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How to Lose 100 Pounds
As this is my 100th blog post, it seemed fitting to use this opportunity to talk about how I’ve been able to lose over 100 pounds and keep them off. It should be noted that this post can be useful for folks looking to lose 10 pounds, 20 pounds, 50 pounds, or even 200 pounds – it only changes the time frame involved.
Introduction
I started having issues with my weight when I was 6 years old. It wasn’t much at first, but as the years accumulated, so did the pounds. They kept going up until the age of 19, which was when I decided to start walking home from community college. It was at least a two-mile walk and I did it three times a week. I also worked out at the college’s weight room, and those two things combined helped me lose about 35 pounds that year (from 250 to 215).
Once community college was over shortly after I turned 20, the weight slowly came back on and continued to accumulate until I started my current job at the age of 26. The office is located kitty corner from a gym and they had a “two weeks free” special when I started my job, so I decided to go to the gym and check it out. They got me set up with an account there and did a general fitness assessment. I was fairly mortified when I saw that I was up to 307.5 pounds and that was the moment I made the conscious decision to get rid of the weight and never let it come back.
How did I do it? Here’s how.
Create a Healthy Diet Plan
When I started at the gym, they set me up with a nutrition plan that was a basic guide for how to clean up my diet. There was a meal plan included, but they said that the food itself wasn’t important (to a degree) as long as the food was nutritious, the caloric recommendation wasn’t exceeded, and that the food was eaten in smaller portions throughout the day.
The idea behind smaller, more frequent portions is that it keeps the metabolism active for longer parts of the day and burns more calories. If food is eaten six times a day in smaller portions as opposed to three times a day in larger portions, the metabolism has to work twice as much and the food burns up faster, thus creating a larger caloric deficit.
Another thing that’s important is to eat fresh foods as opposed to processed ones. Certain processed foods are alright in moderation, but a lot of pre-packaged food at the grocery store are loaded with sodium. Excessive sodium leads to water weight retention, as well as dehydration and high blood pressure in the long-term. It can be somewhat countered by consuming lots of water, but it’s obviously better to avoid excessive sodium in the first place.
It’s also important to note the when you buy food at the grocery store, pay attention to the nutrition facts listed on the product. I avoid almost all foods that have over 10 grams of total fat in a serving (save for almonds) and all that have over 20% of the recommended daily value of sodium in a serving. I also try to follow the portion sizes as close as possible, though in certain situations, the food doesn’t come with a nutrition facts list (deli, produce). In those cases, common sense will need to be applied.
It should go without saying that fast food should be completely avoided. I think it’s good that they’ve put up the calorie facts for fast food now, because seeing that the items you’re about to purchase and consume have a calorie count in the four-figures should be a good indicator that your metabolism is going to have to work that much harder to burn up the food. Also, I don’t think there’s anything on a fast food menu (maybe salads) that’s going to have a good balance of nutrition. High unhealthy fats and high complex carbohydrates – both of which are more difficult for the metabolism to process – are par for the course.
Also, dining out should be done sparingly – no more than once a week, and preferably no more than once or twice a month. It’s a matter of not knowing the nutrition facts and not knowing how many calories are in the meal that you’re eating. If you do choose to dine out, one way to do so more frequently is to eat only half of what is served and save the other half for a meal later on. The main idea is to not put a tremendous amount of calories in your system all at one time.
There are also a lot of different diets that espouse very narrow dietary regimens. I’m sure people find success with those diets if they stick with them for the rest of their lives, but some people find that eating very narrow diets becomes tedious and boring. I’m somewhat of the opinion that food should primarily be viewed as a source of fuel and not for flavor and enjoyment, but considering my status as a beer aficionado, I’d be a complete hypocrite if I fully espoused that.
A few good points I like to stick with are to stay with foods that are high in fiber, high in protein, low in fat, low in sodium, and low in sugar. These foods aren’t that hard to find, but you have to pay attention to the nutrition facts (or stick with fresh vegetables and lean protein). It also helps to drink a lot of water, as it flushes excess nutrients from your body and keeps you hydrated. I usually try to drink about a gallon a day.
Once you start losing weight, you’ll also need to gradually reduce your caloric intake and/or increase the amount of exercise that you do.
Create an Exercise Plan
After the initial discovery of my 307.5 pound weight, I used all the tools at my disposal to reduce that number. I was frequently doing two-hour workouts – one hour of weights followed by one hour of cardiovascular exercise, usually on an elliptical machine. I worked out with a personal trainer once a week and learned how to exercise in new, more efficient ways while also receiving tips on honing my diet. While I’ve already talked about how important a proper diet is, now I’ll focus on the exercise.
As I just mentioned, the two types of exercise that are key to losing weight are weight lifting and cardiovascular. If you’re looking for strict weight loss and aren’t as concerned about your physique, cardiovascular exercise is the way to go. If you belong to a gym, it’s easy to plot your progress with the readouts on the machines.
I found the elliptical machine to be the most useful when I first started out, as it was a lot easier on my joints and it gives a good, hybrid workout. I did switch to the treadmill once I lost more weight, and I used to use both machines to increase my endurance, which I wrote about in my Endurance Routine post earlier this year.
A rather important aspect of cardiovascular exercise on machines is to make sure to track your progress every time you work out – write down the amount of work you did, the amount of time you spent, and the amount of calories that were burned. Armed with that information, you can either gradually increase the amount of work you do or the amount of time you work out to increase the amount of calories burned.
If you don’t have access to the gym, walking or jogging around the neighborhood is a free and easy way to get some exercise. It’s a little more difficult to track your progress this way, but you can always measure the time spent exercising and the distance traveled, then gradually increase both of those factors as you see fit.
While doing cardiovascular exercise alone can get you to where you want to go, adding weight training to the equation will likely speed things up. You can also lose weight with pure weight lifting and no other cardiovascular exercise, but it requires more time than it would with just doing cardiovascular exercise or doing both.
Also, if you don’t lift enough weight or with enough frequency, you won’t really see results – I should know, as I’ve been weight lifting since I was 16 and haven’t really achieved any real results from weight lifting alone until recently this year, which I talked about in my Work Out from Home post from two weeks ago. It’d be rather redundant to talk about all of my techniques again, but I’ll go over a few things.
When I was doing that hour of weight lifting on the nights that I worked out at the beginning, I wasn’t concerned with focusing on any certain body part – I tried to hit them all. If anything, it was more of a low-impact, cardiovascular-focused approach to lifting weight, even though I was trying to add muscle. It didn’t work as I actually lost 10 pounds of lean mass (good weight) after losing my first 70 pounds. While it was a little disappointing, it didn’t bother me too much, as I had still lost 70 pounds.
The idea behind building muscle is two-fold – muscle adds lean mass (good weight) to your body and more lean mass helps to burn fat. A unit of muscle weighs more than a unit of fat, due to fat being basically water and muscle is a relatively dense tissue. Once the muscles are being built and the fat weight is being reduced and replaced by lean mass, it becomes easier to do higher-impact exercises such as running and martial arts, which further increase the amount of fat that is burnt.
A key to actually being able to build mass is to work each muscle group at least twice a week with a few different exercises. Once a week or less won’t net much positive muscle gain and can lead to muscle loss if too much cardiovascular exercise is being done (which occurred in my case). It’s all about finding the proper balance in accordance to your weight loss goals.
Finding Balance
Getting the results you want from diet and exercise does take a lot of work and a lot of trial and error. All changes in diet and exercise should be done gradually and permanently (if they’re positive changes) so you don’t boomerang back up to the weight you were when you started.
I’ve found it’s also useful to set small goals instead of big ones. When I first started dropping the weight, I set the goal to lose 100 pounds in 10 pound intervals. 290 was my first goal, and once I hit it, 280 was the next one, and so on.
I also did my best to make sure the weight didn’t creep back up on me, so if I got below a certain goal, I would set an upper limit for myself (usually five pounds above my last goal) that if I hit that limit, I would knuckle down and do as much in my power to get back below that limit and stay there. Currently, my upper limit is 200 pounds and if I creep up there after a holiday weekend (like this one), I will cut out what I can from my diet and increase my water intake beyond a gallon to flush out as much waste as possible.
It does take a lot of time and effort to lose weight in a healthy fashion, but I can’t even begin to describe how much better I feel now that I’ve lost so much weight thanks to cleaning up my diet and exercising more. I highly recommend it!
Discuss this post at the For the Love of Creativity Forum!
Posted on November 27th, 2010.
External Links
• Athletic Alley – Sexy Organic Blog Carnival 38 | Athletic Alley
• Fitbuff.com – Total Mind and Body Fitness Blog Carnival 182 | FitBuff.com’s Health Secrets Blog
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