I did this same technique myself starting about a year before my wedding. I lost a lot of weight and became a lot stronger and it was pretty awesome. I didn't pay for a gym, but got some weights and a bench at home and did things that way.
Several years and one kid later, I'm back to being fat. Somewhere along the line the calorie counting became less disciplined and then faded away entirely - I don't even know when or why that happened. It just did. The weight lifting time got shorter and shorter to make room for other aspects of life and schedule changes, etc. And eventually, it was gone too. So now I'm back where I started.
I can't recommend this book highly enough: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583870067. Get an exercise ball (duraball is the best) and you can do a ton of work outs from your house. The dieting recommendations in the book are a bit out-dated but it's really a great book.
Seriously. You simply won't want to eat, and if you think you want to eat, you'll be surprised at how untasty that delicious looking candy bar or pasta is once it hits your lips. It's almost as if your body conspires against your best efforts to gain weight, which is a nice reversal for once.
In conjunction, take a high-quality multivitamin like SuperNutrition or Alive and you'll also find yourself with enough energy that you'll go crazy if you don't exercise. Yeah, it helps you want to exercise. That is key for me.
It's so much easier to take your daily olive oil and find yourself automatically disgusted at the sight of heavy food than to rely on sheer discipline, which is probably why you're overweight to begin with. And besides, olive oil is good for preventing disease.
It also helps that you'll feel the effects working on the same day you start, and you should see an encouraging difference on the scale a week later (I lost 5 pounds on the first week with no exercise - almost scary).
You win, like, 3 times on Shangri-La + high-quality multivitamin, and you don't have to have much discipline to get started.
I found Hacker's Diet (http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/) by John Walker (Autodesk founder) to be entertaining reading by itself, it also has some useful advice.
The Abs Diet (http://www.amazon.com/Abs-Diet-Six-Week-Flatten-Stomach/dp/1...) is written in a bit over-patronizing language for my taste, but has a lot of useful info about different nutrients, how to read food labels, how to structure meals to keep blood sugar level constant, etc. Exercises in the book are not bad too.
By combining these two approaches I was able to steadily loose weight and feel better for more than a year. Recent change it lifestyle changed that, I'm looking into reworking my routine to get back on track again.
His advice is not bad, but it can be simplified: low carb diet. Avoid specially excess fructose, so yes, lose the sodas, and sweets and sugar. And cereals derivatives (like bread). Also starchy vegetables (like potatoes).
Exercise if you want muscle, but it's not necessary or sufficient.
Building up muscle tissue also helps you burn calories faster when not working out. Cool little details I learned at the gym.
This is a very common myth.
To their surprise, the researchers found that none of the groups, including the athletes, experienced “afterburn.” They did not use additional body fat on the day when they exercised. In fact, most of the subjects burned slightly less fat over the 24-hour study period when they exercised than when they did not.[1]
I'm not sure they are talking about the same kind of exercise. One is about building muscle mass, the other is cardio. Increased muscle mass does increase resting metabolism.
So, you are saying that a woman weighing 100 pounds with 20% bodyfat will burn the same amount of calories as a male weighing 200 pounds with 10% bodyfat? Do you realize how little sense that makes?
Good advice, though I think he overemphasizes the gym. The point of exercise is to emphasize how much overeating costs you. It's harder to justify that candy bar when it equates to an hour of hard exercise.
Very true. I burn 1000 kcals in an hour of running on an easy day, and closer to 1300 during a tempo workout.
Also, the health benefits of cardio are numerous, ranging from stress reduction to neurogenesis to longer telomeres. It's not just about how good looking your body is.
700 kcals is on the extreme high end for an hour of cycling. You'd have to be fairly heavy already and pushing it as hard as you can go. A normal person putting in average effect is probably more like 250-300 kcal.
I weigh 145. 700 kcals is about "tempo" effort: hard, but still fun-hard. All out, in the best shape of my life for one hour is around 900 kcals. I'm in good, but not phenomenal shape; my brief flirtations with road racing ended in utter humiliation.
I know this because of my on-bike power meter, which measures mechanical work in kJ. That "perfect hour" was around 280 W, and I've done it twice. (Cyclists have a very narrow range of biological efficiencies, so you can just multiply mechanical by a constant to reckon metabolic work.)
He uses the guilt of owning a gym membership to make himself more disciplined. I think if he did better on being disciplined and super-disciplined, the gym membership wouldn't be necessary.
> Lots of diets tell you to reward yourself with one good meal or a really yummy snack after a week of successful dieting and exercise. Fuck that. You’re fat. Punish yourself until you lose the weight
Awesome. As my friend put it, there's a shortage of discipline in the world.
> As my friend put it, there's a shortage of discipline in the world.
This is very wrong. Obesity is not a shortage of discipline, is a hormonal disruption. We play havoc with insulin eating too much of things we didn't evolved to eat.
I'm sorry but I don't buy it. I'm not obese, most people I know are not obese and they are all exposed to the same modern, engineered food that obese people are. I'm not claiming that hormonal disruption doesn't influences it nor am I saying the modern Western diet is any good for you, but I will claim that the majority of obesity, from my limited life experience, comes from lack of self control.
If one exercised discipline and consumed 1500 kcal of even modern, terrible, HFCS-infused food, they would not get fat. Period. They won't necessarily be healthy, but they will not be overweight.
Anyway, this argument is not novel nor is it in the scope of this thread. Just wanted to say congratulations to the OP.
I _am_ obese and I don't buy it either. I've lost 40 pounds over the past 3 years following a scaled down version of the exact same plan as in the post. And I've gained 5 back over the past 3 months by being lax.
There are many people who do have legitimate health problems that cause obesity, sure. But the vast majority of us fat folk (I still hover around 280) eat too much and move too little.
I need to lose weight (I'm about 320lbs now, his maximum, though I'm 5' 9", and somehow I never, ever hear anyone say anything insulting about my weight), but I'm not sure the personality and attitude problem that appears to go with it is worth it. ;)
you lose weight by eating fewer calories, then get your metabolism going with exercise on a daily basis. You need to stay disipline to eat the right things and follow your workout goals. It is simple in theory, but hard to execute for most.
This is obviously true, but it's not as simple as it may seem.
The body has a complex energy regulation system and hunger, energy consumption via metabolism and energy storage are interlaced. It's not as simple as "energy in" = independent variable.
It has a preference to store (instead of immediately use) calories from carbohydrates (due to insulin). So a diet low in total calories but still high in carbs is going to be painful, and very frequently fails.
This is fundamentally true but I usually add this caveat: All calories aren't equal.
Having a negative energy balance is going to ultimately lead to weight loss, yes. But it's important to eat good foods (whole grains, fruits, vegetables) so you 'feel better' even though you're eating less calories.
This journal article (A Role for Sweet Taste: Calorie Predictive Relations in Energy Regulation
by Rats: http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/bne-feb08-swithers.pdf ) is about a comparing natural and artificial sweeteners. The point of the article is the rats fed artificial sweeteners gained more weight than the rats fed real sugar.
It's just a little evidence in support of the original author's assertion that 'Light products are for pussies.' The truth is that while that Diet Coke may have less calories in it, it can also lead to an increase in appetite (read: weight gain.)
Several years and one kid later, I'm back to being fat. Somewhere along the line the calorie counting became less disciplined and then faded away entirely - I don't even know when or why that happened. It just did. The weight lifting time got shorter and shorter to make room for other aspects of life and schedule changes, etc. And eventually, it was gone too. So now I'm back where I started.
Sigh.