Visit a nearby newsstand and I am sure that you will come across some magazines promoting miraculous weight-loss formulas. Sometimes they turn to the mythic properties of fruit, like with the “Lemon Diet” or with the “Papaya Diet.” Other times they just create special nutritional plans, say the “Low-Carb Diet.” There are also the magic workouts and exercises that are supposed to reduce your belly circumference by 10 centimeters in three days – while toning your muscles….
Come on!
The reality is that there are no shortcuts or easy ways to get in good shape. Sorry, but someone needed to tell you this.
Now, don’t get me wrong, you won’t not need to starve for days or perform some Spartan training activities. As long as you get conscious about what you are doing, you will see the results. Below you will find the four principles that you need to keep in mind in your weight-loss journey.
1. Forget About Diets
People that go from diet to diet never reach a stable weight, let alone a good shape. The reason is quite simple: diets are, by their very nature, temporary. You can’t expect to eat properly for two or three weeks and fix your weight problems for the rest of the year.
I know it is encouraging to read that you could lose 20 pounds in 2 weeks if you were to eat this and that. It is encouraging but not true. They might even work in the short term, but after a couple of months you will recover what you have lost.
Many of these diets are not even targeted at fat loss. They promise that you will lose weight, but the caloric cut is so drastic that you end up losing many pounds of water and muscle mass along the way, and that is not what you should be aiming for.
If diets are not the solution, what is then? Proper nutrition, and we’ll cover this on the next principle.
2. Proper Nutrition
If you want to keep your weight and fat percentage under control, you will need to learn the basics of nutrition. Once you learn them, you will be able to eat healthy throughout the year.
Buy a nutrition book on some library and read it. At the very minimum you want to know how your body works, what sources of energy it uses, what are the roles of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, minerals and vitamins.
You will need to shift your paradigm about food. Many people, especially those with weight problems, tend to see food as a source of pleasure. They eat what they like, when they want to, and in whatever proportions it might take to satiate them.
This is not the correct approach. You should see food first and foremost as something functional. You will eat because food is the fuel for your body. If you adopt this mentality, you will start eating what you need, when you need, and in the correct amount.
It might sound extreme, but even with this approach you will be able to have pleasure while eating. It is just a matter of getting used to it. Once you detox yourself from the junk food you will see that an apple can be just as tasty as a sugar-jammed apple pie.
Needless to say that if you are trying to lose weight you will need to have a caloric deficit in place. That is, you will need to eat less calories than what your body needs to keep his weight. Ideally you want to jot down some numbers and calculate how much you should be eating. There are plenty of resources online that can help you here.
3. Physical Exercise
Eating healthy and having a caloric deficit will only take you half the way. The other key factor is physical exercise.
Low intensity cardio is the corner stone of any weight loss program. That is because the higher the intensity of the exercise, the lower the amount of free fat acids in your bloodstream (free fat acids come from your stored fat through the lipolysis process, and they are burned for energy).
So far so good, but what is considered low intensity cardio? The easiest way to determine is to find your max heart rate (220 – age = max heart rate) and calculate 40% and 60% of it. That is the range you should aim for when doing low intensity cardio. Suppose you are 20 years old. This means that your max heart rate is around 200, so your range for low intensity cardio is from 80 heart beats per minute to 120 heart beats per minute.
Pragmatically speaking, what activities can you do as low intensity cardio? There are many of them, from walking to swimming and riding a bicycle; just find something that you like to do.
Start with two weekly sessions, and build your way up. The same theory goes for the duration, find what you are capable of doing in the beginning (without feeling too tired), and build your way up. It might be 10, 20 or 30 minutes, it doesn’t matter as long as you make progress along the way.
4. Discipline and Perseverance
You can start eating healthy and exercising properly, but unless you stick doing it regularly, the results won’t appear (if they do, they won’t last).
Discipline and perseverance are key here.
You could find a friend to exercise together, a mentor to guide you throughout the way, or even write down your progress day after day, like this person has done on his fat man weight loss blog. Do whatever it takes to stay on track.
That is pretty much all you need.
It won’t be easy, but very few worth things in life are easy to achieve, right?
Good luck!
Tags: Weight Loss
This misses the one most important factor of loosing weight. Changing your appetite. Consider foods addiciting, just like tobacco. Your desire for the next dose is caused by the previous. Get off all animal products (milk, poultry, fish, pork, beef) anything with processed sugar (soda, cakes, etc.), fat oils (vegtable, olive, etc.), coffee .. consider each food one at a time. Do you need to eat it or not? Eat grains (rice, barley, etc.), beans, vegtables and fruit. Eat all you want although be careful with the fruit. In three weeks most of the addiction will be out of your body and you’ll have started dropping down to your correct weight. Your body knows what it needs and witt call for it. Just don’t over fuel it with artificially high calorie density. Some people call this vegan. I call it PR awareness. There is great profit in selling addiction, processing and long shelf life. It pays for one large amount of spin. Defiy it.
p.s. I lost 35 lbs doing this two years later there is no sign of it coming back.
Hi-
Can you recommend some smart books on nutrition?
Thanks.
Weight Loss = Eat Less + Move More
Take in 3,500 calories above what you burn, you will gain a pound. Take in 3,500 calories less then what you burn, you will lose a pound.
Seriously…how complicated do we have to make it?
FOUR WORDS : GASTRIC BYPASS.
I like it, it is not rocket science, but with the obesity levels in America, it is certainly not easy.
article reprinted
This could also be referred to as common sense.
I disagree with most of these. I would revise them as follows:
1. All diets are valid and all will help you lose weight IF you eat less calories than your body needs. It doesn’t matter if it’s Weight Watchers or Atkins or vegan or cabbage soup! As long as you eat less than your body burns each day, less than your basal metabolic weight (BMR), you will lose weight. BMR can be calculated here: http://www.caloriesperhour.com/index_burn.php.
2. We don’t know what makes us healthy, so any diet advice around nutrition should be viewed with much skepticism. Just about every nurition study available has another study to contradict it. The truth is that we don’t know what makes us healthy and most of what we think we know about nutrition is likely bogus or overly generalized. Most people who try to eat “nutritiously” revert to their formal eating habits, so any nutrition-focused approach is likely to fail. Nutrition-focused dieting should NOT be followed. Your body is an omnivorous machine. You can use just about any mix of carbs, fats, and proteins. Eat what you want, just eat less than your body needs if you want to lose weight.
3. Exercise does not help people lose weight, although it could help them maintain weight loss. Most people who turn to exericise for weight loss when they’re not naturally inclined to it will fail, so while exercise might be recommended, it is not essential to dieting. The essential point is caloric deficency, or eating less than your body needs. Can you eat more if you burn more by exercising? Yes! And guess what: that’s exactly what you will do, gaining almost nothing from exercise.
4. Discipline and perserverence: both will cause people to quit. Instead, people need to learn how to respond to the adversities of dieting: how to eat on schedule, how to eat slowly, how to recover from failure, how to differentiate between hunger and cravings, knowing that hunger pains last 2 minutes, not 20, etc. The Beck Diet, which is a psychological approach to dieting, does this. I highly recommended it. It’s not one of those diets that chirp the usual nutrition, exercise, perserverence nonsense. These diets always fail. Beck helps you understand why you fail and how to self-correct.
Eat less than your body needs until you lose the weight you need to loss, then eat as much as your body needs to maintain it. Eat whatever you want. The get Beck to help you master self-defeating psychological behaviors.
Lol fat.
The problem is, is that no one wants to here their fat because they don’t know what is healthy and do not exercise. In my personal, not professional, opinion we should cut off health care to Obese people until they modify their lifestyles. They put an unfair, and unecessary burden on our medical system. Let them die from their own vices
Sorry let me clarify, people do not want to hear they are fat because they don’t know what is healthy and do not exericise, and because once they learn this, they do nothing to change
I couldn’t agree more. I will try this out and report progress in my blog
I disagree when you say:
—
People that go from diet to diet never reach a stable weight, let alone a good shape. The reason is quite simple: diets are, by their very nature, temporary. You can’t expect to eat properly for two or three weeks and fix your weight problems for the rest of the year.
They might even work in the short term, but after a couple of months you will recover what you have lost.
—
Diet is a general word and not a synonym of weight loss…diet is an eating habit with a certainly goal. (Maintenance, weight loss, health, blood pressure, lowering cholesterol, etc…)
Take for example the Mediterranean diet…it’s not a weight loss diet. It’s a lifetime healthy living diet.
I can agree with what you say if you’d wrote “Weight loss diet”.
Yes tip n°1 is right for fad diets like Low carbs, Atkins, South Beach and so on…
Other wise great article especially for the n°4 tip. I think it’s the basis of healthy living.
Finally, someone who isn’t trying to blame it on other things. Fact of the matter is, people today eat too much shit. There is literally a fast food join every half mile around where I live. That coupled with the fact no one bothers exercising any more.
ah, this didnt tell me much. eat healthy, work out, wait for results.
These statements really sound like they’re coming from someone who has never had a weight problem. I have had weight and food issues all of my life, and these comments just sound like the same stupid record playing over and over again.
I have lost significant amounts of weight in my life in only two ways:
1. Low caloric intake and LOTS (2-3 hours per day) of exercise (this definitely works, but it also kinda sucks for the obvious reasons).
2. Low carbohydrate intake, with normal/moderate exercise. And everyone I know (I realize this is anecdotal, but I’ve got a link to scientific evidence below) who has changed to this type of eating has had outrageously good results.
So your advice here (to fat people [I can say that, since I’m fat], who really like to eat) is to “find a book on nutrition” (NOTE: there are THOUSANDS, many written by snake oil salesmen) to change WHAT you eat, and also change the AMOUNT you eat. Let me tell you, that advice SUCKS.
Here is the most recent article about low carb diets that I’ve read: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E2D61F3EF934A35754C0A9649C8B63
From a Fatty’s perspective (that’s what *I* like to call myself), this is a MUCH better approach, with MUCH better results. Now all I’ve got to do is restrict what I eat to one group that I already love (I can eat just about all the meat you put in front of me). I don’t have to change my psychology of eating very much at all: if I’m sad, I can binge to my heart’s content on protein and fat, AND THAT’S OK. I know that I’ll lose weight and get healthier over time.
Sorry about the rant. I have no affiliation with the NYT or anyone they interviewed. I just think this kind of post took absolutely no research, and that you’re really uninformed about the thoughts and feelings of the people who would be reading your blog.