Losing 10 lbs--advice and encouragment needed

In My Humble Opinion
1

Spring is sprung. I’m switching out my clothes for the change in weather and have come to the unpleasant conclusion that the Winter Fat Fairy has paid me a visit to the tune of about 10 pounds. So those of you with success stories: how should I go about shedding the weight?

Pros:
-I’m in generally good health, except for the chub.
-My eating habits are pretty good (almost no fast food, lots of fruits/veggies, low meat consumption, though I do love me some cheese).
-I’ve already cut my soda pop intake to 3x per week, max.
-I think my timeline is realistic: in six months I want to be at my ideal weight.
-I’ve never been a dieter–I feel it’s better to eat your fill of good, healthful food than to starve yourself or count calories.
Cons:
-My job is sedentary. No hope for change there.
-I really, REALLY hate exercise. I hate getting up early, since I don’t sleep well anyway. I also resent giving up precious evenings to do something boring, painful, and sweaty.
-I don’t care for sports and don’t have the time to commit to a team anyway. I like hiking, but it’s hard to get away on the weekends.
-I’ve tried to build good fitness habits before, but they always fall apart. And I start small: “I’ll wake up 5 min early every day and do some stretches for a month before adding on.” I lasted three days.
-I’ve asked my PCP what to do, and she just says, “walk around!” Walking around is boring, especially given that I’m smack in the middle of a city. “Hey, there’s that same one tree within this one-mile radius! Woo!”
-I can’t get my girlfriends on board with me. Because I’m a naturally slender person and dress to hide the extra weight, they think I’m just being vain or “anorexic.” “Oh, you don’t need to lose weight, you’re a stick anyway!” But I know my body better than they do and I know I need to trim down, or at least tone up.

So how does a person who is anti-physical activity (and let’s face it, pretty lazy) learn to enjoy exercise, keep up the habit, and drop the pounds safely and permanently?

2

Wow, you sound exactly like me.

One thing that helps me (when I remember to do it) is to wear a pedometer. They’re cheap and it’s amazing how much it motivates me to walk more. You attach it to your waistband and it counts how mant steps you take each day. Your goal should be 10,000 steps each day. You’re pretty much guaranteed to get in better shape if you hit that mark. It took me a bit to get up to that many, but again, it really helped to have that little doodad count steps for me.

3

I’ve lost about 20 pounds since Xmas, just by cutting my portions. Also, I eat a light lunch now, as opposed to skipping it in favor of a bigger dinner. I haven’t done the exercise thing yet, as I apparently have a blockage in one of my coronary arteries, and the cardiologist has suggested I don’t exert myself too strenously until it’s resolved (which should be soon as I have a catheterization scheduled for Friday).

Walking a bit is good exercise – years ago when I worked in downtown LA, I’d walk for much of my lunch hour. In later years, I’d walk through the neighborhoods around my apartment in the Valley. Nowadays, I live and work in the suburbs of Atlanta, where there are no sidewalks, so walking’s a bit more difficult.

4

You don’t mention your usual means of transportation - car, bus, subway? Think about biking to work or walking to work. If you walk, you can use an iPod/mp3 player, discman, whatever, as a reward for the effort. Even if walking all the way is an impossibility, parking further from work might do the stunt. Biking is great, but I wouldn’t recommend the listening device - there’s too much going on that needs your attention.

It sounds like your diet is pretty much under control, it’s just a question of coming up with some way to increase your physical activity that’s interesting enough and gentle enough to be sustainable. You mention hiking, but what I think you’re after is something you can do often for short periods of time. Long periods of exercise once a week aren’t as effective, in my experience. Is swimming, canoing or rowing a possibility in your neck of the woods? The trick is to find something that isn’t ‘boring, painful and sweaty’ - leave that stuff to the masochists.

Good luck with it.

5

Agreed with the last poster - fun types of activity. Do you like dancing? Rollerskating/blading? Ice skating?

6

Portion control has been a big help for me.
My eyes were always bigger than my stomach and even when I was full I kept on eating just to finish the portion.
Now I find I don’t need the 12" sub, 6" is fine.
Half portions of pastas are fine.
If I have soda the small will do.
When splitting a pizza with my wife a small works good.
One scoop of ice cream rather than two.
The 1/4 pound burger is fine. Skip the 1/3 or 1/2 pounders.
A few fries won’t kill me, a basket of them will.

I used to think doing this I would always be hungry. But after a few days your stomach shrinks down and you’re not as hungry as you thought you were.

7

We’re not even in the same universe if you’re that stingy on the exercise front.

Anyway, in another thread the other day, someone posted a link to this excellent fitness page, which contains lots of tips for beginners, especially tips in how to get going and try to enjoy it.

8

I’ve given up soda completely–not even diet because I can’t stand the taste of it. I drink water or low-fat milk with everything and I don’t even miss soda now. I don’t know how much you love soda, but if you can cut down to once a week or wean yourself off completely, the benefits are enormous.

9

If you can get yourself to start exercising, you’ll probably sleep better. I think it’s important to start with small manageable goals. So if you don’t want to get up five minutes early, take five minutes at night to do some stretching. Or just take a walk around the block. Anything is better than nothing.

10

I was once advised that I could lose ten pounds of ugly fat by cutting off my head :slight_smile:

11

Several years ago I used maybe 4 months of a 15 month gym membership. My eating habits are fairly good, but like you I’m fairly sedentary - I found that eating okay meant that I looked okay, but I wanted a more toned look, so I joined the gym again.

I started again this year and have been going 3x a week on average and 6x the past couple of weeks. I found the biggest difference is having a gym buddy - someone who will motivate me to go even when I’m feeling blah, and someone I can socialise with before and after so it feels more like fun than work. But the workout itself? Ugh. Thank God for my iPod - I have a playlist of just power tracks to motivate me during my boring 30 minute run.

As you can tell, I’m not one of those people who loves going to the gym. I find sports boring too, but the gym has the advantage of allowing me to make my own schedule. I don’t enjoy exercise, but I enjoy what it does for my body.

What I do enjoy are the gym classes. There are step classes, yoga and pilates classes, crazy aerobic classes, dance aerobic classes, weights classes, etc. My gym buddy and I agree that the instructor and other participants make us to push a little further than we normally would, and it’s a good way to mix up your regular workout. There’s a stigma to classes cos they look like lame 80s aerobics and have mainly female participants, but they’re great if you have trouble self-motivating.

12

There’s a regular monthly weight loss thread but with search disabled and forums currently going back all of one page I couldn’t find this months…

My background - fairly active 37 year old male, I’ve lost approximately 40lbs and kept it off for over a year and seen a variety of benefits. I did it via Weight Watchers and just getting more exercise.

My personal feeling is that there is simply no magic to weight loss. Every single person knows what they need to do and it’s the same basic advice that any doctor will give you - eat a healthier diet, eat less overall and increase your activity level. The devil is of course in the details.

IANAD and you should of course talk to yours before making any big lifestyle changes but here’s my two cents:

Healthier eating - lots of fruits and veggies (the less-processed the better), whole grains (brown rice, whole wheat pasta and couscous, etc), lean proteins (chicken, fish, veggie proteins, lean beef), low-fat dairy, “good” fats. I really got rid of stuff like soda, chips, cookies and so on - it’s packed with calories and crap and personally I can eat a whole bucket of cookies if they are sitting around.

Sensible portions - portion control is tough, it took me a couple of weeks of paying attention to get into the groove. I’m not oversimplifying too much when I say that I don’t let myself feel starving and I don’t let myself feel stuffed.

Exercise - Walking is great however the real key is to find something that you enjoy doing that just happens to be exercise as well. Don’t worry about getting in an hour a day of vigorous weightlifting, that will seem like too much and just lead to failure. Take a walk at lunch. Use the stairs instead of the elevator. Do some gardening. Take the dog to the park. Go dancing. Take a yoga class. Don’t get bored, do different things. I like to walk and run and I found that getting an MP3 player made a huge difference.

Don’t necessarily focus on “losing weight” - you are making long-term changes to your overall lifestyle that will improve your HEALTH. Make sure your friends know that and see if maybe that gets them interested in joining you - if they don’t think it’s about dropping to size 0 but it’s about feeling more energized and healthy that’s more fun.

It’s a lot of little things and you just keep doing them - don’t miss a chance to be a little healthier; walk to the corner store instead of driving this time, have an apple instead of a cookie.

To throw a little math into things, a pound of body fat stores about 3500 calories, so if your weight is stable right now given your activity level and your eating habits, you’d need to generate a 3500 calorie deficit to burn off a pound, through a combination of diet and exercise. 500 calories per day would account for a pound a week (1-2lbs per week is the general recommendation for a safe & sustainable rate).

Not that hard - if you drink a can of soda and have a bag of chips or a candy bar each day as a snack, you can switch to something like sparkling water (or diet soda, personally I can’t stand the stuff but to each their own) and some fresh fruit or veggies (low caloric density - lots of bulk for a small amount of calories and you get the extra fiber and so forth) and probably cut 300+ calories per day right there. Walking a mile at any pace burns about 100 calories so take a short walk at lunch and do some other light physical activity and you’ll come up with another 200 calories per day. Bingo, that puts you on track for a pound a week by making some very small changes to your life.

Remember that it’s all about the long term. You didn’t put 10 lbs on in a week so it’s not coming off in a week - think a few months.

13

I appreciate all the helpful advice so far. To answer some of the questions:

I do drive to work although I’m close enough that I could bike. My problem is that my commute is right through the center of a very bike-unfriendly city. I think I would be taking my life in my hands. I also live in the desert, where it can get to be 100 °C in the summer, easily. Pee-yew.

I like the idea of a pedometer, since that takes the focus off of the time spent walking (“Ugh…I still have 10 minutes left to go on my walk”) and puts it on hitting the number. That seems more…well, not fun exactly, but at least quantifiable.

Valgard, you make a good point that showing my girlfriends that I’m more health-oriented than weight-oriented might help. But until then I’m stuck with “Why do you need to exercise? You’re not fat.” Which is extremely demotivating. My SO pays lip service to wanting to exercise, but he’s even less motivated than me.

Trunk, that’s a nice link. And I know there’s already plenty of helpful info here on the boards somewhere, but I can’t find any of it at the moment. (ahem) Thanks for posting that again. I understand the advice to keep it light, keep it fun…but honestly, no activities seem fun to me. I was never an athletic kid and I never learned to enjoy any physical activities. (Except one…) I know that’s my major weakness, but I’m at a loss as to how to change that.

So since I think I’ve done all the easy stuff (no junky snacks, good diet, decent portions), it really boils down to this: how do I learn to enjoy exercise? I really just don’t like even any of the “alternate” activities: pilates, dancing, swimming, whatever…it just isn’t fun to me. None of these things get me interested or excited.

My problem is that I can’t shake the feeling when I’m exercising that I’m doing something pointless and routine, and I already have plenty of that in my life. And yet I know millions of people are active and enjoy it…how do I become one of those people?

14

I put audiobooks on my mp3 player, and that’s a good distraction for me. If I pick a good book, I will look forward to listening to it, and that’s just the little push I need for motivation. Whenever Harry Potter books were released, I would go for 3 hour hikes just to keep listening!

I find it’s easier to keep it up once you’ve got some momentum, too. I’m trying for 6 days a week (of something), and that’s actually less of a burden than 3x. I’ve really had to push myself past all the reasonable excuses and just do it.

I’m also trying to lose 10lbs. I eat well and exercise a lot. It’s just not coming off… :frowning: I know, how encouraging. YMMV, hopefully.

15

Seven years ago I lost 10 pounds of post-baby flab by following what is sometimes called the Hellerman diet. (The name of the book is “The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet,” but it is simply terrible – written for people who think Good Housekeeping magazine is literature. Authors are Rachel and Richard Hellerman.) My husband lost 45 pounds. Both of us have mostly kept the weight off. It works.

And it is simple: two meals a day eat low-carb (perhaps an omelet with lots of veggies for breakfast; a chicken caesar salad without croutons for lunch) and for dinner, eat what you want as long as you consume it within a one-hour period and don’t have more than 1/3 of your meal from carbs. That last instruction is a little mysterious - 1/3 what? Calories? Volume? Weight? and one reason why I don’t recommend the book per se. However, the book will answer most of your questions about things like timing, snacking, etc. so I suppose you should read it if you decide to give the diet a try. But don’t come after me when your soul shrivels and dies from the terrible writing.

One nice thing about the diet is that it is very adaptable to whatever health rules you care to follow. A health freak could have an egg-white frittata with zucchini and broccoli cooked salt-free in a small amount of olive oil for breakfast, a lunch of grilled tofu and a huge pile of lemon-flavored string beans, and dinner of whole grain bread, turkey, and salad. A junk-food junkie could have bacon and scrambled eggs for breakfast, a hamburger with melted cheese for lunch, and KFC chicken, a giant pile of cole slaw and a candy bar for dinner. Both would be following the diet and both would probably lose weight. (The authors tend toward preferring fairly natural, unprocessed foods themselves and have a decent cookbook that I actually do recommend.)

This diet has worked for everyone I know who genuinely followed it (and it isn’t that hard to follow; it actually gets easier as you get into the swing of it). But of course, YMMV.

16

Adkins will wipe 10 lbs off in no time.
Buy a dog. He will insist on walking every day once he gets the rhythm.

17

Exercise is important for more than staying trim. It’s also important for stuff like bone density in later life, and it has psychological health benfits. And there’s a whole slew of studies about how not being sedentary will protect your overall health and ability to stay active down the line. Diet is important, of course, but getting active is really a good thing for all of your life, not just the ten pounds. Tell your girlfriends that! A bone density scan and a family history of osteoporosis sure got ME off my butt.

I speak as a couch sloth who has a lot more than ten pounds to lose and doesn’t generally LIKE exercise. I’ve been making an effort though, and after several years of trying lots of different options, have found a couple of forms of exercise (walking with a pedometer, training for a long distance walk, and taking up a physically demanding self-defense course) that I can not only tolerate but look forward to. Keep looking until you find the activity that fits for you! It’s worth it.

18

I lost–at a guess–between 35/40 pounds in the past year and a half.

I am a girl, five feet ten inches tall, and as a kid/teenager I never had weight problems. If anything I was “the skinny kid.” (Vs. my brother, who wore “Husky” jeans and hated it. He has always had more problems with his weight that I have.)

But nonetheless I went from the skinny college freshman to the overweight twenty-something. It took about eight years for me to put on the weight, but it happened…a few pounds a year…plus a few years…it added up. To a size and a weight that I hated.

I am now 29 years old and I weigh about ten pounds more than I did as a freshman. I went from a size 16-18 to a size 10-12. Because of my height, people tend to think that I weigh less than I do; I’ve worked on my feet since I was seventeen and I have the muscle mass to prove it.

I gained the weight during an eight-year relationship that went south; I really do believe that when you don’t like yourself, or where you’re at in your life, you tend to gain weight. You eat because it’s a simple easy way to make yourself happy. At least for a little while.

When I broke up with the guy, I lost the weight almost effortlessly. Eating what I wanted, when I wanted it. My only rule–and this is key–is that I never, ever ate after midnight.

I bartend for a living. I go to bed between five and eight in the morning, depending on my shift. To relate this to people with a “normal” job, I don’t eat within five/six hours of my bedtime. If you go to bed at eleven, don’t eat after five or six. Eat whatever you want–your biggest meal–as your first meal. And as the day grows longer, eat less and less. You’re not denying yourself; you’re just eating what you want to eat at a better time. If you want to eat donuts/ice cream/steak/loaded baked potatoes/whatever it is you love and crave, eat it. Just eat it first thing. You have the rest of the day to burn it off.

This advice may not work for somebody with a serious weight problem, but for somebody who’s gained that extra ten/twenty pounds, it makes sense. You have a decent metabolism and you have good basic nutrition. You just need to realize what you’re eating and when you eat it. If you’re craving something later in the day, promise yourself that you will eat it first thing tomorrow. If you want to indulge, do it early. Cut back later in the day.

I work on my feet but I don’t exercise, per se. And it works for me. It can’t hurt to try.

19

If you are like me, you find exercise boring because what you are doing doesn’t engage your mind. Just walking around mindlessly by yourself IS boring. So try doing something that also allows you to engage your brain in a way you enjoy.

The audiobooks suggestion mentioned earlier is a good one. If you’ve got an hour for lunch, use half of it to walk around listening to your book.

You could also try joining a gym and trying the treadmill - most gyms have a television you can watch while you are walking, and some treadmills even have a place for a book, so you can read while walking - there’s a gym near me that has this style of treadmill for people who are walkers rather than joggers/runners. That way you can still do something you’d probably do anyway, but you are moving instead of sitting on your butt while you are doing it.

Do you like videogames? Get a Wii and do the interactive games - again, you would be doing something you would normally do, but you are moving while doing it. Just make sure you have plenty of room around you while playing!

As already mentioned, you will find that if you get enough exercise during the day, you will sleep better at night, so just keep that in mind as a side benefit. It may help you keep going if you lose motivation.

20

I think a big part of it is making exercise a habit. It’s hard at first, but once you get used to it, going to the gym becomes something you just do—no different from the other normal stuff you do every day like taking a shower, going to work, and making dinner. (I know you said you wanted to get away from the routine, but IMO that’s what exercise has to become in order to stick with it.) That’s how it worked for me. I didn’t really like working out at all, but did it because I felt I had to. When we joined the local gym at the start of February I made myself go at least three times a week because if I do, my insurance will pay the majority of the bill. Going to the gym quickly became something I just did, not because I had to, but because that’s what I do after work. Now I actually look forward to it, and don’t want to miss a day. These days I’m going to the gym 6-7 days a week. I’ve lost five pounds since the beginning of February.

I will say that I don’t know if I could do it without my iPod. Also, it helps to add a little variety. I switch it up so I’m not doing the exact same thing every day. For example, I do the elliptical and strength training three times a week, stationary bike two times a week, and combination elliptical and stationary bike twice a week. I also like to get outside when I can. I love to ride my bike and go for long walks with the dog.