ShawnD said:
Another thread for crack pot theories... my turn
This thread is making it apparent that people really don't understand much about nutrition or body composition, or what it really means to be healthy.
1. Be a vegetarian for a while. Big meals like supper will probably be the same amount of calories if you keep eating things like potatoes, but snacks will have essentially no energy. Instead of eating beef jerky when watching TV, the only thing to eat will be banana peppers or something like that. I've never heard of anybody getting fat from eating too many cucumbers or hot peppers.
Okay, note the common theme to what most people are suggesting. Change your diet to include healthy snacks and to cut calories. However, be careful not to cut out essential nutrients. Vegetarian diets can be very healthy, or they can be very unhealthy. You need to be more careful to combine foods to get adequate protein, and you don't want to eliminate too much fat. Without knowing what someone's diet is like to begin with, it's hard to know what changes are the best for them. If someone sits down and had an entire steak for dinner every night, trying to cut out some of that meat will help, but if the real culprit is potato chips, french fries, and milk shakes, then this isn't going to help. Anyway, the variety of options suggested here are good, because the one thing that is important with dieting is to choose a diet you can stick with.
2. Start drinking tea. I find that when I'm drinking crazy amounts of tea, I don't drink as much milk or pop. Tea is just water that gives you a crazy buzz; basically no food value. This might actually make your skin look nicer as well since rumor has it that drinking water helps your skin. I'll have to look into that.
Not a good idea if you're prone to kidney stones. Caffeine is a stimulant, so will get your metabolic rate up, but it's not the healthiest way to do it. But, substituting water for high calorie beverages is a good idea. If plain water doesn't suit you, a little lemon juice or other juice mixed with it is good...just not too much...those juices are very high in sugar. This is a mistake a lot of people make, to drink juice or sports drinks thinking it's healthy, not realizing those are mostly flavored sugar water.
I like the way you think, but I would recommend the exact opposite.
Scales tell you nothing about how good you look. You can take two men, both 6 feet tall and 250 pounds, and have them look completely different. One will be fat slob, and one will be a muscular stud.
You shouldn't be fighting what the scale says. You should be fighting what the mirror says.
Yes, this is why I suggested staying away from scales initially. If you have access to a gym or other facility that has the equipment to test body composition (% body fat), that's really helpful. If you start on a good fitness program, you may actually gain weight over time if you start to build up muscles to replace the fat you lost, depending on how overweight one started out. Some people can start out not even truly overweight, but just flabby, and they may really enjoy the change in appearance with some defined muscles building up. I really recommend avoiding scales, mirrors, etc. initially, because the changes aren't going to be that rapid and when you don't see progress, it can be discouraging.
Instead, have someone take a "before" photo of you. It's much easier to look back at a photo and see what you really used to look like than to let your mind play games with you that nothing has changed because it happened so gradually, you didn't notice it in the mirror.
Other things you can track that will give you measures of progress without seeming discouraging will be to keep a log of your exercise routine. Just get one of those small, bound notepads (one that will easily fit in your pocket), and whatever exercise you do, record things like time spend doing it, distance you ran or biked or walked, intensity of the workout (if you work out on fitness machines, they have different settings that you can gradually work up to more and more difficult workouts), or weights lifted and # of reps if you do weight lifting. I personally found that much better than trying to track progress on a scale. It's really fun to look back through those records 6 months later and see what a wuss you started out as and how much progress you've made. For example, if someone chose jogging as their exercise, when you're jogging 3 miles a day, you'll get a good laugh to look back and see that when you started out, you couldn't even make it around the block.
I think good exercises to start out with are ones that you have to push yourself to complete. What I mean is something like going for a walk or run, and even if you get tired out halfway around the block, you have to push yourself to get the rest of the way around the block to get back home. Unlike sitting on a stationary bike where as soon as you get tired, you can stop and get off. The way to increase endurance is to keep pushing the limits. Not to complete exhaustion, but beyond what's easy.
I think the biggest mistake people make is to do too much at once. If in the first week of a diet you so drastically cut back on all your meals that you're feeling hungry all the time, you're going to have a hard time sticking with it. But, pushing yourself to be a little hungry some of the time is more likely to work. For example, instead of going for that snack after lunch, tell yourself you have to wait until dinner. You'll eat dinner, and you won't stay hungry all night, but you will just be hungry for a little while between your usual snack time and dinner. Before long, your body will adjust and you won't miss that snack at all. Same for exercise. If you set out to bike 5 miles on the first day when you haven't been on a bike since you were 12, you're going to be in such pain the next day that you won't exercise for the rest of the week. If you just push yourself a little past your comfort zone and begin with an every other day routine, you can build up gradually to a daily routine and to longer and longer workouts. Another trick that can work is when you get that craving for a snack, think about how much time you stop working to get that snack and eat it. Now, instead of spending that time snacking, go take a walk for that amount of time, especially if you're someone who snacks when bored.
