How to lose weight. No, really.
renatovaldes.com
renatovaldes.com
Several years and one kid later, I'm back to being fat. Somewhere along the line the calorie counting became less disciplined and then faded away entirely - I don't even know when or why that happened. It just did. The weight lifting time got shorter and shorter to make room for other aspects of life and schedule changes, etc. And eventually, it was gone too. So now I'm back where I started.
Sigh.
Seriously. You simply won't want to eat, and if you think you want to eat, you'll be surprised at how untasty that delicious looking candy bar or pasta is once it hits your lips. It's almost as if your body conspires against your best efforts to gain weight, which is a nice reversal for once.
In conjunction, take a high-quality multivitamin like SuperNutrition or Alive and you'll also find yourself with enough energy that you'll go crazy if you don't exercise. Yeah, it helps you want to exercise. That is key for me.
It's so much easier to take your daily olive oil and find yourself automatically disgusted at the sight of heavy food than to rely on sheer discipline, which is probably why you're overweight to begin with. And besides, olive oil is good for preventing disease.
It also helps that you'll feel the effects working on the same day you start, and you should see an encouraging difference on the scale a week later (I lost 5 pounds on the first week with no exercise - almost scary).
You win, like, 3 times on Shangri-La + high-quality multivitamin, and you don't have to have much discipline to get started.
The Abs Diet (http://www.amazon.com/Abs-Diet-Six-Week-Flatten-Stomach/dp/1...) is written in a bit over-patronizing language for my taste, but has a lot of useful info about different nutrients, how to read food labels, how to structure meals to keep blood sugar level constant, etc. Exercises in the book are not bad too.
By combining these two approaches I was able to steadily loose weight and feel better for more than a year. Recent change it lifestyle changed that, I'm looking into reworking my routine to get back on track again.
Exercise if you want muscle, but it's not necessary or sufficient.
This is a very common myth.
To their surprise, the researchers found that none of the groups, including the athletes, experienced “afterburn.” They did not use additional body fat on the day when they exercised. In fact, most of the subjects burned slightly less fat over the 24-hour study period when they exercised than when they did not.[1]
[1]http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/phys-ed-why-doesnt-...
Also, the health benefits of cardio are numerous, ranging from stress reduction to neurogenesis to longer telomeres. It's not just about how good looking your body is.
I know this because of my on-bike power meter, which measures mechanical work in kJ. That "perfect hour" was around 280 W, and I've done it twice. (Cyclists have a very narrow range of biological efficiencies, so you can just multiply mechanical by a constant to reckon metabolic work.)
Losing weight is all about diet.
Looking good is about diet and exercise.
Awesome. As my friend put it, there's a shortage of discipline in the world.
This is very wrong. Obesity is not a shortage of discipline, is a hormonal disruption. We play havoc with insulin eating too much of things we didn't evolved to eat.
If one exercised discipline and consumed 1500 kcal of even modern, terrible, HFCS-infused food, they would not get fat. Period. They won't necessarily be healthy, but they will not be overweight.
Anyway, this argument is not novel nor is it in the scope of this thread. Just wanted to say congratulations to the OP.
There are many people who do have legitimate health problems that cause obesity, sure. But the vast majority of us fat folk (I still hover around 280) eat too much and move too little.
Perhaps they will make a pill for this?
The body has a complex energy regulation system and hunger, energy consumption via metabolism and energy storage are interlaced. It's not as simple as "energy in" = independent variable.
It has a preference to store (instead of immediately use) calories from carbohydrates (due to insulin). So a diet low in total calories but still high in carbs is going to be painful, and very frequently fails.
Read Gary Taubes' book, people.
Having a negative energy balance is going to ultimately lead to weight loss, yes. But it's important to eat good foods (whole grains, fruits, vegetables) so you 'feel better' even though you're eating less calories.
This journal article (A Role for Sweet Taste: Calorie Predictive Relations in Energy Regulation by Rats: http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/bne-feb08-swithers.pdf ) is about a comparing natural and artificial sweeteners. The point of the article is the rats fed artificial sweeteners gained more weight than the rats fed real sugar.
It's just a little evidence in support of the original author's assertion that 'Light products are for pussies.' The truth is that while that Diet Coke may have less calories in it, it can also lead to an increase in appetite (read: weight gain.)