“How to lose weight safely?” was the question that I have been asking myself and everyone else for years. I did lots of research online regarding health, wellness and fitness. Some say, “The BEST WAY to lose weight is to do this and that…while some say, the FASTEST WAY is to do extra this and extra that…and other say, the CHEAPEST WAY is to buy less and eat less WHILE doing this exercise and that..”

But for me, the smartest question should be..“How To Lose Weight SAFELY?” That means are you healthy while losing weight?

I learned a lot from all the information I got thru reading hundreds of threads online and tried almost all of them for my own personal experiences. Don’t get me wrong. I am not an expert in fitness and nutrition. But the idea of losing 16 kgs can be very inspiring for some.

I do not want everyone else to experience what I have done and sacrificed (including the effort, time and money) just to burn some belly fats.

So below are the simple things you need to know and understand to burn that stubborn little bastards in you called fats.

1.) CALORIE COUNTS and then sometimes DOESN’T

You are what you eat. The more you eat, the more calories you are piling up in your body. So how much calorie should you eat daily? The calorie intake calculator provides an estimate of how many calories are required for both men and women. You can check yours in any calorie intake calculator online. Or you may want to try the nutrient calculator to break this down into carbohydrates, protein, and fat.

Calories For FAT Loss

Check a body mass index (BMI chart) online so you will have an idea on how much you want to lose based on your current weight.

Science tells us that 1 pound of human body fat is equal to 3500 calories. To lose 1 pound a week, one will expend 3500 more calories than eating. Therefore, a daily calorie deficit of 500 should result in 1 pound per week fat loss. In reality, this is not the case. This calorie deficit method does not quite work efficiently. Generally speaking, a person’s energy expenditure becomes less as they get lighter. That means anyone doing the calorie deficit method will inevitably plateau. The amount of food intake that once lead to weight loss, will now only maintain your current weight.

The Weight Loss Plateau

Our human body is so complex and yet so efficient. Over time our bodies adapt to the lowered calorie level. Our body becomes more efficient at using energy (lowered metabolism), and therefore burns less fat.

This is the reason why most of us reach a weight loss plateau. At this point, it will be so hard to lose any more weight and the only option is to boost your metabolism. Below are some of the things or activities that you need to do to continue losing weight:

• increase your cardio, do resistance or weight training, try ‘cheat’ meals (i.e. occasional high-calorie meals) once in awhile, cycling (or zig-zagging) calories, and any activity that promotes active lifestyle.

Very often, you find that the nearer you get to your goal or ideal weight (or your body fat percentage), the harder things get!

Continually dropping calories only serves to lower metabolism even further – the moment you return to ‘normal’ eating – the weight comes back on.

Minimum Daily Calorie Intake

Generally speaking, it is difficult to set absolute bottom calorie levels, because everyone has different body composition and activity levels. Health authorities do set some baselines – these are 1200 calories per day for women, and 1800 calories per day for men.

In reality, this doesn’t really make too much sense because muscle mass is not considered here. Therefore, these absolute levels don’t work. However, these give us a starting point.

When reducing calories:

You try not to lower your calorie intake by more than 1000 calories below maintenance. Doing so may invoke the bodies starvation response (a state where your body will undergo starvation mode), which can lead to a bad effect on your diet.

Learn to eat slowly – research shows that faster eaters are heavier people.

What happens when calories are too low?

• Muscle mass is broken down for energy (catabolism).
• Metabolic rate will begin to drop (typically) after 3 days of very low calories – this is related to, and compounded by the loss of muscle mass.
• With very low calories you risk sluggishness, nutritional deficiencies, fatigue, and often irritability. You are completely set-up for a regain in fat if you suddenly return to your previous eating patterns.

How Much Calories On Foods

Example:

McDo Big Mac has more or less 560 calories; KFC breast hot & spicy has more or less 530 calories;  4 ounces of breast chicken with skin has more or less 190 calories; Or 1 large EGG has more or less 80 calories. You can check a food calorie chart online for your own reference or you can ask me and I will see what I can do.

Important Note: Try to consciously count your daily calorie intake. You can be very technical about it or just simply become familiarize on the calorie content of the food you eat. You will be amazed of the results.

2. EXERCISE and/or RESISTANCE TRAINING

When you exercise or do resistance training, you expend more energy and as a result your body will burn more calories. And if you’re lucky, you can build muscle along the way and muscle helps you burn calories.

There are a lot of good advices online and a lot of bad ones. For me, whatever you do, give your body a time to relax and recharge. If you find a blog or site that will tell you to go to the gym daily, then perhaps he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Example:

Lower body training every Mondays and Thursdays then upper body every Tuesdays and Fridays. Then maybe relax your muscles on Wednesdays and weekends.

I may talk more of weight or resistance training on my next blog because it’s more of gaining/building muscles. This blog right here is more of losing body fats.

3. RIGHT ATTITUDE

You can become a calorie expert in no time but once you do not have the right attitude towards calorie intake or eating habits, then achieving your weight loss goal can be very frustrating.

When you decide to lose weight, make sure to prepare yourself mentally, morally, and religiously.

4. NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS

Let’s admit it. We can not get full nutrition by just eating our required daily calorie needs.

That is why it is no secret that the key to effective and sustainable weight loss program is making positive changes in diet and exercise. However, making those healthy lifestyle changes can often seem like an insurmountable task.

There are nutritional supplement products that are scientifically designed to jump-start healthy eating habits and help individuals begin to make a clean break from unhealthy food.

So my advice for all of you is to try to scout for the world’s best supplier of nutritional supplements. I trust only the best of the best and a 5 star gold awardee product, according to the “NUTRISEARCH Comparative Guide to Nutritional Supplements” book by Lyle MacWilliam, MSc, FP.

The products that I choose and trust so much are scientifically research and proven. You should be very extra careful what to take in because not all nutritional supplements in the market today are good for you and your health. For me, the best way is to buy this book of Lyle MacWilliam and start comparing over 1,600 nutritional supplement products.

So, there you go..the 4 simple things that you need to know if you want to live a healthy lifestyle by being fit and staying fit..because HEALTH is true WEALTH.

I am so tempted to talk about each of them but I think I will probably settle down in showing you all the top 5 of them as follows:

1.) Taipei 101 in Taiwan (Taipei 101 will not keep its crown for long as there are many other projects in the planning stages or even near completion. The most talked about is the Burj Dubai projected to be completed and occupied in 2009)

Fantastic fact: The world’s two fastest elevators live here, installed by Toshiba. With top speeds of 1,010 m/min, you can fly up from Level B1 to 89 in 37 seconds.

Less fantastic fact: Something frankly less interesting is that there is a 900-ton tuned mass damper installed on the 87th floor to counter earthquakes and typhoons.

2.) Petronas Towers in Malaysia

To give you an idea of its height Alain Robert, the Gerard Depardieu of the climbing world, attempted to scale the towers without ropes or harnesses. It’s great to see these Malaysian office workers so happy and yet he failed to finish the climb. He also failed in 1997 when he was caught at the 60th floor, 28 short of the 88th storey skyscraper. The police simply opened a window and pulled him back in. Something tells me we might be seeing Alain again as he has tried to climb virtually everything including Taipei 101.

Fantastic fact: Apparently, the shape of the floors is based on an eight-point star, common in Malaysian Islamic patterns and the towers have so many windows that window-washers take a month to clean each tower!

Less fantastic fact: The Towers were featured in the film Entrapment with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery. The backdrop in the film was a shanty town surrounding the building when this is nowhere near the reality. This caused some controversy in Malaysia as it was portrayed as a backwards country.

3.) Sears Tower in Chicago

Fantastic fact: And just in case you need a better view the building has six robotic window-washing machines mounted on the roof.

And yes, in 1999 French Alain “Spiderman” Robert scaled the building’s exterior glass and steel wall all the way to the top…without getting caught.

4.) Jin Mao Building in Shanghai

5.) Empire State Building in New York

BURJ DUBAI STATUS:

In February 2007, it surpassed the Sears Tower as the building with the most floors in the world and earlier this month the tower’s height was 460.1 meters (1,510 feet), with 129 floors.

It is currently the second tallest building in the world excluding antennas and is rising by 2-3 floors per week. It looks like the Burj Dubai will be the tallest building in the world by the end of this year.

The final height is officially being kept a secret – you wouldn’t want to spend years constructing the tallest building for another to ‘pop up’ a couple of metres taller a few months later. However, figures released by a contractor on the project have suggested a height of around 808 metres and 162 floors. Even so, other contractors are estimating over 940 metres (over 3,000 feet). To put it into perspective that is 5 times higher than the Swiss Re building in London.

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Anyway, few meters after I passed by the Matina Pangi crossing, I saw five 10-wheeler trucks very slowly climbing up against each other in this slightly elevated diversion road. For some reason I found it quite impossible to overtake even just one of them at a time. I was not in a hurry at that time so I was just cool and so decided to just go with the flow of the 5 km/hr race.

I didn’t find any reason to complain at that time until I smelled something real bad. This very fouling odor must have entered thru the car’s aircon inlet air or whatever. And then I realized I was following this truck..

I am wondering..Is there any law or sort of “code of practice for the land transport of pigs” here in the Philippines? Anyone?

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I am just wondering why I could not connect to the URLs of the Biodiesel, Biomass, and the other Renewable Energy in this site (no offense Marc) but I just didn’t know what went wrong..honestly.

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Yesterday, I had the opportunity to interview 5 job applicants. Some of them just literally gave me headaches. So this morning when I opened my email, I came across this video of a guy doing some rope tricks and it somehow made me smile.

You can check it out.

I have already sent this comment to the DPWH but I want to share this to all of you so you will know something.

TO WHOM THIS MAY CONCERN

The “Blue Book” is your set of standards I believe. Do you have any regular revision(s) of the said book? I suppose you do have and you should because every industry should grow and cope up with the trend of technology.

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It looks very much as if the year 2007, at least for Filipinos, is still in its infancy. The activities that have taken place and are still going on in the construction industry are only the beginning.

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• Councilor Peter Laviña
• Join The DigitalFilipino.com Club
• Dimsum Diner
• BisayaBloggers.com
• Davao’s Food Huntress
• NoKiAHOST.COM P5/day webhosting
• Globe Broadband
• ACT for Peace Programme
• Web Design Philippines
• Lane Systems
• Snap Graphic & Sign
• Orange County Real Estate
• Web Developer Philippines
• Eric Clark Su
• Frendz Diner
• Artcom Printing Services
• Cubepixels Design Studio

Whew!! Is it only me who had so much trouble in trying to register in this “1st Mindanao Bloggers Summit”? I can only wish that the process is not that complicated. My advice to the webmaster of this event is to make it very simple..a few clicks of the mouse can never be any better. Because we have to understand that since our main objective is to attract bloggers, neophytes in web page blogging included, we should make the process (or whatever you may call it) user-friendly.

Well anyway, I salute the people behind this summit. See you all on and in the “Summit Party”.