Let me back up a bit, though. On July 15th, 2013, I, a 6'5" (196 cm), individual weighed in at an astonishing 340 lbs (154 kg). Since that date I have lost more than 105 lbs (47.5 kg). And the reason I'm writing this is of course to brag... oh, and to let you know that you can do it too!
"To keep the body in good health is a duty... otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear." - BuddhaThe progress pictures are at the end if you want to skip to that, but this isn't about me. It's more about the how. I've been on diets before, and I've tried saying "I'm just one of those people" that won't be at a healthy weight. Horseshit. And this is the cold hard truth to anyone out there. Step #1 is to be honest with yourself.
Then, do research. No, really. Legitimately do some research on how you should behave in all facets to be healthy. Don't hop on some fad diet like "Atkins" or something else. The reality about fad diets is that they don't work because people approach them with the wrong mindset. You go into a diet thinking it's a temporary change. And if you keep that change up long enough, you'll lose some weight. But, the second you stop you start gaining weight.
Health isn't a temporary choice. It's a permanent one. So, approach losing weight not as a "diet", but as a lifestyle change. You are changing the way you eat, the way you act, the way you live. Don't take on a more challenging task than you can handle. I chose to defer exercise, because I wanted to nail down control of my diet, and exercising makes you feel like you deserve a reward. Nine of my 9 and a half months of weight loss were purely from caloric restriction. Let me rephrase that: I never had to get on a treadmill, go to the gym, go outside and run or even basically break a sweat.
Losing weight is a simple formula. If (Calories expended > Calories taken in), then you lose weight. If (calories expended < Calories taken in), then you gain weight. Regardless of what you eat, this is true. You could eat only twinkies, but still lose weight. If you want to exercise too, more power to you. But make sure you overestimate your calories eaten and underestimate the calories burned.
Losing weight in a lot of ways is similar to breaking an addiction... just an addiction to food. The problem with that though is quitting food cold turkey permanently has a 100% probability of death. This is why you need to retrain the way you think about it. Weight loss is very personal and an individual experience, so very few "do this, it worked for me!" are actually effective for everyone.
What the idea of it being an addiction also means is that you return to the idea of being honest with yourself. So many diets have cheat days, and it's the cheat days where diets fall apart. If you are honest with yourself, you need to answer whether or not you can handle a cheat day responsibly. Are you more likely to allow cheat days to snowball on each other? On a cheat day will you go overboard and eat back all the calories you gave up during the week? I knew that I couldn't for a very long time, so I went without cheat days for a long time.
But everyone wants to have some ice cream or cake once in a while, right!? That's the beauty of approaching it this way. You can eat cake or ice cream while dieting. You just need to eat less of other stuff during the rest of the day. I tend to plan out my meals a lot more than I used to if I know I'm going to have dessert. My best suggestion for this is to use a food journal. It's a humongous pain in the ass at first, but eventually becomes habit. My favorite one that I use is Myfitnesspal. I switched to that from loseit, because it has a much larger database of food.
One of the important things about using a food journal like that is to log everything. And by everything, I mean everything. That coffee in the morning? Log it. Add cream and sugar? Log that, because you just turned an 8 calorie drink into a 100 calorie drink. Orange Juice? Log it. Did you just grab 9 grapes while looking in the fridge for something substantial to eat? Log that too. Everything you eat or drink except pure water has calories, and one of my biggest mistakes prior to starting my diet was in this area, which is what I call "hidden calories".
The most important things to understand, though, is that just like Chumbawumba said once... I get knocked down, but I get up again. This is a marathon. There is no healthy and quick way to lose weight. Don't go into this thinking you'll lose 50 lbs by the time summer arrives, because you won't. On top of that, don't give up just because the scale fluctuated up 5 pounds from your last weigh in. Take that as an opportunity to evaluate why that might have happened, then try to fix it for your next weigh-in.
I won't sugar coat it, though. The first couple of weeks suck. Correction. The first couple of weeks fucking suck. I walked around miserable as fuck because of how hungry I was. But with each passing week, it becomes easier and easier. Eventually, you barely notice it and your body stops throwing a temper tantrum at you. You're still hungry some or most of the time, but it becomes very normal and you become used to it.
To end this, I wanted to thank all of my friends and family for the tremendous support I received while I went through this. It's wonderful to have a great support network, and one of the most important parts is to embrace anyone and everyone who is genuinely willing to help along the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment