The GI Walking Diet: Lose 10lbs and Look 10 Years Younger in 6 Weeks
Depending on your particular type of arthritis, you can choose which part of the six-week plan you would like to follow. The flexibility plan is a great place to start, while the strength plan may assist in building muscular strength, thus minimizing pressure on your joints. The walking plan can boost your spirits as well as aiding weight loss, again reducing pressure on weight-bearing joints such as knees, ankles and hips.
If your arthritis is severe, ease into the programme gently. You may not get the huge results you are initially looking for, but it’s important to look beyond exercise purely for the benefit of your condition. People with arthritis are at higher risk of developing several other chronic diseases including heart disease, diabetes and osteoporosis. The huge health benefits of regular exercise will help prevent these diseases.
Osteoarthritis
The most common form of arthritis, osteoarthritis mostly affects people over the age of 45. Although this degenerative joint disease is common among older adults, it may appear decades earlier. Osteoarthritis begins when joint cartilage breaks down, sometimes eroding entirely, creating a bone-on-bone joint. The joint loses shape, bone ends thicken and spurs or bony growths develop. Although osteoarthritis can affect any joint, the most common are joints of the knee, hip, feet and fingers. Osteoarthritis is not fatal but it is incurable, with few effective treatments. Symptoms of pain and stiffness can persist for long periods, leading to difficulty in walking, climbing the stairs, rising from a chair, getting in and out of a car and lifting and carrying.
Fibromyalgia
Fibromyalgia sufferers experience general muscular pain, fatigue and poor sleep. Although it may feel like a joint disease, fibromyalgia is not a true form of arthritis and doesn’t cause joint deformities. In fact, it is a form of soft tissue or muscular rheumatism.
Rheumatoid Arthritis
Rheumatoid arthritis, the third most common form of arthritis, is an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks itself. It is characterized by pain, warmth, redness and swelling. Many joints of the body have a tough capsule lined with a synovial membrane, which seals the joint and provides a lubricating fluid. In rheumatoid arthritis, inflammation begins in the synovial lining of the joint and can spread to the entire joint, leading to damage of the bone and cartilage. The space between joints diminishes and the joint loses shape and alignment.
Rheumatoid arthritis can strike at any age but usually appears between 20 and 50, developing slowly over several weeks or months. Although it is most often found in the small joints of the hands and the knee joint, it can affect most joints of the body. The effects of the disease vary widely: some people must remain in bed while others run marathons. It is also difficult to control and can cause severely deformed joints.
Other Forms of Arthritis
Other common types of arthritis include:
Other Age-related Conditions
Hypertension (High Blood Pressure)
High blood pressure is strongly linked to cardiovascular disease and stroke. The risk of cardiovascular disease increases as blood pressure rises, even within the normal range of blood pressures. This suggests that a large number of people may be at risk.
How the GI Walking Diet Can Help
It’s possible to reduce high blood pressure through physical activity, such as the six-week walking plan, and by adjusting your diet. The six-week menu plan is low in salt, making it ideal for people who need to reduce their blood pressure.
Diabetes
In diabetes, the body doesn’t produce or cannot properly use insulin. Insulin is a hormone that converts sugar, starches and other foods into energy. Without insulin, glucose builds up in the bloodstream, and can lead to many health-threatening conditions. The health implications of diabetes are staggering:
The exact cause of this long-term, incurable condition is a mystery. However, genetics and environmental factors – like obesity and lack of cardiovascular exercise – appear to play roles. There are two types of diabetes:
Metabolic Syndrome
In recent years, metabolic syndrome has become increasingly prevalent. A pre-diabetic condition, it is characterized by
and, guess what? That fat deposition in the middle again.
How the GI Walking Diet Can Help
Getting physically active and reducing your weight is the most important action you can take to prevent metabolic syndrome.
Every day is an opportunity to make a fresh start or to build on yesterday’s success.
Ageing and Body Weight
Many different factors may have led to you putting on weight at this stage of your life. Some of these may have been physiological changes, while others may have been psychological issues. Understanding why this weight gain has occurred allows you to put things in context and to understand what action needs to be taken. Now is the time to get excited about what you can achieve for yourself, your body, your weight and your health.
Weight gain predominantly occurs because we are consuming more calories than we are burning off through physical activity. As we have seen, however, weight gain in later life can be the result of other factors, such as a decrease in our muscle mass and a consequent lowering of our resting metabolic rate. This leads to us requiring fewer calories to perform our everyday activities. In addition, hormonal changes make it easier for the body to lay down more fat, especially around the middle.
Why Men Lose Weight More Easily
I often hear people comment that it is much easier for a man to lose weight than it is for a woman. When partners embark on a ‘diet’ together, it is quite common for the man to lose weight more quickly, and possibly to lose a little more than his partner does. Research has shown that having personal support as you embark on a healthy lifestyle programme has a major impact on your long-term success. In fact, recovering male cardiac patients whose partners showed an active, positive, supportive role in their recovery had a 74 per cent greater success rate than patients whose partners showed neutral support.
From my research for this book, I know that many of you will want to complete the six-week plan with a partner or friend. I actively encourage people to do this. The walking plan, in particular, can be a great source of enjoyment. Walking with others can be great fun, and the support aspect will be vital when your motivation naturally wanes at points throughout the six weeks.
If, however, you are participating with members of the opposite sex, it is likely that your rate and amount of weight loss will be different. This doesn’t mean that a woman’s efforts are any less than a man’s; the truth is there are strong physiological reasons why it is easier for men to lose weight. But before you give up before you have even started, let’s make one thing clear – although your rate, and possibly the amount, of weight loss may be different, the health benefits to be gained are there for both men and women to enjoy.
Although men tend to lose weight more easily, the health benefits of the GI Walking Diet are there for both men and women to enjoy.
How the Body Stores Fat
Most body fat is stored in fat cells called adipocytes. Around 50,000–60,000 calories of energy are stored as triglycerides in fat cells throughout the body, both under the skin and around the delicate organs. That’s enough stored energy to walk briskly non-stop for 500–600 miles, or from London to Land’s End. The body also stores fat between the muscle fibres, generally holding about 2,000–3,000 calories, enough to walk briskly non-stop for 20–30 miles. So before we even start to consume food for energy, our bodies are holding on to an awful lot of energy in the form of stored fat.
Where the fat is stored creates quite distinctive body shapes. Storage of body fat around the middle, resembling more of an apple or ‘android shape’, is characteristic among males and is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. Storage of body fat around the hips and thighs, creating a more rounded pear or ‘gynoid’ shape, is the most common body type among pre-menopausal women. The role of hormones in the way we store fat differs between men and women and affects how each lose weight.
Two hormones are particularly associated with fat distribution. Lipoprotein lipase (LPL) and hormone-sensitive lipase (HSL) directly affect whether we store fat or encourage it to be distributed in the blood and then burnt off. LPL tends to encourage fat storage, and HSL tends to encourage fat to be burnt off. The amount of LPL and HSL we have tends to vary between men and women, between individuals, in different areas of the body and at various stages of a woman’s life. Men tend to have more LPL in the belly and less HSL in the lower hip area. This creates the more pronounced apple or android body shape seen in overweight men, with more body fat distributed around the belly. Women tend to have more LPL in the hips and backs of the arms and less HSL in the upper body. This classically creates more of the traditional pear or gynoid shape. When women lose weight, they generally still have more LPL in the hips so retain a pear shape, even though they may be a smaller pear shape.
It therefore seems obvious that getting more HSL can be only a good thing for aiding weight loss. HSL is stimulated by the hormone epinephrine, and what is really exciting is that exercise causes greater amounts of epinephrine to be released, and as you get fitter your body becomes more adept at using even small amounts of epinephrine to burn fat. So that’s a great reason to get moving and keep moving.
A body that is significantly overweight or obese, however, will require higher amounts of epinephrine to stimulate fat-burning. For this reason it is vital that overweight people include gradual, progressive cardiovascular exercise into their weight-loss efforts. Walking is a fabulous way to do this.
The crucial difference between male and female fat loss is down to hormone receptors, which are located on the fat cell walls. There are two types of hormone receptor: alpha-receptors and beta-receptors. Alpha-receptors tend to inhibit fat breakdown while beta-receptors encourage it. Men and women don’t have the same amount of these crucial hormone receptors. Men tend to have more of the fat-busting beta-receptors and fewer of the fat-storing alpha-receptors in their abdomen, while women tend to have fewer beta-receptors and more alpha-receptors. The more beta-receptors there are in the abdomen, the easier it is to lose middle-age spread. So when a man loses weight, it will be easier for him to drop inches off the midriff area than it would be for a woman. Finally, the last infuriating piece of evidence that it’s easier for men to lose weight is that, even at rest, a man will be burning more calories than a woman. This is because their fat cells are smaller than women’s!
The Oestrogen Effect
Another factor in the weight-loss battle of the sexes relates to the female sex hormone oestrogen. Oestrogen has an impact on fat storage in a number of ways:
During menopause, however, the amount of oestrogen decreases, so its ability to help break down fat is diminished. This causes weight gain in the midriff to become more prevalent in women than in men.
It’s not all doom and gloom, however, as oestrogen also increases the production of nitric oxide, which encourages the blood vessels to relax. High nitric oxide concentrations are associated with migraine, and it is often reported that migraine sufferers experience less frequent and severe migraines after menopause.
Weight Gain and Stress
Stress is another factor that can lead to weight gain and middle-age spread. Scientists are just beginning to discover that long-term emotional stress can contribute to age-related weight gain, especially in older women.
For more on stress and other emotional challenges, see Chapter 2.
How the GI Walking Diet Can Help
You will lose weight on the GI Walking Diet. The combination of the physical activity and eating plans allows you to follow a flexible or more structured approach to your goal. All you have to do is choose which approach suits you, and you are on your way to losing 5–10 per cent of your excess body weight. Losing weight can be an intimidating process – sometimes the amount of weight we feel we have to lose can be off-putting – but the positive news is that even a small amount of weight loss can improve your health. In fact, research shows that a drop of just 6 per cent will significantly improve your health.
If you are carrying excess weight, an initial goal of losing 5–10 per cent of your starting weight is both realistic and valuable. Plus, by following the six-week plan, you will be more likely to keep the weight off, maintaining your health improvements.
If I said to you – in six weeks from today you could be 6 per cent lighter, far healthier, fitter and energetic, wouldn’t you want to take action?
2 Emotional Challenges
Life’s too short to sweat the small stuff.
Can your emotions affect your health? Evidence now suggests the answer is ‘yes’. One study of pre-menopausal, peri-menopausal and post-menopausal women found that emotions like anger, depression and anxiety increase the risk of developing metabolic syndrome. Other studies have confirmed that long-term stress causes the shape-shifting phenomenon of middle-age spread due to too much sugar being converted to fat, which gets deposited in the midriff area. Researchers have also established a link between stress and poor health. And, of course, when we are stressed, sad, angry, afraid, hurt, worried, lonely, frustrated or depressed we reach for food as a source of emotional comfort.
Emotional Stress
Most experts define emotional stress as a person’s reaction to any situation that places special physical or psychological demands on them so as to unbalance their equilibrium and take them outside their comfort zone. These situations can give rise to feelings of fear, anger or anxiety as the body responds to the perceived threat to its wellbeing. Emotional stress varies from person to person so is difficult to measure. It is highly subjective and influenced by personality and experience; everyone has a different sensitivity to stressful events – what may be stressful to one person can be perceived as quite manageable to another.
The concept of emotional stress pioneered by Dr Hans Seyle proposes that during stressful situations, the sympathetic nervous system sets in motion a series of physiological responses. Various hormones produced by the adrenal cortex, including cortisol and epinephrine, prepare the body for an instant state of readiness, the classic ‘fight or flight’ response. It is also theorized that once the ‘stress-invoking threat’ has passed, the body returns to a state of normality and balance. However, recent research shows that long-term elevated cortisol levels can lead to weight gain, especially in the belly.
Although both men and women may be uncomfortable with some of the changes to their faces and bodies as they get older, women often feel more vulnerable as society places such a high value on their physical appearance. For women over 40, excess weight can become more difficult to shift, and this is often compounded by emotional challenges. At this stage of life, emotional issues that have been suppressed for years can resurface. Additionally, divorce, financial burdens, concerns about retirement, career moves and residential changes often occur alongside unpleasant menopausal symptoms. With the children now grown up and out of the family home, many people begin to question their own identity, which was typically being the family caregiver. This loss of identity can be unsettling for many, and may coincide with a new role of becoming the ‘parent’ to their own ill or ageing parents.
Emotional challenges can be difficult at any age. In later life, emotional stress can be harder to deal with if we are no longer physically fit and healthy. Coping with an age-related medical condition – such as arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease or osteoporosis – can be a considerable burden. Physical problems combined with emotional challenges – such as periods of mourning, feelings of increased isolation in retirement and a changing social role – can all contribute to a sense of loss of control and helplessness. This makes people vulnerable to depression.
Emotional Eating
We all know food can make us feel good, providing a great source of psychological fulfilment. From infancy, we are taught that love and food are intertwined. A baby cries – we feed it to calm it down; a child does well and is rewarded with a food treat; and of course seduction and food have been entwined since Creation – just think of Adam and Eve! In later life we have a whole catalogue of food memories associated with holidays, celebrations and happy times, so it’s really no wonder that we equate food with positive feelings. When emotionally stressed, some people strive to recapture those happy feelings by comforting themselves with food. It has recently been shown that we are more likely to engage in emotional eating if our basic human needs – such as security, love and belonging – are unfulfilled. Prolonged periods of depression and anxiety also tend to cause emotional eating, leading to cravings for sweet and fatty foods.
Many parents and grandparents mistakenly use food as a reward for positive behaviour: ‘If you are a good girl or boy today you will get a treat.’ This strategy may create a lasting unconscious desire to reward oneself with sweet, high-calorie foods when under emotional stress. This may develop into unhealthy eating habits, so that being overweight becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Aim to reward younger members of the family with non-food treats, such as a trip to a park, a treasure hunt or a physical activity. This will have a much more positive impact on their health.
Why People Eat Emotionally
In my experience with both female and male clients, people often find themselves trapped in a cycle of stress-eat-stress, feeling helpless to change. Significant weight gain can occur as a result. There may be unconscious reasons for this behaviour. You may want to prevent other people getting too close, and feel that a layer of fat on the body may protect you. Or it can represent an attitude of needing to let go and be out of control when all other aspects of your life have to be neat and in order.