If you can keep food at your office and have a microwave, oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins is a pretty good, filling breakfast.
Also, if you have a hard time breaking the mayo habit, there are light and fat-free mayos. On a sandwich with some mustard I find them acceptable.
Also, my guess is that the change to the sedentary job is driving this at least as much, probably more, than any change in diet. Can you make a point of walking on your lunch hour? Walk to do errand on evenings and weekends?
Yeah, 5 minutes twice per day is not much at all. If you can increase that to 15 minutes twice per day that would be a whole lot better.
It’s worth it to carve out at least 15-30 minutes per day at least 3 time per week for more vigorous exercise. Even that is on the low end of what you should do.
I’ve found that having digital cable is a huge benefit for me. The On Demand stuff has some great and fun workouts.
Your body composition is the result of your lifestyle. You’re going to have to make changes in how you live if you want to make changes in how you look. It’s that simple. No matter how you feel about the way you eat and exercise now, the body you have now is the one they have created.
I’m in agreement with everyone that says you need to eat smarter. It isn’t just about your body fat percentage. It’s about your health. You can’t expect to remain healthy over the long run on bad nutrition. Start by eating more fresh foods. They’re cheaper than the stuff in boxes and actually have real nutrients. You can eat really well on 1800 calories a day if you eat mostly fresh foods.
Middleage spread is the least of your worries. Middleage bypass surgery would be something more worrisome to me if I didn’t exercise every day, eat right, and have my blood checked every year. Your health is easy to negelect when you’re young and have plenty of it to spare. That’s going to change as you get older. If you care enough to have a retirement plan for your finances, you need to have one for your health and developing good eating and exercise habits is definitely part of that program.
One way to accomplish this, if you use public transportation to and from work, is to get into the habit of getting off one stop early to force yourself to walk the extra ten to twenty minutes (briskly, of course).
Okay, the lard reference was a joke - my friends and I use ‘lard’ as a reference to something fatty. Perhaps loses something in the translation.
I never said Cheese didn’t have good things in it, I was merely pointing out, to someone who’s worried about his weight, that cheese is very fattening and not a grreat thing to eat for lunch ‘every day’.
Ugh…enough with the BMI Calculator. I personally think any tool that attempts to standardize body weight norms is working off of a faulty premise.
I’m 5’10", have a small body-fat%, am in pretty good shape, and weigh 195#. According to the BMI, I’m obese, with a good chance of turning into a human lard-depository.
I like the Quaker Breakfast Oatmeal Bars… having said that, I haven’t looked at the stats on those in a while…I must have decided they were OK at one point. Delicious, and in bar form!
Once you get your diet modified (no cheese and Mayo), try the 6 meals per day thing. Obviously, the portions have to come down slightly, but you’ll find yourself to be not hungry. Don’t skip meals.