two hours of TV a day have a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

In a study at the University of Vermont, overweight participants who cut their daily TV time in half (from an average of 5 hours to 2.5 hours) burned an extra 119 calories a day. And a recent study of people who successfully lost weight found that 63 percent of them watched less than 10 hours of TV a week. Want more? A study in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine reported that lean people have an average of 2.6 television sets in their homes. Overweight people have an average of 3.4. Finally, researchers in Australia recently discovered that every hour in front of the television trims 22 minutes from your life. Yikes!

This is a great subject and worth evaluating in your own life.
More on this later...

Not enough weekend

So it's Sunday... it's overcast outside, making me slightly demotivated to get out back and do a little yard clean up. I'm trying to watch some football, evaluate some bokkens for a guy back in Iowa, start one of the books I just bought from Amazon, set up the new iPod Shuffle I got, because my Nano has to be sent back to Apple for a recall issue, clean up the garage, so I can take down the last baseboards to finish the wood flooring project in the family room, and find some time to relax with the time I have left. By the time Monday rolls around and it's time to go back to work, I'm wondering where the weekend went, and why I'm so tired. Ha, ha... yeah right.

I just posted a couple old pencil drawings on facebook, but I'd like to tell a little story about them first.

Back even before I joined the Navy, I became an aspiring artist.

In high school, I dreamed of becoming an architect. Frank Lloyd Wright was an early role model of mine, and I read and collected everything I could on him. I visited Taliesin West and was convinced that this was what I wanted to do as a career. Unfortunately, my dismal GPA and the ever present draft for the Vietnam War, kept me from pursuing anything close to this.

In an effort to satisfy my artistic side, I started taking commercial art classes and messing around with freehand media.

I was a huge Ed "Big Daddy" Roth fan (still am). In high school, I met him at a car show at the state fair grounds, and was so overwhelmed by it, that when I finally had the chance to talk with him, I couldn't think of a thing to say or ask.


Anyway, while I was studying art when in the Navy in 1972 at UCSD, among other things, I made numerous pencil drawings. I had a lot of free time while on the ships during our Vietnam tours' of duty, so I needed something to take my mind away from everything going on around me. These are the only two I did that survived until now. My dreams of becoming an artist were there for many years, but never quite managed to go from interested amateur, to the real thing. Life has a way of twisting your hopes toward other directions, and although I still have a mild interest, I just don't have the time to pursue it. These are just the some of the remnants of times gone by. I hope you enjoy them.

This first is one I drew of my sister. It's obvious I looked at her with a teenage outlook of a sibling. I need to give this to her. I think she'd enjoy seeing how much she has changed.


I'm not sure about the history of the second one. Vietnam was certainly on my mind, so I can only assume its impressions were strong in me.