6 Smart Ways to Fight Hunger

Let’s face it, trying to lose fat can be hard at times.  The biggest thing that comes up time and time again is hunger.  In a perfect world, you would find a way to not be hungry and still watch your waistline shrink.   Can that really be done?   Below are 6 tips to help guide your waistline to a new low.
 

1) Eat more protein
I tell everyone to eat more when they are looking to get leaner.  Most of the time people look at me like I’m nuts.  Really?  Eat more?  Their whole lives they have heard you need to eat less and less, but can we eat more of something and still lose weight?

It turns out that protein has some very cool effects.  First off, protein helps with satiety and keeps you full longer.   I could site a bunch of studies here but try this experiment out on your own instead.   Eat 2 whole chicken breasts and the same amount of calories from Twinkies, then see how soon you are hungry again.

Two 6 oz chicken breasts have about 420 calories.  This may leave some of you doing your own episode of “Man vs Food” just to finish them.  Yet 3 Twinkies have about the same number of calories, and it would be easy to polish them off in no time (not that I know anything about that).

 

In the end, eat more protein to watch your waistline go down.
 

2) Drink more water
Not a new one but most people still don’t do it.   Good thing about water is there’s no calories.  Test out drinking more water and I bet you will drop fat without trying harder.

 

Does water temperature really matter?  If you research this you’ll see very quickly that this topic is pretty split, so if you like cold water, go for it.  If you can’t stand cold water, just go with room temperature water.   Don’t use the temperature of the water as an excuse to avoid it.   Drink more first and then worry about the temperature.
 

3) Get more essential fats
Essential fats are something many, many people are lacking in today’s world.  Plus they are involved in virtually every process and cell in the body!    Your body NEEDS them (hence the “essential” part).  Hunger is the main way the body signals you to get more nutrients (both macro and micronutrients).
The downside is that the world we live in today has non-essential fats readily accessible.  You can eat all the non-essential trans fats you want, but they will do nothing to increase the essential ones and only screw things up more!
A good source?

One of the best sources of essential fats is kril oil.  Krill or fish oil may also help with body composition too and increase muscle mass.
 

4) Exercise
Exercise is a good thing!  It changes your mood and I say this all the time:  you will never regret working out after.  So many people only choose to exercise so that they can eat what they want.  That’s not doing anything to help you shrink your waistline!  Don’t exercise to burn off that donut.

Exercise is the main way create a fat burning machine even at rest!  Give your body a donut in that process and you’ve just slowed down all functions in your body.
Most people nowadays spend most of their time seated.  Even when they exercise, it is for a small portion of their day; so we need to maximize that time by prioritizing full body exercises. Not only will this burn a ton of calories, it will work to add more muscle.  More muscle literally pulls fats and carbs out of the blood to be burned.  Your resting metabolic rate is your primarily caloric burn, so you want to have a fast, high horsepower motor.
Another benefit from exercise is related to up-regulation of the glucose transport receptors that allow glucose to enter into a cell.   (HOLD ON – DON’T FALL ASLEEP HERE)!  These receptors are located in fat and muscle tissue.   This protein is expressed only in muscle and fat cells – the major tissues in the body that respond to insulin.   This leads us into point 5…..
 

5) Eat Low Glycemic Foods to Control Insulin Throughout the Day
I’m sure you have read about this topic many times and scratched your head or fallen asleep.   But our bodies are designed to regulate bodily functions through hormones like GH, testosterone, estrogen, leptin, and neuropeptides.
While these are very important,  there are 2 key questions.
1) Do we have any direct control over them?
2) What are the main effects?
Out of these key questions we find that insulin is a major regulator hormone, and we do maintain some control over it.
Think of insulin as the “fuel selector switch” in the body.
High levels of insulin = storage mode (think of people with type 2 diabetes).
This can be storing carbs in muscle and live tissue as glycogen, or storing more fat around those love handles you hate.
The opposite works to our favor, though, as low levels of insulin = fat burning (enhanced fat metabolism).   Everything that you eat will result in some release of insulin, but we want to keep the overall response as low as possible by sticking with more proteins like meat, fish, egg, lots of non-starchy vegetables, and essential fats.
 

6) Spike insulin
You’re probably thinking I just made a typo after dicussing how important it is to control insulin.  Nope.  I still want you to keep insulin at a low level during the day overall but the one time to increase insulin temporarily is RIGHT before training since it may help enhance carbohydrate metabolism.
When you are lifting weights, your body is fueled primarily by carbs.  Remember that when insulin is high, it pushes the fuel selector switch towards carbohydrate metabolism which is great right before a strength training session.
Have a protein and carb drink about 30-60 minutes pre-training.  In addition to temporarily increasing insulin, it also helps increase muscle protein synthesis where you are literally adding proteins to muscle tissue so they are bigger and stronger.  Remember, we want to build a huge engine to burn more calories even at rest.
 

So as you know, hunger can be a vicious enemy and you are now equipped with 6 tips to beat it into submission.    Go practice them and send me feedback and your results with it.

Discipline and Co-parenting

Disciplining children can be hard enough as it is in a traditional family.  But add divorce, joint custody and getting remarried to the equation and it makes it even more difficult.

The girl’s father was very lazy, nothing bothered him and it took pulling teeth and ultimatums to get him to lift a finger.  Now I’m in a relationship that is quite the opposite:  Frank does things way before I even need to ask.  The problem with this type of personality though is that he is ‘Johnny on the Spot’ when it comes to my girls and the proper discipline.

I’m from the school that no one disciplines your children except their own parents (unless of course they’re staying at someone else’s home and the parents aren’t around). 

Frank is from the school that anyone can and should take matters into their own hands.  [I don't mean literally.  Neither one of us has never laid a hand on any of the kids.]

For example, this just happened the other day, Frank and I stayed up way later than we normally do watching movies and then the following morning Frankie woke up and we didn’t hear him cry.  Kaitlyn’s room is right next to his so she went in his room, took him out of his crib and brought the baby into her room to play with the idea that she was helping us out. 

Me, being the lover of all things sleep, loved this.  I’ve allowed her to do this in the past, either by me asking her to go get him or vice versa so I’ve seen her take him out of the crib many times and she’s never had a problem.  Plus, if she had a hard time taking him out and accidentally hurt his legs or something he would not hesitate to cry.  But that scenario has never happened.

So I wake up with Frank walking into our room with the baby and he said “Did you know Kaitlyn takes the baby out of the crib?”  I said yes and thought that would be the end of it.  He then says “I don’t want her taking him out of the crib unless she asks us first and we say its ok”.  To which I replied ok and went back to sleep.

The next day as we’re all sitting around the table having lunch and Kaitlyn tells Frank something funny that happened that morning and Frank asked if she got the baby out of the crib.  Her and I both said yes.  He got pretty upset and said he didn’t want her to do it anymore.  I told him I recalled that he didn’t want her to do it without getting permission first.  He then said no, he doesn’t want her doing it at all.  He explained that he doesn’t feel she’s strong enough and didn’t think it was a good idea.  Then I got upset that he was doing this in front of the children and not allowing me a say in this.  I explained that if the baby was getting hurt he would cry as she was pulling him out of the crib, etc.

The most frustrating aspect of all of this is that he and I (like all parents) are supposed to be a united front.  So we can’t argue about it in front of the children.  But at the same time, pressing issues need to be dealt with immediately so the kids understand the consequences of their actions right away.

The other reason this hit home a little too much is because just a couple weeks ago, the girl’s father told me that the girls tell him that I do ‘whatever Frank says’.  This absolutely boggled my mind, first, because supposedly it came from the girls and second, I do not do as I’m told.  I never have.  So this was a complete shocker.  Now I know that my ex loves to say stuff to get under my skin and he never has a nice thing to say about Frank but the thing that cut to the core of me was wondering if that was really the girl’s perception of me?  Now I know they’re only 7 and 6 but still.  He also told me that the girls tell him that I make Frank his dinner and his drinks.  I told my ex that this is coming from our children and that I make dinner and get drinks for everyone.  I also added that I used to make dinner and drinks for him and I too when we were together.  It was then that he realized what I was saying (or at least pretended to).

So after this heated moment at the dinner table all of these thoughts started running through my mind.  And all I kept wondering was what the girls were thinking.  So since Frank raised his voice I decided to raise mine.  I told him “I did not appreciate him talking to me that way, especially in front of the children and I wanted an apology.”  He started to apologize right then but I said I wasn’t done yet.  I then said “if you have a problem with how I do things around here talk to me about it behind closed doors where we can resolve it between the two of us.”  He told me (in front of the children) that I was right and that he was sorry… and then everyone was silent for the next few minutes.

Now this isn’t, of course, the least or worst of examples.  It was just the most recent.  We’ve always had this problem about discipline.  He thinks I’m not consistent enough and I think he’s too harsh.  We’ve been to plenty of parenting classes due to horrendous allegations by my ex where we learned that you have to tell a child 2000 times each behavior you’re trying to correct. 

Last month, my youngest daughter got all her toys taken away by Frank because he’s had to tell her too many times to pick up her toys after she’s done playing with them.  And he did this when I wasn’t home.  Now I understand that there should have been some form of consequence but I thought taking away all her toys was way over the top.  I also don’t think that he, being the soon-to-be-Stepdad, should be the disciplinarian.  And many counselors and other people in the field we’ve spoken to agree with me on that.

But he disagrees.  He doesn’t believe he should’ve waited til I got home to let me handle it.

Anyways, the point of me sharing this is to try and figure out if I’m alone in this.  I can’t be.  But does every blended family household go through this?  Or anything remotely similar?  Did anyone grow up in a broken home?  What were your experiences?  How would you have handled either scenario differently?