I need to loose some weight. Okay, lots of weight. I’ve changed some of my eating habits (at least become more aware of them), and I’d like to begin some aerobic activity, preferably done in my home.
Does anyone have any suggestions for workout videos? Ones to avoid? Ones that worked really well? Ones that the host/hostess didn’t act like a cheerleader on speed? (No offense to any posting cheerleaders.)
there are these new hula-hoops that are heavier. Even I can do them ( I can work the light plastic ones. They are supposed to butn fat.
Brisk walking is great.
And eat a balanced diet, with lots of wwater
I managed to lose 30 pounds in a year just by doing a few simple dietary rules.
Eat your meals according to healthiness order. I.e., if you have a steak and veggies, eat the veggies before starting on the steak.
You may have a prohibition against leaving food on the plate. If so, squelch it. Learn to feel when you’re not really hungry anymore and stop eating then.
No soda. 1 glass of milk and 1 glass of OJ at breakfast, but otherwise I drank lots of water.
Finally, try to be aware of the calorie counts of what you eat. I’ve found that keeping a count is less important than being generally aware of how much you’ve consumed. And remember to double-check portion size.
Watch out for things that you consume that have a lot of empty calories. Like if you drink several glasses of juice a day, that can add a lot of calories b/c of added sugars (depends on the kinds of juice, obviously). If you don’t feel like you can give up certain things right away, try mixing them. I gave up juice by mixing it w/ water and cutting down the amount of juice gradually. Now when I drink juice alone it tastes really sweet to me, so I rarely do it.
Same thing can be done for things like pasta dishes. Instead of having a big plate of spaghetti with sauce, replace half the spaghetti with steamed veggies like squash, zucchini, or broccoli. With the sauce, you can hardly notice the difference, and you end up eating half the pasta w/ more vegetables.
Also, this is a mistake a lot of people make. Don’t completely deprive yourself of things you love, just avoid eating them all the time. Completely cutting something you really love out of your diet only makes you want it that much more, and you might end up bingeing on it.
Thats all I can think of for now! Good luck to you, losing weight can be hard sometimes.
General advice: try not to make radical changes in the hopes of reaching X weight by Y date; you’ll just make yourself miserable and most likely gain everything right back as soon as you finish. Instead, if you make small incremental changes that you can see yourself doing for life, you may not lose much weight to begin with but you’ll do much better in the long run. It sounds like you’re already well on that track.
As for exercise, having some muscle built up will enable you to burn more calories even when you’re resting, so some regular weight training can be very helpful. If you’re doing this at home alone, though, don’t try anything too heavy. For aerobics, I’ve had a lot of fun with some of the Playstation games that involve moving your whole body to play the game. My favorite is one called Martial Beat 2, in which you strap sensors to your wrists and ankles and do an aerobic/kickboxing workout while it measures how many calories you’ve burned and keeps track of your progress in a diary. It may not be available in America, but there are other similar games out there.
OTC pharmacology can help a bit.
Start taking green tea, calcium, chromium picolinate and a multivitamin. also increase your fiber and protein intake.
A few months ago, I started out trying the low-carb thing. While this, anecdotally, seems to work for lots of people to burn their fat, it didn’t seem to work for me at all. So, thinks Dogzilla, maybe I need to move around more. So I started taking a brisk 30-minute walk every day after work, continuing to watch the carbs, but not eliminate them completely. Still not much weight lost.
Well, thinks Dogzilla, perhaps I’m still not exercising enough. So I surf around Amazon for a while until I find a nice beginner’s yoga tape. Now I take my 30-minute walk and do yoga for 40 minutes a day, right after work. Still no weight lost.
Finally, I started keeping a food diary. And guess what? Turns out I’ve been replacing my carb calories with fat calories :eek: ! As a vegetarian, it’s been very hard to get enough protein as well. So now I’m all about packing in protein calories and trying to balance out carbs and fats – and continuing to exercise every day.
Mind you, I’ve done all this, not necessarily to lose weight, but because I quit smoking, I needed to find healthy habits to replace the bad one. I highly suggest a very carefully balanced diet of fresh foods – avoid the middle of the grocery store. Don’t eat anything processed – nothing frozen, canned or otherwise. Avoid refined sugars, drink loads of water and keep trying out different kinds of exercise until you find something you can stand to do. I also recommend some of those dieting sites where they have chat rooms and message boards for ideas and support. Frequently, those sites will offer a lot of recipes as well.
Personally, I think it’s all about the exercise and reading every single label of everything before you put anything in your mouth. I wasn’t aware of how many fat calories I was still getting until I kept a log and then the patterns jumped out at me.
Quickly reading the title, I thought you wanted help burning your flat. Leaving evidence of arson and/or insurance fraud on a message board didn’t seem like such a great idea. I will go back over here and read with interest. Looking to burn a spare tire. The wife says situps won’t really help, since it will be building muscle under the fat, not necessarily getting rid of the fat.