The Naturale Yogi

This is the follow up to my previous post wherein I enumerated a couple of important things I’ve learned these past few months about fitness, fatloss and proper nutrition. I would like to break them down one by one for you guys and hopefully this inspires you to start your own wellness journey with hope, excitement, and curiosity. But first I’d like to say that each person is unique and as long as you are healthy and happy in your body what anyone else says, including me, is secondary to how you feel as a person.

1. Most calorie calculators online are inaccurate.

Yes, calorie calculators are inaccurate and they could lead to more harm than good by suggesting you eat too little calories than you should that causes your metabolism to slow down. The proper and most accurate way to calculate your calories is get the daily average of 3 to 7 days of calories that you would normally eat in a week. That would be a more accurate picture of where your current metabolism is at, and both the No Meat Athlete and Petite Power programs stand by this idea.

2. Fatloss does not always equate to weightloss.

What people talk about when wanting to lose weight is actually losing fat and not just weight. You can lose weight and it would only come from water weight and that is also why a person could easily gain 3 lbs in a day and that’s just due to water retention. What people want is real weight loss from fat in the body. A person may stay at the same weight on the scale but could look different because the body mass composition has changed, meaning the same 5 lbs that used to be made up of fat which is higher in volume is now 5 lbs of muscle which is denser and lower in volume. Some people even gain weight but look leaner so the scale is not your friend for real fatloss.

3. Dieting should be the last thing to consider.

Ten years ago I followed every article and show on TV on fitness and weightloss and blindly followed the lowest calorie possible which is 1,200 calories for a woman. This turned out to be wrong and in fact caused my metabolism to slow down. I was and still am a physically active person and between that and school I was breaking down my own body by not eating enough calories thus my body held on to the remaining fat that has always been with me through all the various fatloss attempts I have gone through. I remember each time I get nearer to my goal weight I’d get too tired and hungry that I don’t really get to my goal and I just stay where I was during the plateau and then slowly my weight would increase until ten years later I’m 20 lbs heavier although I don’t look that much bigger but that would be due to some recomposition because of my continued practice of resistance training yoga. The Petite Power Method teaches to stay at maintenance calories as start lifting weights to create that muscle and boost the metabolism.

4. Having a high resting metabolic rate is key to permanent fatloss.

Think of it this way we all burn calories even when we do nothing. We spend an hour or two training/exercising and a few minutes walking here and there and for us office folks we spend most of our time on our bums working. If you think of it this way the majority of our time in spent doing no hard physical activity and that is the majority of our daily calorie expenditure, just by sitting and breathing. We want that time to be spent in burning the maximum amount of calories so the only way we maximize calorie burn while doing nothing is to have our bodies actually be able to do that and only by increasing muscle mass would our bodies maximize that because our muscles need calories to repair when damaged

5. Rest and recovery is as, if not more, essential than the training itself.

In my late teens are early twenties I have been notorious with over exercising especially with cardiovascular focused exercises. I used to run a lot and I did enjoy it until I got injured and I cannot run that long or that far without experiencing pain in my foot. I often neglected rest days in between runs in my training plan and would opt to do some HIIT or any cardio that I thought would increase fat burn. It turns out that I was wrong because I wasn’t giving my body enough time to recover from those hard training days and I wasn’t training the other parts of my body in the way of lifting weights. I was very imbalanced and developed over use injury. Today I consider rest days as equal to training days and focus on foam rolling and easy stretches on at least 2 days in a week of training. Rest days are when the body actually starts building and repairing the muscles that broke down on training days and if given the time to recover I get back into the training with more energy to be able to perform every exercise with perfect form.

6. Weight lifting and resistance training is for shaping and muscle tone, not cardio.

Unless I’m training for a marathon I shouldn’t be too focused on cardio. Yes we need it but we don’t have to do long hours of it to lose fat. It could be incorporated to break through a plateau but that’s a whole different story, but for getting that balanced toned physique muscle hypertrophy is needed. Lifting weights is key to get that shape that we want because muscle is what gives that shape. I learned that as a petite woman doing long steady state cardio exercises would not serve me well because I would be breaking down my muscles instead of having it recover after shorter bursts of activity, so by building muscle it would increase my BMR and that would be the best thing for my already slow metabolism.