Results tagged “Weight loss”

Over the last few months I'd pretty much given up making any concerted effort to lose weight.

Why?

Apathy.

When recently I met up with a few people I hadn't seen for quite some time they mentioned they were concerned about my weight, so I guess guilt may be working.

So what to do?

A friend who I only meet once or twice a year claims to have lost over 30 kgs quite easily by simply tracking his calorie intake and doing a bit of exercise.

Since I've now got an iPhone I've decided I'll try out a few of the apps that are available for tracking weight and calories. Why? I always have my iPhone with me, so all I should need to do is enter the data as I take in the calories

Will it work?

Who knows?

Even if I don't actively change my diet tracking how many calories I'm consuming should be a useful exercise.

OK, we've established that losing weight isn't easy for many reasons.  What can we do to make it a bit easier -- to give ourselves a head start?  Making one change in your life won't get you to lose weight (unless you are very lucky), but one right thing may just get you moving in the right direction.  So what's one thing that you can do that may make a difference in your life.

Here's a list of things I have read or thought of myself.  Please let us know your ideas.

• Get up early and go for a walk in the morning.
• Turn off the TV and put on an exercise video/go for a walk.
• Take the stairs instead of the lift.
• Don't eat after 7pm.
• Cut out chocolate (or chips, ice cream - whatever your 'addiction' is)
• Walk/cycle to work - or park on the other side of town and walk across.
• Buy smaller plates.
• Take up a sport that you've been wanting to try for awhile.
• Keep a bit bottle of water next to you at all times and drink, drink, drink.
• Develop a taste for dark chocolate.
• Go out dancing one night a week.
• Change your regular route to avoid passing McDonalds (or whatever is your weakness)
• Go to bed earlier, before you get a chance to snack (or at least brush your teeth straight after dinner)
• Make a new friend that will support your new lifestyle (or at least avoid the people that make you feel bad about yourself)
• Meditate/prayer/sit and think quietly at least once a day to reflect on how you are doing and where you are going.
• Stop eating food that's left on your children's plates.
• Keep a food diary and note: 1) when your bad eating times are and do something else interesting then and 2) what foods (or food combinations) make you feel heavy and bloated that perhaps you should avoid or eat only limited amounts of (for me it's carbs) or 3) what foods really make your body feel good (in a healthy way) and eat more of that.
  
• Take part in the kids sports and games whenever possible. (I get a good workout helping with the Under10s soccer training)
• Get a hypnosis tape.  I find it helpful when I listen to the CD that came with Paul McKenna's I Can Make You Thin.

I'm sure I've heard a lot more and will add more as I think of them.  In the meantime I look forward to hearing your suggestions!

I've had a weight problem since I was about 10 years old.  I had put it down to bad eating habits, genetics, not exercising enough; pretty all down to everything that was my fault.  I wasn't strong enough, I wasn't dedicated enough and I would never be thin enough.  This hit hardest a year ago.  I had been on Neris & India's Idiot Proof Diet for 8 months and had great success.  I had lost nearly three stone, felt fantastic and was getting compliments from everyone about how I looked. I was afraid to think it, but I had finally conquered the weight problem I had lived with for over 30 years. 

Then we went on holiday visiting my family in the US.  It was so nice to show my family the new me.  So I relaxed on the diet, which was nearly carb free.  We had pizza, pasta, sandwiches -- you name it. Didn't bloat up straight away, but when I got back from holiday, I just couldn't get back into the diet, so quicker than the weight came off it piled on again.  I've tried a couple of times to get back onto that plan, but haven't even kept on for a week.

Last September, returning from another indulgent holiday eating and drinking up the delights of Provence, I decided to hire a personal trainer. For nearly three months I worked out in the gym three times a week, in addition to 2 tae kwon do training sessions; and had my weight and body fat checked weekly.  This time I was losing weight more slowly but steadily.  Just before Christmas I got very sick, perhaps from pushing myself too hard for tkd competitions, and stopped the training -- and haven't got back to it yet!

I'd say that nearly all of us know what it takes to lose weight: take in less calories and burn more calories. We've read up on various diets and exercise routines, yet after years and years and various attempts, here we are still looking for some secret that will make it all click for us.

The truth is that inside each one of us, buried deeply, we have some need, some empty spot that needs feeding. There may be a diet that suits your lifestyle more and will help with eating right. You may find a buddy to exercise with and that will help keep you going and burning the fat. In the end, unless you deal with the issues that are causing the weight problem, it will come back again and again.

In my 20's I read a book that helped give me a little insight into what it was inside me that kept me from losing weight: Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach. At the time I started to feel that the weight was giving me some power I wouldn't have as a petite young woman; and also protected me from men that would see me only as a sexual object.  Unfortunately that weight was also keeping me from a lot of good things, mainly feeling good about myself! 

This thinking went a bit further about ten years later.  I was watching an episode of Oprah, yet another about weight loss, and the guests had all lost serious amounts of  weight.  One woman told about how her problems went back to childhood when she had been sexually abused by a relative.  Once she realised that and started to deal with it, she started to lose weight.  It hit me then that my weight gain started when I was 10 and at that time I had a terrifying encounter with a pedaphile. Though I escaped from actual physical abuse, the experience frightened me so much that I never told another person until I had grown up. I had pushed that experience so far back in my consciousness that it was a dim memory. It then made sense to me that the extra weight was a kind of protection and the eating was also feeding the child inside that was still afraid of whatever preditors were out there in the World.

So after 35 years of using food as a comfort and shield, I have to learn a new relationship with food and it's a real struggle. All of my food decisions are emotionally charged and I have a great fear of passing this on to my children, especially my daughter. It's hard to work on it without giving it too much power and let it keep hold over your life.

I'm working on building some inner strength and serenity and have found some help in the works of Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie. I don't fancy going into psychotherapy, so am hoping that writing about the experiences I am having will be a good therapy in itself. Networking with others who share the problem should be very helpful as well.

Do you have any of this kind of deep issues about weight? What have you tried to do to deal with it, and how has it worked? Please share your experiences with us.

The last week hasn't been exactly stellar.

Apart from anything else I was hit with a touch of 'flu which "knocked me for six" in more ways than one.

As a result of the 'flu I ended up spending several days feeling pretty dire and eating quite badly.

I may not have put on much weight, but I definitely didn't make any progress in losing weight as a result.

Lack of progress is bad. You end up in a "catch 22". Your lack of progress means you feel quite negative. The negative feeling makes you feel more negative, so you don't have any motivation. Without motivation it becomes really hard.

Hopefully when I've fully recovered I'll be able to get my "mojo" back!

I generally weight myself on Sunday morning shortly after getting out of bed and before I've had any breakfast.

I'm tracking my progress with FitDay.com, but I have to convert the weights back from Imperial to Metric, which is quite annoying!

Progress has been slow.

I gained back some of the weight I'd initially lost and then lost it again!

Of course I should have really expected something like that to happen - consistent weight loss would have been too much to ask for!

I've lost close to 4kg since I started tracking my weight at the end of November. I'm averaging a weight loss of about 1kg a week, which probably isn't that bad. However I'm a lot more interested in seeing my waistline reducing than I am in simple "weight loss".

My biggest problem is my "gut". As I'm quite tall and broad it may not be as apparent to other people, but I am incredibly conscious of it.

So I may need to step things up a little bit and start doing exercises for my stomach muscles, though I've never been a fan of situps!

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How are you feeling?
Are you happy?
Are you sad?
Are you in love?
Are you bored?
Are you stressed?

These aren't questions that I ask myself every single day - if I did I'd probably lose my mind, but when it comes to dieting and eating properly they are very important.

You could read lots of studies about how people's moods affects their eating habits. But is there any need?

When they're bored a lot of people snack.

If you're not happy you tend to eat badly - you've probably heard people talking about "comfort food" or eating to cheer themselves up.

I'm the same.

When I started making a concerted effort to reduce my waistline and lose weight I was in quite a good mood. Of course that wasn't going to last forever. Things happen in your daily life that have an impact on how you feel, so it's very tempting to either "pig out" or simply lose the motivation to keep up your regime.

At the moment, for example, I am not 100% happy. However I also do not want to have wasted any gains (well they're really losses!) that I've made by straying from "the path".

When I was a lot younger I didn't take sugar in my coffee. Since then I've taken to drinking much stronger coffees, so adding sugar became a natural thing to do. I then decided to replace the sugar with artificial sweetener, but that's probably not the best of ideas either...

But being honest about it, the sugar in the coffee might not be the worst thing. The sugar on the breakfast cereal is probably doing me a lot more damage. So I'm now going to try and cut it out. I might not be able to cut out sugar immediately, but if I can reduce the quantity I use it will probably help a bit ....

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So I'm avoiding lots of food. Trying to eat better and more healthy options etc., etc.

Most of the time it's relatively easy - munching on fruit throughout the day seems to work out okay and if I've got too much fruit other people in the office help make sure that it doesn't go off.

Of course the big question is whether or not any of this is actually working.

While it's nice that people say encouraging things it's hard to know if they're just saying that to help boost your morale. Not that I'm complaining, but tangible results would be so much nicer!

So I was delighted to find that I'd dropped a full kilo when I weighed myself this morning. A full kilo! That's 2 lbs if you're into Imperial measurements.

Unfortunately I suspect that the 1kg is due to my horrible hangover yesterday - as I couldn't stomach food for most of the day, but let's not dwell on that too much.

Other positive things ...

I've bought a smaller belt for my trousers, as the one I was using couldn't be tightened any further and my trousers felt like they were going to fall off me most of the time.

So what now?

Rome wasn't built in a day, so I just need to keep on at it.

As I've mentioned before, I work in IT, so I like gadgets and web services. However I am pragmatic. If it's going to take me hours to setup a profile on a site and keep it up to date, then I probably won't really use it.

In my quest to keep track of my dieting and weight loss (I prefer to refer to it as "change of lifestyle") I sought out some online services to help me.

Weight Watchers have an online service, but as it's pay to use I haven't assessed it as yet.

Three other sites did attract my attention:
Daily Plate
Fit Day
Traineo

There were problems with all 3 sites.

Both Daily Plate and Fit Day are very American, while Traineo's signup page was broken on my first visit. While I did eventually manage to signup a number of the site's functions are not working correctly at present, which is more than a little annoying.
Of the three only two sent me confirmation emails after signing up. FitDay didn't, so I had to search my browser history to work out the site's name.
That is annoying.

Anyway, what about the site's themselves?

All three offer very similar functionality. The main difference is in how you can access it and add your details ie. keep track of your eating, exercise and weight etc.,

Traineo would appear to be the slickest and simplest to use, as they give you a relatively simple "portal" to work from. Unfortunately, like the other sites, it allows you to enter data in lbs or kg, but then displays suggestions related to lbs only, which is really annoying.

Daily Plate is quite powerful by the looks of things, but to be able to access any of the more advanced features you need to upgrade to a paid subscription. It allows you to track what you eat by searching their database, but unfortunately it's very American in its bias and the display of options when you search is confusing to say the least

Fit Day is quite easy to use and doesn't seem to want my money to access any of its features. Unfortunately, while it allows me to set targets and enter data using metric values it provides all of its advice and graphs using Imperial measurements!

After playing around a bit with all three services I'm really none the wiser.

If someone were to launch a more Euro-centric solution I'd probably be a lot happier.

Weight Watchers seems to be a very popular way of losing weight amongst my female friends.

I've been looking into joining weight watchers, as I like to keep my options open, but I have a few reservations.

To start with, while I may be happy to write about my battle to lose weight or to tell anyone I know, I'm not 100% sure if I would like to get involved in a group of complete strangers. I've never been particularly good with groups or anything that involves regularly scheduled meetings, so I don't think I'd feel particularly comfortable going to a meeting by myself. If a friend or colleague was attending as well then I probably would.

The other thing is that while weight watchers has "men only" meetings in some parts of the country, they don't have any in my area.

Of course if I really wanted to I could always opt for the "Weight Watchers at Home" system, which gives you all the booklets that you'd get normally plus you have access to their consultants. 

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If you're sitting at a desk all day you probably end up drinking lots of coffee or tea (I know I do!)

So when you're drinking your tea or coffee you may feel that overwhelming urge to indulge yourself in a snack - maybe a little biscuit or a small bar of chocolate. Wouldn't it be nice to wash down with that coffee?

Stop!

Snacking is a really bad idea!

If you're trying to control your waistline and bring down your weight then you need to cut out unncessary snack in between meals.

If you must eat something then try an apple or an orange - I don't think you can really overdose on fruit!

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As I mentioned before, it's not weight alone that matters, however you do need to keep track of your progress.

So what do you need?

The answer is pretty obvious:

a bathroom weighing scales

Until I went looking for one a couple of weeks ago I hadn't realised that there were so many different types to choose from!

The one I opted for was the Weight Watchers Body Monitoring Electronic Scale, which was reduced in Argos:
Why did I choose this particular one?

I work in IT, so I like electronics gadgets!

It has a LOT of options, which was why I chose it:

• Silver frame with stylish chrome bezel and impact resistant, safety glass platform. - it looks nice
  
• Easy read extra large 48mm clear LCD display. - ie. you don't need to wear your glasses to see how heavy you are
  
• Measures weight, BMI (body mass index), body fat and body water. - if I can work out how to do that it will be useful ... I haven't yet!
  
• Can be used for weight only. - it's a weighing scales, so it would want to be able to do that now, wouldn't it?
  
• Tap start, auto shut off and low battery warning. - the "tap" is more like a "whack", but we'll let them off
  
• Records and displays start, last and goal weights. - very handy - though I still haven't worked out how to get that working!
  
• 4 person memory and 5 fitness levels, including athlete mode. - not sure if I'll find a use for that, but I'm sure others would
  
• Precise positioning indicator ensures even weight distribution for accurate readings. - if it's not accurate it's not much use
  
• Measures in st/lb/kg. - very useful for me, as I like being able to use either
  
• High weight capacity 172kg/27st 2lbs/380lb - that's kind of handy, as some of the cheap scales I've seen aren't able to handle "larger" numbers
  
• Size (W)32, (D)32, (H)3.4cm. - translation - it's not too bloody big
  
• With BIA technology for body analysis measurements. - I've no idea what that is, but it sounds intriguing
  
• Optional carpet feet for accurate readings on carpet. - useful? I've no idea
  
• Includes 2 x long life lithium batteries. - I don't like changing batteries
  
• Manufacturer's 10 year guarantee. - handy
  

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Everyone is different.

It's one of humanity's strengths - we're diverse in more ways than one!

Bearing that in mind when it comes to the ideal weight then it's obviously not as simple as some might think.

If you are a broad shouldered giant you will be able to carry a lot more weight than a lanky beanpole!

The simplest method for calculating ideal weight is via their BMI (body mass index) which basically takes into account height, gender and weight to come up with a figure. Based on that figure you can then see if someone is overweight etc., etc.

If you want to work out your BMI then there are plenty of tools online to help you.

Here are a couple I found (I'm not saying they're better or worse than any others!)

• calculate your ideal weight
• BMI calculator

You'll obviously need to know your height AND weight to be able to use any of those tools!

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Dieting, weight loss and everything to do with the entire subject has been a hot topic and a massive industry for years.

There are probably as many "wonderful" diet systems out there as there are days in the year and for every success story you can probably find several "failures".

The bottom line is that there is no "magic solution".

You can read all the books and watch the dvds, documentaries etc., etc., but if you're looking for a quick and "easy" answer you're probably going to be disappointed.

I've started this little blog as a sideline and personal journal about losing weight (the domain name should give that one away!)

I'm not 100% happy with my weight at present, or more precisely, with my waist size.

I'm in my mid-thirties, so I know that if I don't do something about it now it will be even harder to rectify later.

I'm not going to go on a "crazy diet" or try to run a marathon. I know damn well that trying to do anything extreme is not going to work for me, so instead I'm going to focus on making small changes to my lifestyle that will hopefully help reduce my waist size.

I'll be the first to admit that I've never been thin, but over the last few years I've gone from being a bit heavier than some to being overweight.

I work in IT and sit at a desk all day long and my lifestyle in general hasn't helped matters.

So now I need to change.

Let's see how we get on!