Well another new year is upon us which means millions of us in the modern world of never ending waistline expansion have sworn to shave off a few of those flabby pounds we are lugging around. One of the more popular posts I had was the one I did about my process of losing weight. As is I started a weight loss program in feburary of 2004 when I weighed some 280 pounds. Currently I am at 230. I have been as low as 212. I got to 230 for the first time somewhere around sept 2004 so I have kept off 50 pounds or so for more than a year now.
Now I plan on starting phase two. If it works I will get down around a healthy weight of 180 or so. 230 is still way to much for me (5'10" and change). I will be doing nothing really different from what I did the last time. They keys are.
1) First and foremost I must consume fewer calories than I consume. No matter what you think you know, in the end weight loss boils down to your body metabolising more energy than you give it due to a caloric deficit. Perhaps there are pills out there that help with this but as yet I have seen nothing which personally appeal to me.
2) see 1.
If you want nutrition help go check out nutritionist websites. You honestly could loose weight eating big macs if you only ate a couple bites. It wouldn't be healthy. But you could do it. The better bet is to eat a good mix of foods. Elimination diets like Atkins can be very effective in the short run but ultimately are unsustainable. In the meantime your body develops severe reactions to the lack of certain types of food by hoarding whatever it does receieve once you begin consuming them again making it extremely hard to maintain any losses you get from such a process.
3) Whatever you do must be sustainable. For roughly the past two years my habits have changed a great deal from what they once were. Before the last two years the only times in my life when I had lost weight were due to extreme levels of activity. Such as Collegiate Baseball or Hiking on the Appilachian Trail. Without long term changes in my eating habits there is no way I could ever have lost weight without resorting to similar activities with incredible levels of caloric burn exceeding my prodigious ability to consume food when left unchecked. The times over the last two years when my weight has fluctuated back up have been due to relapses in my old eating habits.
Just remember, if what you are doing now wasn't bad in terms of weight gain... you wouldn't have packed on those pounds in the first place. Excercise is great for you. But if you loose weight through excercise alone it becomes a permanent requirement as long as you want to keep that weight off. Soon as you stop the pounds will start packing back on... and due to the fact that any losses had to be achieved due to a caloric deficit (which by the way is just a fancy term for starvation) it means your body will pack em back on faster than it did the first time around as a reaction to the starvation routine. Once you attain a desired weight it can take months to establish your bodys equilibrium so that it dosn't continually try and hold onto every calorie like it might be its last which is the pain in the ass side effect of weight loss.
Again this is a bit of a double whammy with excercise. Why ? Lets say you cut your intake and up your activity level with a daily workout to loose weight. At the end of the 'diet' You start eating like you did before and stop excecising. Well your body is now lighter which means it expends less energy than it did before which means your caloric glut is far greater than it was when you were hefty... AND you stop your daily excecise routine which just means that many more unaccounted for calories to turn into fat stores. BLAM BLAM you be fat again. Most times if you proceed like this with the excercise as a temporary activity you actually will find you have to cut your food intake even more once you are at your desired weight once you cease the excercise activity if you want to successfully maintain your new weight. Serious bummer.
Don't get me wrong. Excercise is very good for you. But its roll in weight loss is very misunderstood on the whole. General rule of thumb if you ask me should be that any excecise you undertake for weight loss should be viewed as a permanent addition to your general life routine. Otherwise even once you manage to loose weight you are going to have to accomodate further alterations to your eating habits to maintain your weight loss in the event you cease the excercises you used while losing weight. The more changes you make... the less likely your long term success will be.
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