How can a Nutrition and Lifestyle Coach help you to manage and lose weight in Singapore: Part 1

Dieting, exercise and personal trainers. Are these the common images that come to mind when you want to manage and lose weight? Maybe you’ve tried a few diets but struggle with the motivation and the weight returns after the wheels came off? Maybe you hit the gym for a while but didn’t keep it up or, most likely, didn’t see any beneficial results in the first place? Maybe you’ve tried all of the above, had some success, but have now hit a plateau? Maybe you’re struggling to lose that abdominal fat around your mid section no matter what you do? Whether you want to lose just a few kilograms or 20 kilograms hiring the services of a Nutrition and Lifestyle Coach is likely to be the key decision you make in order to manage and lose weight permanently in Singapore.

In the first of this two part article we’ll look at how our Nutrition and Lifestyle Coaches can help you optimise The 10 Elements of Health in order to get down to your ideal body weight. If you have already read the first part you can find the second part here.

When it comes to managing and losing weight physical exercise is far less important than most people are led to believe. In fact, in many cases it can be downright detrimental. Why? Well take running for example. Humans were designed over hundreds of thousands of years to sprint, lift heavy occasionally, walk a hell of a lot but not run. When you run for long periods of time two things happen. Firstly, your body goes into stress-survival mode because it thinks you’re running away from a tiger for 45 minutes, this raises your cortisol levels and prioritises the body’s storage of visceral fat. This is a genetic self-defence mechanism to coat your abdominal organs in a protective layer of fat so they’ll have emergency fuel when they need it. Secondly, your brain will think to itself, “if this joker is going to go out and do this again tomorrow we’d better make sure he gets more fuel onboard”, so it will ramp up production of your hunger hormones thus, increasing your desire to eat more. Essentially your desire for food will match your energy output forcing you to re-feed to fill up the energy gap you’ve just created. And if that energy deficit is satiated with more junk food then that’s really not going to do you any favours. Gary Taubes does an excellent job of proving this from the multitudes of scientific studies out there in his books: Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease¹ and Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It².

Also, if we look at this from a genetic and evolutionary standpoint out of the few hundred traditional hunter-gather societies still in existence today only 1 tribe, the Kalahari Persistence Hunters, actually run as part of their regular hunting routine.

OK this is a no brainer really so we’ll be brief on this point. You must fuel your body sensibly with real food such as pastured animals, wild fish, organic fruits, vegetables, tubers and quality fats. If you treat your body like a dustbin then you cannot expect to achieve the results you crave no matter how optimal your other lifestyle factors are. Feel free to grab a copy of our nutrition infographic on our contact us page for more information on making better food choices.

It is important not just to make healthier food choices but also to eat food that is in the right macronutrient proportions that are the most appropriate for you. There are 65,000 diet books on Amazon and if any of them actually worked then there would be no need for so many. Diets suck and don’t work - they just make you hungry and grumpy! What our Nutrition and Lifestyle Coaches do is help you understand your body and what it needs, we help you make better choices that do not require exhaustive amounts of willpower and we utilise techniques such as metabolic typing to help fine tune your nutritional needs to create self-empowerment.

If you'd like to know where are some of the best places in Singapore to shop for healthy foods, please visit our Singapore Healthy Shopping Food Guide. 

This might not seem very intuitive at first but is probably one of the most overlooked bodily inputs when it comes to achieving optimal health. A normal breath should be a deep diaphragmatic belly breath where the air is drawn into the belly by the contraction of the diaphragm, creating a vacuum in the chest cavity which sucks air into it. Unfortunately many of us tend to breathe incorrectly often by breathing into the chest first which results in shorter, shallower breaths. Also food intolerances, particularly gluten and dairy amongst Singaporeans⁴, can cause inflammation of the nasal lining resulting in restricted nasal breathing or or mouth breathing.

These poor breathing patterns not only result in reduced oxygenation of the body at a cellular level but also create a minor stress response. Now consider that the average person takes about 23,000 breaths per day then that’s 23,000 minor stress responses per day adding up to major chronic stress. This is because the shallow breaths tell the body that we're in a fear state. Remember that the body treats stress in exactly the same way irrespective of whether it is emotional (i.e. fear), physical (i.e. poor diet and movement) or environmental stress (i.e. toxins). It all gets dumped in the same “stress” bucket and results in:

• Increased blood sugar resulting in weight gain
• Increased insulin resistance making it harder to get glucose to get into cells and resulting in weight gain
• It makes you hungrier and crave sweets resulting in weight gain
• It reduces your ability to burn fat resulting in weight gain
• And finally disrupts your HPA Axis, creates hormonal imbalances resulting in weight gain

Levitise’s Nutrition and Lifestyle Coaches have a number of different techniques at our disposal to identify and correct faulty breathing mechanics and whether they are caused by poor posture, intolerances, bad habits or something else.