It’s hard to think that your body actually needs it when cholesterol gets so much bad press. There are two sorts of cholesterol in your body, bad cholesterol or LDL cholesterol and good cholesterol also known as HDL cholesterol. Cholesterol in your body is necessary to make hormones, vitamin D and bile salts to stay healthy.
On the other hand, the bad cholesterol may cause you many problems. The main concern with LDL cholesterol is that it could deposit cholesterol onto artery walls that will produce plaque. The plaque in turn will make the arteries to narrow and then block. This may cause blood flow to be blocked, which is not good news for your heart.
There are a lot of confusing terms being said when it comes to cholesterol. One of those terms is dietary cholesterol. You could think that all dietary cholesterol is bad, but actually, dietary cholesterol doesn’t raise blood cholesterol as high as you could think. The two bad guys here are saturated fats and trans fatty acids.
So what you need to do when you think of cholesterol problems is to lower your levels of bad cholesterol. The best way to do this is by changing your diets. As well as reducing foods with bad cholesterol such as meat, eggs, dairy and seafood, you should also eat different foods that will lower LDL levels.
Dieting can be slow and frustrating but what if you could trick your body into losing weight faster? Would you be interested? In this article I’ll lay out for you 3 simple ‘tricks’ that are safe, effective, and will help you lose fat faster.
1. Trick Your Body Into Thinking It is Starving – This sounds a little outrageous but it is essential to faster fat loss. By cutting your carbs you will signal your body to start producing ’starvation’ hormones. These hormones are responsible freeing stored body fat and shuttling it to your liver and muscles so that it can be used as energy. You don’t need to starve yourself (that’s a bad idea). Just trick your body by reducing your carbohydrate intake to 50-100g per day to trick your system and crank up your fat loss.
2. Trick Your Mind and Stomach Into Thinking That You Are Eating More – One major problem with dieting is hunger. The inability to deal with hunger while dieting is one of the biggest reasons why many people fail on their diets and can’t lose weight. This is an easy fix – just trick your body into thinking that it is eating more food than it really is. How can you do this? Eat more green leafy (spinach, kale, lettuce) and/or fibrous vegetables (broccoli, asparagus, brussels sprouts, etc). These kinds of vegetables have a lot of ‘bulk’ to them but not a lot of calories. This means you can eat a lot more food without consuming extra calories. You actually trick your body in two different ways. The first is visually. There is a big difference from a psychological perspective when you sit down to eat a plate overflowing with food vs. a plate that just has a few pieces scattered on it. The second trick occurs in your stomach. Your stomach has stretch receptors that signal the brain, letting it know your stomach is full and that you should stop eating. These receptors don’t sense calories, they sense volume. Eating lots of green leafy and fibrous vegetables will activate these stretch receptors and you’ll feel full even on less calories.
3. Trick Your Body Into Thinking That It is Time to Build Muscle – Successful long term weight loss hinges on your ability to maintain and stimulate your metabolism. The major driving force behind your metabolism is your muscle. Muscle is a metabolic powerhouse that burns massive amounts of calories allowing you to peel off the pounds. The people that lose muscle when dieting are doomed to not only slow weight loss but also being stuck with the ’skinny fat’ look once they are done dieting. Increasing your protein intake while dieting will help prevent muscle loss because certain amino acids found in the protein you eat work on the DNA level to stimulate protein synthesis (i.e. muscle building). Your body is smart (well not too smart as this article is dedicated to tricking it) and doesn’t like to waste resources so if it is building muscle then it won’t at the same time start breaking it down. This little trick will spare your hard earned muscle from destruction when you are dieting and allow you to keep your metabolism cranking.
There you go. Pretty simple…Eat more protein, less carbs, and more green vegetables to trick your body into losing weight fast. Put these tricks into action and you’ll be losing weight 2x faster than all your friends.
About the Author (WSFL): Mike Roussell is an author and nutrition doctoral student at Pennsylvania State University. Mike writings can be found in Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness and Ironman Magazines in addition to the internet’s largest bodybuilding and fitness website - T-Nation.com
His Warp Speed Fat Loss system is a complete Done-for-You A-Z Fat Loss Blueprint. You can learn more at WarpSpeedFatLoss.com Warp Speed Fat Loss is a complete 28 day diet and training system crafted to help you lose 10,15, or 20lbs of body fat in just 28 day. To start losing weight fast visit Warp Speed Fat Loss.
If this doesn’t scream SCAM I don’t know what does…
The local medical center is advertising a “heart screening” in order to determine your risk of heart disease. This is a voluntary screening, and costs $50. You go in, get and EKG, Cholesterol check, and CT calcium score. These are supposed to be good predictors of heart disease.
A family member of mine went in to have his screening done. He’s in his mid-50’s, has never smoked, is not overweight, and quite consciously watches his diet. He has never had any heart problems, (but there have been in some in the family).
His screening was perfectly normal. No abnormalities on the EKG, cholesterol, LDL, HDL, and Trig’s all within normal. His ‘calcium score’ was 0 which signifies the lowest risk category.
After the screening, the cardiologist suggested he go on a prescription cholesterol lowering medication.
HuH?
Yep, with all seriousness he was told he should be on one of these medications.
