Weight Loss

“A snail was mugged by two turtles.  When the police asked him what happened, he said,”I don’t know.  It all happened so fast.”

How many times have we seen celebrities representing weight loss products gain and drop weight faster than we can keep up with?  The sad answer is many, many times.  It seems to be a cultural element to want things immediately especially when we see cultural icons who have ripped abs and look like they are carved out of marble.   We see these images and as a culture we seek those images as ideals in our own lives.  We want an instantaneous result for problems that maybe took us several YEARS to incur.

I was at a party recently and I noticed a friend who has dropped a significant amount of weight since I had seen her last year at thanksgiving.   I’m always interested to hear someones’ story so naturally I asked what they did.  The simplicity astounded me, but the discipline was equally impressive.  Basically, my friend said, I wrote down everything I ate and I counted calories.  When I got to 1200 calories, I stopped eating.  Maybe I stopped at 3pm but maybe it was 8pm.  Either way I made a commitment to stop eating once I hit my goal.  Since January of 2011 my friend dropped 50 lbs.  WOW!  

This seems incredibly simple.  But it’s the TRUTH!   If you want to lose weight we have to expend more calories than we intake.  Now my friend paid close attention to what she was eating.  She didn’t diet.  She didn’t eat only protein, or carbs or fat.  She kept her basic nutrition and simply paid attention to her portions.  And she limited herself.  She set a daily goal, and achieved it!

The average person needs somewhere between 1200 and 2000 calories to maintain basic metabolic function (cell replication, respiration, etc) depending on activity level and muscle to fat ratio.  If you’re like me, you may not know the caloric values for the typical meal that you eat.  No problem!  Here’s a web site that helps you track your calories for each meal:

http://www.acaloriecounter.com/

There are many calorie counters online.  If you don’t like this one, try another.   

Although counting calories worked for my friend,  (who is, by the way, a numbers orientated person) maybe counting each calorie seems daunting.  No problem.  I still suggest writing down everything you eat and drink.  I always tell people to write down not only what they ate but what time and where.   

When everything you eat / drink is written down you can really see the scope of your nutrition.  This gives you a chance to evaluate your nutrition.  Maybe you don’t eat until 4 hours after you wake up.  This lag time between waking up and eating is never advised because having fuel in the tank to start your day helps you throughout the day.  People who tend to eat within 1 hour of waking up also tend NOT to eat 1 hour before they go to sleep.    An important distinction, since going to bed burns about 20 – 100 calories (depending on your metabolic rate) while eating a meal before you go to bed can be many more multiples of 20 -100 calories.  That’s one potential benefit of watching what you eat.

I like to coach people (interested in weight loss) in replacing items.   What I mean is to replace one thing in your nutrition with another item.  

 For example: maybe you are like me and LOVE Cheese!  Well, instead of a cheese platter snack, maybe you could find a vegetable to replace the volume and kind of snack the cheese platter snack represents in your nutrition.  Long story short (as my 10^th grade biology teacher, Mr. Nale would say), “Awareness PRECEDES Control.”  We have to know about something before we can impact it. 

The idea is to take a long term perspective when it comes to weight loss.  Typically ½ to 1 lbs of body weight dropped per week is a healthy long term weight loss goal.  Any more than that in a shorter period of time tends to be muscle atrophy and water weight: not anything anyone wants to lose, actually. 
Mo-tate.  Motivate your life to motion.