How Do I Lose Weight ? First Learn Why You Gained It
The infamous question, how do I lose weight and how do I keep it off? Has been branded on my forehead!
The question has been asked and will always be asked by thousand from now to eternity even though it has been answered many times; it is just that people are not listening.
Hello and welcome to Don’t ReGain It. A blog dedicated those that have not lost hope and are still scouring the web for answers.
I am going to do my best to coach you on what I have learned in 30+ years of being in the Fitness and Health world.
In this s blog I will break down the concepts that, even though we know, we have not put the pieces together
A lot of what I will explain here can and will relate to just about every aspect of our lives, including finances, education, and maybe even relationships. You will see the parallel process required to optimize just about any aspect of your life.
We first need to understand that we all have the power to change and improve but this can only happen if we believe we can change and improve.
We need to be open to other possibilities, and strangely enough, this can be accomplished by just about everyone.
I will repeat this; weight loss among other things can be accomplished by everyone.
So stay and read with an open mind you can only take a forward step if you believe that it will help you.
Confusing Answers
It is quite confusing and overwhelming when you look at health and weight loss books on Amazon (I also like to go to Barnes and Nobles, the library and second-hand bookstores) and see all the books on display. You will see a row of beautiful covers, bodies, beautiful faces and colors. The athletics and gorgeous people in the covers just pull you and entice you to purchase them.
You might read them and try to understand them, but honestly, they throw around a lot of medical sounding words and concepts that we have only heard a few times through the media. The authors of these books, we learn, are very young fitness instructors or perhaps Physicians, and that their life’s work has been dedicated to “helping the world,” and that their soul passion has been to help people regain their health, slimness, and beauty.
“At the end of the day,” they are all about the same. They follow the same pattern, and they end up in the same hallway. The authors of these books will tell you that if you eat certain foods in a certain pattern or eat most of a certain color or certain density or that is not eaten by a cow but is not milked from a cow but can eat form a cow massaged and loved and organic feed.
What a bunch of malarkey.
What They Don’t Tell You
What they don’t tell you is that as soon as you lose the weight, you start your most miserable part of your dieting which is fighting off the pounds that start to come back slowly but surely.
To lose weight, you need to eat less, but if you have spent your entire adult life gaining weight and then you try to change your lifestyle quickly, you are going to fail miserably.
Not that eliminating calories is wrong, is that the entire weight reduction process is tried to be completed in the quickest way possible.
Losing weight very fast is similar to when you decide to run a marathon even though you have not run in a while or even worse never ran or even worse, that you hate to run.
You can push yourself through the daily runs and other exercises you see fit or have been told to try to help you achieve your goal the fastest.
To make it to the finish line hungry, tired and joints aching.
You cross the line, and you feel a great sense of accomplishment and are exhilarated because of your success. Yes, you are physically hurting, but the accomplishments make you feel like a million, then, you never run a mile again!
Does this sound familiar? It is almost the same for weight loss except that you keep on doing it over and over.
The crowded and loud internet makes it so that those that are really good marketers will be the ones in display and such a high position as being in front of an audience all the time given them the false legitimacy of being a real expert. Surprisingly some are experts at what they preach but what they preach is just a superficial scientific way. A process designed by a money making system, sure, why change it if it is bringing you a lot of money?
Why Are They Selling Us the “Fail-Proof” to Fail Products?
As a consumer, you need to remember that there is no one out there that is obligated to keep you healthy or to give you the best product available to make you happy forever. The job of the seller is to sell their product in any which way. It is up to you to protect yourself.
Selling short-term result sell better than the long-term result, it is a recurring business.
So you have noticed all “diets” answers the same question of weight loss with the similarly reducing calories process. It is easy to see that this is the direction to take. However, there is no one showing you why we eat what we eat or why we cannot resist foods?
Why can you not keep an exercise program? No one is talking about how to keep up with good eating habits or simple life habits. Why?
Have we not all lost weight, have we not all stayed in an exercise program and willed ourselves through incredible odds and lost the weight and look fabulous to have the weight creep back up slowly and we are powerless to stop it?
What do the gurus say about that? Will they say; you did not follow my program to the T!
That is their answer that you did not follow the program the way they have described it otherwise you would then be beautiful.
How do I lose weight should be replaced by How can I keep the weight off and keep it off forever?
Ask Them to Explain Why
Have you ever asked them how come, people, before the 1970’s were so slim and that there was a movement toward gaining weight because most could not gain weight?
What is the answer to that? How come they were slim, and we are not?
Has anybody ever mentioned the little fact about the infamous 1978 accidental discovery?
We should be asking to TELL ABOUT the food manufacturing industry 1979 and how it exploded and correlated it to the book Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us- Michael Moss
In 1978 there was an accidental discovery that changed America and is still being changed by it.
Ask them about the perfect storm in the late 1970’s at a time when America maintained a steady upward slope of weight increase, it was a slow increase, but it had been going up at the same rate for a while.
How the U.S. Low-Fat Diet Recommendations of 1977 Contributed to the Declining Health of Americans
The recommendations have served as a screen to mask the fact that food manufacturers had found the magic goose when they started to use functional MRI and became extremely scientific with marketing research and food manufacturing reserch.
Motivation
Another big phrase that is tossed around all the time is “motivation,” that people just do not have enough motivation to achieve their goals, that they are lazy.
I DISAGREE, I do not believe overweight people are not motivated I think they are too motivated.
I know this sounds controversial but listen me out.
Motivation might be working against us. Motivation is a misunderstood concept, and we need to understand this concept as soon as possible especially in weight loss.
I have seen some of the most motivated people while trying to exercises themselves to a slimmer self. They work out in the heat and run with this huge frame and pound their bodies on unforgiving concrete streets then deprive themselves of food they love and then they simply eat less and less. They can drop their weight, but the effort is so astronomical that they cannot keep it up and their bodies will fight them and will start to regain the weight.
Again, losing the weight is doable but to keep it off is the jewel.
How to do it
Weight loss is a lot like learning to play a new sport or improve your finances. We all have learned little habits that are so ingrained in our day that we do not even think of them as habits. We have little rituals that we think are cute and quaint. We have learned them so well that if we were to try to change them, we would have a very hard time doing it.
We have mastered the art of eating and gaining weight, after all, it has taken us at least a decade to learn the fine art of bulking up.
Research related to what is the best process that has helped people keep the weight off speaks loud and clear.
First thing: Write down everything you eat, yes everything you eat even if it is just chewing gum. You need to write it down.
I am a believer in this process but not for an eternity. I believe that several weeks is plenty and if you are having problems keeping the weight off, then it might be a good idea to keep writing down everything you eat even after you have kept the weight off for a while.
Second: Take the weigh-off slowly, approximately one pound per week.
Let us be realistic, some of you will see this info and say “yes it does make sense.” Those might be ones that might see the reasoning and are those that have tried everything before with pretty much the same outcome, failure.
I know this does not sound cool or sexy and not a great story to tell your colleagues. A better story would be that you are losing weight so fast that you have to spend a fortune buying new clothes and that your old flame just saw you and its Hello there gorgeous/handsome!
These are the ones that do not want to try it because they are entangled in the coolest thing of the day. This group is interested in what you will try and talk to their mates about all of the time at how cool and how much sense it makes and how they are a beast/animal and follow the jungle process. And how easy it is to be a flesh eater or scavenger or a hunter and gatherer type and that you feel fierce.
After all they have all heard about a new diet, or exercise routine, giving it a good try for 3-6 months then give up because it started like gangbusters and then slowly plateaued and slowly the weight started to creep up again and again.
But this is only the adverting working on you, but the result will never match the cool media presentation.
In your coolness, you have helped those people make more money, and they will laugh all the way to the bank, while you are still miserable.
Finally, the ones that do not want to believe. A lot of people do not want to believe me and a whole bigger group will dislike me saying this since it challenges their believe. Their believe that it is not up to them to create the change. A large group of people want to believe that it is beyond them to make the change and if I say it is up to you then they become hostile.
At the end of the day, they are all still miserable.
What to do
So, returning to the little habit, we have learned throughout our entire life.
For us to help ourselves and create a good pattern to succeed we need to know what we are doing.
That is the reason we need to write down what we eat. You have to write everything down. Once you become proficient at writing down everything, then you need to add how you are feeling while you are eating.
Surprisingly writing down everything will give you insight into what you have not seen before. You will start to realize the little things that are going on that you had no idea.
Most of the time individuals start making corrections that are small and then start to see changes. Surprisingly the majority of the changes are created by the journalers themselves, without the intervention of coaches or trainers. While journaling you will see little things that are so tiny but add to their misery that they make the small change and see rapid improvement.
I like 3-6 weeks of writing. I am not a believer in being a slave to a book. The book helps you get over a hurdle, but I let the client or a patient decide if they want to keep it up for a while.
The other interesting finding of the above research was slow weight loss works the best:
I am lucky to be a Sports Med therapist. I work with athletes and Marines all the time. I teach them how to improve just about any movement and exercises, and I predict if they are going to do well within the next few weeks or not according to how they follow my specific plans.
The patients that try to “rehab” too quickly tend to re-injure themselves more often, which causes them to take more time to see progress. The body can only repair itself at a certain rate and no matter what you do is not going to make it faster. You cannot fool mother nature.
People who are at a very high level of fitness can return to activity before they are fully healed, but always stand the chance of re-injury and are not able to participate at their peak. They have a hard time reaching their peak again, and it might happen after they take a little time off due to sickness, time of due to holiday or another injury. Some injuries you might be able to participate at a good level, but their full recovery might take a full year.
Our digestive system is like any tissue in an athlete, and it needs adjustment time to retract, heal, or learn.
Digestive tissue “feels” the stretch of the fibers and need that stretch to maintain homeostasis. If the stretch is not there, the system feels like a person in the dark feeling for someone that was there by their stretched arm and touching them. Now they don’t feel anything and feel lost and confused. To allow the system to feel the similar comfortable, food volume needs to be going in and stretching the digestive wall. You can decrease the volume by a fraction just enough that it will not make the system feel blind in the dark with nothing to direct it.
If the change is so tiny that it causes minor disruption or any disruption at all, then the system is happy. The system will adapt to the small change, but it needs time. After a couple of weeks like this then another small change is introduced and if the system, again, does not sense a disruption in the sensory vision it will not sense distress.
Seem like a strategy developing here does it not?
This process might feel that is very slow and in a way it is slow, but in the long run, it is the fastest way to lose weight and keep it off.
