RockSolidBody

Fasting is an act of willingly abstaining from some or all food or drink (or both) for a certain period of time. Some religious fasting may also include abstinence from sexual activity.

Fasting means cleansing. To those who practice it, and to those who propagate it to all mankind as the cure to all ills and as the salvation from all sins.

Cleansing of the body. Cleansing of the soul. As a nutritionist, I can only comment on the former.

TYPES OF FASTS

Fasting can be total or partial. It may begin from abstinence from one particular food to total exclusion of all food and even water.

Different fasts may follow one or more of the following restrictions:

·         Abstaining from meat or all non-vegetarian foods

·        Exclusion of cereals such as rice and chapatti, or any other staple foods

·         Reducing total food intake to only one full meal per day

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When people enroll in gyms, their reasons for enrolling are varied & most often they want things that could actually harm them in the long term. A responsible fitness professional needs to understand the psyche of the enrolling member & through counseling, educate the member as to what’s best for him, rather than give into the demands of the member (A member hasn’t gone through the education required to understand the true meaning of fitness).

The following are the most common demands made by people enrolling in gyms & my response to them

1.    Got a wedding in the family…have to lose at least 10 kgs in a month…Already bought my clothes two sizes smaller & I don’t fit into them…

My Response:
We can do it for you…but we would only be doing you a disservice…The only way you could lose so much so fast is to indiscriminately lose weight through excessive cardio & soups n salads diet…You would lose 10kgs but with it lose so much muscle that you would end up doing the unthinkable – Lower your already sluggish metabolism…Once you get off the crazy diet you are going to bounce back & get those 10 kgs back…But you are not back to square one…When you lost you lost mostly muscle & when you gained your weight back you only gained fat…So the only effect weight loss is going to have on you is to ensure a FATTER you in the future…
SO sorry…but we cant always give you what you want…as what you want may not be always good for you…

2.    The only problem with me is that I have a protruding belly…I have just come here for getting my tummy in…So if you could just show me the abdominal exercises…

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The Stone Age Diet has many names: the Paleolithic Diet, the Paleo Diet, the Prehistoric Diet, the Caveman diet, or the Hunter-Gatherer Diet.

It traces the problem of obesity back to 10,000 years ago, with the advent of farming and cereal planting. During the Paleolithic period of the Stone Age (before the advent of agriculture), for over two million years, our ancestors were hunters and gatherers with a staple diet of lean meats, fish, fruits, vegetables and nuts.

These were then replaced by the modern-day staple diet of cereals, pulses, dairy products, refined fat and sugar.

These changes are associated as risk factors for so-called “diseases of civilization”: obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, autoimmune-related diseases, certain cancers, and vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

The theory goes that today’s human genes have evolved through 2.5 million years of the Paleolithic era but the last 10,000 years have not been enough for genetic changes to adapt to our relatively new farm-based diet.

It claims that we are nearly genetically identical to the Stone-age humans!

Our genetic make-up is of a hunter-gather: ‘designed’ for the consumption of plants, animals and seafood. Not designed for farming foods: grains, legumes and dairy products. Even less suited to modern processed foods such as sugar and refined fat.

To cut a long story short, an ‘ideal’ diet is the Stone-age diet!

Is this scientifically true? Lets take a look!

DIET PROTOCOL

In 1975, gastroenterologist Walter L. Voegtlin was one of the first to suggest the meat-based Paleolithic diet of chiefly fats and protein, with only small amounts of carbohydrates – arguing that humans are carnivorous animals.

The Stone-age diet claims:

We are ‘designed’ to consume ‘hunter-gatherer’ foods:

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There is no better way to attain fat loss than to weight train. Majority of the people who enroll in gyms are obsessed with fat loss…yet this fact is unknown to them. One of the reasons is their complete misunderstanding of the concept of fat loss & confusing it with sheer weight loss…Weight loss is the easiest thing to achieve…starve yourself on soups, salads & hit the treadmill for an hour a day & you could end up losing 10kgs in 2 months. The reason for this stupendous weight loss is not loss of fat but LOSS OF MUSCLE…again because people don’t understand Fat loss, they don’t understand the value of muscle…if only they knew that the secret behind burning fat is simply an increase in muscle… but to convince you about this simple scientific fact I first have to define Body Fat (Adipose Tissue) & make you understand as to why the human body collects Body Fat

WHAT IS BODY FAT?

To understand where this ugly unsightly soft jelly like substance that we can pinch on our abdomen & hips n thighs (fat can be anywhere on the body but most often collects around these two places) comes from…we first have to understand the concept of Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).

It is a big mistake on our part to think of calorie burning to be associated solely with gymming…lots of people obsessed with calorie burning are surprisingly only concerned with burning more calories by extending their duration on a cardio machine such as a treadmill…this is achieved by probably extending their 1 hour run or walk to an hour and a half…they completely ignore the fact that the body is burning calories even outside the gym throughout the day. If they are so obsessed with calorie burning…shouldn’t they be concerned about increasing their caloric output throughout the day???

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