A big ditto on this for me. Three months ago I escalated my exercise routine from an hour or more of very fast walking to a fast two-mile walk followed by a three-mile run. The next step was cutting down on the portions, and it seems to be working. Slowly, very slowly, but working.
I’m with you on the wasabi peas, too. I need to go get more of those little buggers.
My top tips are:
Never miss breakfast, even if it’s only a cereal bar. It wakes up your metabolism and starts the body consuming calories!
Chew a lot of gum. The chewing action actually sends signals to the tummy to begin digesting, if not food your stored fat. Also, it will take away the hungry’s in mere moments.
Snack on baby carrots. They are crunchy, yummy, a little sweet, and ready without any prep right out of the bag, (like any good snack food ought to be).
Once a day, choose the stair over the escalator, get off the elevator a floor early, etc.
Always remember when you get that peckish, I could nibble, feeling, that’s when your body is actually deciding to get more food in or burn your stored calories. Remind yourself of this whenever you have this feeling.
I always keep chocolate chips in the house for my must cheat times. Why eat a whole candy bar when a small hand full of choc chips will hit the spot and last much longer. Eat them very slowly, one at a time. Of course this won’t work for those shy of will power. But a little treat really will get you through the tough times.
I think that the main thing to remember with weight loss is that you’re embarking on a lifestyle change. If you approach it as a “diet” or temporary thing, you’re going to be fat again, and it’ll take a shorter time than you think. I know whereof I speak. I got fat for the first time after I broke my wrists and fell into a do-nothing period that lasted a couple of years. I finally got fed up with myself and did something about it. That was a painful couple of years. After getting back into what I’d consider pretty decent shape, I had a relapse when wedding planning sucked up most of my time. I still was able to get in a couple of workouts a week, but it was sporadic. Between that, eating a bit too much because I didn’t realize I probably wasn’t active enough to burn off what I ate, and going back to a 3 meal model of eating, I gained back about 60% of what I’d lost, in only about 8 months.
I’m mostly over that, though I’m still carrying about 10% more body fat than I want to have. Just a few more kg of stupidity lard to go, and that will go quickly since I’ve finally gotten back into a good and steady routine after a few months of spotty activity. I’ll semi-quote Apollo from BSG here: “I never want that to happen again.” The way to keep it from happening is never lapsing again. Short breaks are okay, but nothing over a week or two at the most. I figured out that it has to be a permanent change, or I’ll just end up yo-yoing. And this is coming from a guy who never had to worry about weight gain before about age 25 because I was a really active kid and an athlete in high school and college.
Exercise is the key for me. I’d feel like crap if I did nothing but restrict my diet. Besides, I don’t feel healthy or “in shape” unless I can do some pretty demanding activities. That takes some work. I do some running and swimming, mixed in with strength training and short intense exercise sessions. I don’t like straight endurance training much, and I don’t like the kind of body you get if you don’t do regular strength training. Besides which, in my earlier attempt to get back in shape I found out that I didn’t make much progress in losing fat unless I was doing some kind of weight training. Apparently I need to do some heavy lifting in order to convince my body that I’m serious about getting the gut off.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with Cross Fit lately instead of regular weight workouts. I found that site after getting back into pretty decent shape again, and even so I usually can’t do the workouts completely as prescribed. I don’t feel too bad considering there are some serious athletes who haven’t been able to just jump right into their stuff. There’s another forum where people usually give scaling info for the Workout Of the Day (WOD).
I usually do one step down from the prescribed workout, though I sometimes go for a bit more if I think I can handle it. Obviously, my goal is to be able to do the WOD without scaling. I’ve made more progress with their workouts than with Max OT and other, more conventional weightlifting programs I’ve tried. I can handle a LOT more weight now than I did before, to the point where I almost have a hard time believing I can actually lift those weights after only a few months of doing this program. I’ve set new personal bests on most exercises. Plus, the workouts are more fun (for certain values of masochistic “fun”) than plain weight training.
The only diet reforms I’ve ever made are minor; my focus is on activity. I try to eat a greater number of smaller-portioned meals spaced out throughout the day (4–6 meals) rather than have 3 bigger meals. It’s the way I used to eat when I was doing swimming and springboard diving in high school, and it’s apparently how most serious athletes eat normally. The advantage is that you’re never really full or hungry, you get used to smaller portions overall which — along with the never really hungry part — helps prevent over-eating, and your blood sugar stays more stable.
I eat more protein than average, for both fat control and muscle building reasons. I try to get about a 40/40/20 split for protein/carbohydrates/fats. Overall calories the last time I checked were actually higher than what I took in when I was eating more conventionally at a higher, and fatter, body weight. Despite the high protein intake my blood-work looks better than it did a couple of years ago. The only things I got flagged for on my last physical were BMI — which is a piss-poor indicator of fitness considering that when I was in the best shape of my life and had less than 10% body fat I was over 24 on that index, pushing the boundaries of “obese” — and creatinine excretion, which has a top value of 1.0 for the Japanese population, which is what I was being compared to. With my reading of 1.2, I’d be on the high end of normal for the US. Considering that, in the absence of renal failure, creatinine levels are generally related to muscle mass, I’ll wear that 1.2 with pride.
I also started paying a bit more attention to what I ate and cut out a few non-essentials, like soft drinks, chips, other assorted junk because of that attention, while adding a bit more salad, fruits, things like nuts, yogurt, and jerky for snacks. I still drink soda and eat chips, but it’s an occasional treat now. Aside from a couple of months where I figured out what I was actually eating and then planned out what I wanted to change, I haven’t done much calorie counting. I’m thankfully not prone to eat much junk anyway, as I don’t like sweets much. Probably alcohol and cheese are my worst junk foods, and I don’t take in either of those to excess.
I’ve upped my exercise to include a half-mile walk every lunchtime and climbing three floors’ worth of stairs twice a day, also taking the dog for two- or three-mile walks two or three times a week. I’ve cut out the snacks between meals. I’m aiming to calorie-count breakfast and lunch to about 500 calories between them and “be sensible” about evening meals. A lot of tinned fish at the moment largely because the portion size is strictly controlled and also I like the taste. Long-term, I am just going to have to get used to weighing myself regularly and applying damage control when it’s necessary; short-term, I need more mobility and less stress on the joints and heart, so I’m aiming to shed the first forty or fifty pounds quickly while the interest holds - then I can take my own sweet time over the next fifty-odd.
OK, well I’m 6’ 2" and weigh 240 pounds. Weight lifting is a hobby for me so I don’t actually look as fat as you’d think for those numbers. Nevertheless, I was starting to get a belly and it bothered me.
I started a seriously-strict Atkins diet two weeks ago and have lost 10 pounds so far. All I eat is meat and greens. In about a month (estimated) when I lose the rest of the weight I want, I’ll start re-introducing complex carbs.
I workout with weights every other day for about an hour. Right now I need to do something aerobic but I’m not sure exactly what I can do in an apartment.
My reason for doing Atkins instead of some other diet was I wanted to make sure I lost fat weight instead of having my body start dissolving what muscle I’ve managed to build.
Oh yeah, and drinking water or ice tea. I drink 3 to 4 liters of water or tea every day.
Regards
Testy
Well, as for myself, I would like to report that I dropped an inch off my waist over the past week… I attribute it to not eating any junk food (mostly) or processed food, exercising 30-60 mins per day, but most of all a grueling 12-mile hike over hilly terrain on Sunday. Using some estimation tools it would appear I burned around 5000 calories that day, whoa! If I do that every weekend then I wouldn’t have to trim calories much, just not exceed the daily requirements and I should be good…
I’ve gone from 15 stone plus to 12 stone minus since January without following any specific plan.
What I did was:
Cut out all the crap from my diet. The snacks, the over-large portions, the booze so I just eat 3 times a day and watch the calorie content.
Exercise. I walk to work and back - 7-8 miles a day.
Food-wise I was careful to watch the fat and sugar content and go for ‘good’ carbs. In the end it was good, old fashioned will-power coupled with male obsessive behaviour.
I told myself I had to lose weight and if I was hungry that was just tough. Eating good carbs and lots of salad generally meant I wasn’t hungry much.
I agree totally. It’s long-term changes. You can “lose” ten pounds in a week but it’s probably neither healthy nor sustainable in the long run, and the long run is what’s important. Losing 1lb a week might not seem like much but it’s 50lbs over the year and just as important, it’s easier to sustain that kind of pace in a healthy fashion. If you keep that sort of thing up for a long time you also know that you are managing yourself well, as opposed to going for some kind of “quick fix”.