The tips regarding processed foods and regular, fun exercise are spot on.
I regularly train in ninjutsu 2/3 times a week, and if I don’t do that I feel noticeably more tired and unfocussed.
With food, I suppose I was lucky to be raised by a mother who was pretty strict on food, so I’m used to eating lots of fruit and veg, and keeping sweets as a rarity.
The amount of sugary crap that a lot of people have without a second thought is astounding to me. One of my mates told me he used to go through 4L (~gallon for you non-metric types) of Coke every day. It’d be unusual for me to get through that amount of any soft drink in a month.
Also, for all you who think you don’t have time to cook good, healthy meals, get a Thai cookbook. It’s dead easy, quick, tasty, and healthy. As a bonus, Thai curries survive freezing very well, so you can cook in bulk, and have a few things in reserve.
I have to agree with the folks above who mentioned martial arts. I was never any good at team sports so I had to find a good solitary sport to enjoy. Well, the martial arts fit this better than anything else. I train in Tae Kwon Do for many years before switching to boxing and Muay Thai a few years ago. Let me tell you, these two (Muay Thai especially) are EXCELLENT workouts and a great deal of fun to do. I love the physical conditioning I get and I love the strategy involved in the fights. Winning a fight is 80% mental, afterall. I like to run through combinations and strategies in my mind while sparring and try them out on my opponent.
I did try lifting weights/running for awhile but found them very boring. Training in fight sports has been much better for me because I have a trainer who is pushing me more than I’d ever push myself if I were on my own.
I’ve just recently started (about 2.5 months back) getting “health serious”. I’ve lost 15 pounds so far, putting me about 20 pounds over the max “ideal” weight range.
Use a good calorie tracker. Calorie trackers work, for many of us. My problem was I was making stupid decisions. For a 6’3" male of programmer’s build (heh) to maintain 230 pounds static, you take in 2,800 calories every day. Anything less than that will cause you to lose weight. I set my target daily intake at 2000 calories, and have gone over that (although never over 2800) a few times in the past month or so.
Make sure you’re getting the proper nutrition. The main hazard of “dieting” is that you don’t take in enough nutrients. You do need fat and carbohydrates, despite popular diet myths; cut out the carbs and you will find your brain withering. One of my “hazard” nutrients is calcium: even at 2800 cals I was rarely getting enough in a day (and calcium needs to be spread out over the day as your body can only digest a certain amount of calcium and iron at a time). So, I pay particular attention to that nutrient. Getting the protein/carb/fat balance right is also critical (you should be getting a 50:30:20 mix of carb calories:protein cals:fat cals). To track nutrition you need to track more than calories or grams of fat or “weight watcher points”. There’s more than one or two dimensions which need to be tracked, at least at first in the “formative” stages of your diet change. YOU CAN LOSE A LOT OF WEIGHT AND END UP PERMANENTLY HARMING YOUR BODY. A lot of “fad” diets substitute nutrient-poor foods for nutrient-and-calorie-rich foods. These will bring your weight down, which is important if you are morbidly obese. It is not, however, worth permanently damaging your nervous system, heart, and lungs, to shed pounds a little faster.
Exercise! An hour of walking at a brisk pace burns about 400 calories. An hour of strolling burns over 250. You don’t need equipment. You don’t need preparation. Take your “decompression” time after the day while out walking and breathing in the smog … er, fresh air. A nice side benefit is that you actually tend to see other people in your neighborhood! I am naturally quite exercise-averse. Still, I’ve found the walking routine has helped me in many ways. It’s surprising how good it feels to complete a walk in record time or of record distance.
Weigh yourself at the SAME time of day on the same day of the week, weekly. Your weight will vary by a few pounds over the course of the day. Thus, if you weigh yourself in the morning one week and then the next week in the evening, you might see no improvement at all, while in reality you have made terrific improvement. Ideally, you’d weigh yourself multiple times during the day and take the minimum or average weight throughout the day as your weight that checkpoint. However, that takes time. Generally your lowest weight is in the morning, and so if you keep a schedule of weighing yourself in the morning then you should be able to track progress pretty well.
Remember that fat weighs less than muscle. If you find your weight not moving at all, but you are seeing improvement in your waistline, it is because you are gaining muscle faster than you are losing fat. That’s good. Keep it up!
There are no “forbidden” foods. While tracking calories, you will find that you can’t eat that huge slab of chocolate cake and make it through the rest of the day on the calories left in your budget. Still, you can allow yourself a portion of that cake if you “save” a little throughout the day (or week). Just like a household budget: never borrow forward, only pay forward. In other words, only eat that calorie-rich food after you’ve saved the equivalent calories from your day’s or previous day’s budget. Often, the key to staying within a healthy lifestyle is “giving in” to your cravings. If you cut out chocolate entirely, you’re quite likely to backslide and binge on it a few days later. So, if choocolate is your thing, find a small-portion but satisfying source for it. Peanut butter is mine; I’ve found that Kraft’s “South Beach” peanut butter cookies satisfy my craving for the flavor and keep me “on track” for the rest of the day.
Dietary change is hard. But, once you’ve made the change, keeping it is easier. Still, there are more days ahead of you than what you’ll spend making the change, and slowly you will backslide if you don’t keep periodic watch.
IMHO, all this is best done using a calorie tracker from a third party with a well-maintained database of foods. Yes, a “true” geek would build it themselves. But then, a “true” geek would probably spend a month getting their “system” up and running, have it “down” for maintenance every other week, and give up because it’s all too much work two months in. You’re already fighting inertia here. Don’t give yourself another reason not to take control of your diet! It should take no more than 30 seconds to enter in the information on a meal, and you should be able to check on your overall nutrient consumption at any time.
I’m using “Calorie King”, which is a pretty good program for tracking intake, exercise, and results. It has a rather exhaustive, well-maintained database, and cost $40 to register (only a one-week trial period, which IMHO is a bit insufficient). Every once in a while we’ll eat something which isn’t in the database, and it takes about a minute to enter a new food in. There are faults with the program (managing your own recipes is unintuitive and clunky, for instance), but, again: I’d rather spend my weeks making progress with a somewhat imperfect system than hold out for the perfect system.
Forgot to add: in order to make a 2000-calorie diet and remain satisfied, a large portion of your foods will necessarily become unprocessed and “healthy”. Watching calories is not an alternative to eating “right”; it is a tool to get you to eat right without punishing your body and sending it into starvation mode.
I happen to be a cyclist and don’t feel I’ve lost an iota of geek cred. I generally get an hour ride in during lunch 2 or 3 times a week and a longer ride on the weekends. It clears my mind for the afternoon segment and as a bonus you get to play with additional geek toys such as heart rate monitors, GPS devices, bike computers, and carbon fiber frames.
Again, the people who say that “exercise doesn’t burn many calories” are simply wrong. All of these studies concentrate on how many calories are burnt DURING exercise. This is not the whole picture. When you stress your muscles to the point where recovery is needed you burn many times more calories AFTER exercise than you do during exercise.
This is why when you hear people say that walking burns as many calories as running you need to slap them upside the head. You walk, then you’re done. You run, then you recover… for many days.
It’s the same thing with weight lifting. Back in the 80’s some so-called scientists determined that weight lifting had very little benefit for weight loss. They took a pure physics approach and measured the distance the weight was being moved times the number of reps and such. In the end they determined that in the gym you don’t burn many calories. Many years later someone finally wized up and noticed that body builders were consuming 4000 calories a day and yet stayed thin (even in the off season). These guys should have been fatter than a house. So they went back and did the tests again and realized that from a single hard workout you can still be burning calories UP TO A WEEK LATER.
Recovering from exercise burns a LOT of calories! So get out there and work hard. Don’t waste your time walking!
I should also point out that lifting weights and exercising hard increase your matabolism rate. Arnold Shmarzenegger burns more calories sitting on his butt than I do running a 7 minute per mile pace. So weight lifing and running do more than just burn calories.
Be careful when you say that exercise doesn’t burn many calories. It may burn fewer calories DIRECTLY than you expect, but one thing it does do which is extremely important, is to raise your metabolism, so that the number of calories you burn at rest goes up. In other words, it helps to increase your weight loss efficiency.
Walking vs running: Those of us with bad joints need to choose the less jarring pace of walking over running. I’m not sure if your comments were aimed at me, but my point wasn’t that walking is better than running or lifting weights or anything of the sort. My point is that walking is many times better than sitting on your butt. Like sitting on your butt: it requires no equipment. The only cost is the energy and commitment to getting up and moving.
If your time is too constrained, you can get just as much or more benefit from a half hour every other day of more strenuous activity. But, usually, then you are dealing with other expenses and hassles as well.
In any case, as that NY Times article shows, just adding exercise without monitoring (and, obviously, managing) your caloric intake is a fool’s errand. Your body will naturally try to take in more energy to compensate for that which it expends. In that study, they saw a “statistically insignificant” 10% increase in caloric intake over the course of the exercise regimen; obviously that affects the effectiveness of the regimen!
As always, and moreso than most times, your mileage may vary. Every body responds differently to exercise. The only hard-and-fast rules are that you stick to a nutritionally sound program for more than a couple of months before trying something else, and that you avoid “cheating” the program. The program doesn’t care if you cheat; you’re only cheating yourself.
I’m a year round cyclist (even when it’s -40C) I’m sure it’s the only thing that’s kept me from packing on pounds. The only other trick I’ve found to keep me from the junk food is that I leave my wallet behind. No money, no junk food. I love to do it with will power but I’m weak.
Setting your goal is key. For the people who love counting, the calorie counting idea is a good plan. For those who want to look good, just put all the geeky significance aside and get your body in shape with some exercise. People who are in good shape look good, and people who aren’t don’t. While you are trying to decide between cardio kick boxing and super slow free weights, take a walk or do some chores. Last time I checked, painting the house and taking out the trash counted as exercise too.
All older martial arts competitors I know have blown out knees, arthritis, broken necks, and other fun ailments. While I enjoy sparring, I avoid tournaments (I don’t need to prove I’m the best or whatever) since I’m in this thing for the long run, and when you fight people for real, you will get hurt. Every time. Those injuries will accumulate, and you’ll have a battered body in exchange for some trophies.
Even in-class sparring is inherently dangerous. In Judo, my ankle got bent so far backwards that it was pointing backwards. My hands are covered in small scars from other people’s fingernails from Judo and BJJ. I had a minor tear of my achilles’ in TKD. I’ve broken several small bones from stupid accidents. But nothing very serious, and I’d certainly do it all over again if I had the chance. I’m not on a cane like one of my friends.
Finally, don’t pay any attention to BMI when you start working out. I’m 19% body fat – I’m not skinny – but I have a BMI of 32. BMI calculations are very flawed, especially with people who build muscle mass. Get your body fat tested instead. It takes only a couple minutes.
Well honestly this seems quite pathetic.
Want to exercise? Get to go to gym or run, or use bicycle. Don’t stand in front of a display.
I play WoW but I go gym. And honestly going gym means to interact with other guys/girls and most of all train you whole body, not just legs…
Really I think we’re losing the ‘humanity’ factor with this kind of stuff…if you’re happy…
I must point out that the SCUBA divers’ tan line is wrong… he should have a full body tan… Achieved by laying around semi-nude on the roof of the dive boat between dives.
Maybe northern hemisphere divers look like that… but what would I know, I live dive in the Pacific
The biggest myth in this is diets … the almost always don’t work (mainly because the have no scientific basis) and even when they do they mostly work because of two factors
Loss of water retention - i.e. the weight you lose is mostly water
Any diet makes you eat less - if you eat less you will lose weight
The combination of eat only what your body needs - (eat when hungry, eat slowly, stop when you are not hungry), Don’t eat (much) food that is bad for you (sugary, salty, fatty foods), eat more that is good for you (fruit, veg etc) - and get more exercise (no matter what, more is better, varied is better still) is the only diet that works
Detox diets don’t work, odd/unbalanced food diets don’t work, the only diet is one you eat for the rest of your life. Studies have been done on detox diets and most have no/little effect or are actually harmful, all unbalanced food diets are harmful by their nature…
I like boxing – in the form of hitting a heavy bag and a speed bag.
Make sure you bounce/move around on the balls of your feet and that you don’t just stand flat footed.
Do NOT hit the bag hard, at least not at first.
Go for ‘quantity’ over quality. As you slowly get used to the impact of your hands/wrists hitting the bag (and wear gloves), begin to hit it harder. No haymakers: that’s a good way screw yourself up.
You’ll be amazed at how tired you get and how much of a workout it is to keep your hands up and your body moving in such a manner.
Go in rounds. On for two minutes … then stretch for a half minute. Do that 3 times.
The speed bag is an entirely different beast – coordination, timing, concentration AND a physical workout.
I had “the revelation” about 3 months ago, when I couldn’t find a pair of clean sweats. So I grabbed a pair of jeans, and found I couldn’t button them.
I stopped inhaling Doritos and Mountain Dew. I started walking, then jogging. For rainy days, I have a shiny treadmill.
As stated by Jeremy Zawodny, that first month pretty much sucks. However, I can say that after that first month, things get better. Pretty soon, you’ll notice that you are not winded walking to/from the bathroom.
Today, 40 pounds lighter, I can actually race my 10 year old around the block, me on foot, him on his bicycle. It feels good to be mobile again. I’ve found that I am more awake and alert during the day, and sleep better at night.
So in closing, I offer words of encouragement to my brethren. May you have the willpower and strength to get to your goal.
