My scale performs some really cool functions: It not only tells me my mass, but it also provides me with approximate fat and water percentages. This gives me basically everything I need to lose weight.
Now, to lose weight healthfully, I needed a bit more information, so I did research, for example, everyone I look at says you should not try to lose more than 2 lbs per week of dieting, This is unhealthy. Healthy body fat for a male is between 9 and 15%. In most cases, BMI actually does work with this if you measure yourself. I have found the focus on fat reduction is completely missing from pretty much every fad diet. They make really stupid assumptions: Let me line them out for you:
Assumption 1: If I weigh less, it's better! Completely false if you lose the weight by reducing your hydration level. You can also lose weight by digesting muscle fiber and internal organs, or amputating a limb. No one's goal should be an arbitrary number of pounds because it sounds great. No one's goal should be a dress or pant size. To be honest, even a BMI range is of very limited usefulness because of the wide variation we see in the human species. to set up my diet, I actually ignored how many pounds I weigh, and even my BMI, and I looked to the ideal setup of an average human being, and related that to how realistic it is for me with consideration to my relation to the average human being in overall health, size, and build.
Assumption 2: You are what you eat! While it is true that if you eat just fat all day you get fat, and if you eat only carrots you turn orange, you are NOT what you eat. Your body manipulates everything you ingest through both simple and extremely complicated chemical processes, and it's assenine to assume that your ass is made of what comes in your mouth. If you are what you eat, why do we not regularly eat seratonin, or insulin? Our bodies take what we eat and process the crap out of it! (literally actually, it processes the crap out of it and excretes the crap) I really don't know how my hamburger turns into the chemicals and hormones I need, but it does. The lesson I can take, however, is that even if I eat no fat, only simple carbs... my body is talented enough to string those carbohydrates together in the right order to store it as fat. Just cutting your fat doesn't mean you're less fat, it means you eat less fat. This is why Atkins actually can reduce your fat weight, because fat that goes in doesn't necessarily stay as fat in your bloodstream.
Assumption 3: Less is more. Many diets kind of assume that if you just eat less, you'll get skinny. It works for the african orphans, right? This, of course is coupled with the idea that we just want to lose weight, not change proportions of anything. Weight watchers improperly practised is the epitome of this false assumption. As long as you only eat your allotted 20 weight watcher's points, you'll weigh less! I'm aware that real weight watchers involves a bit more, but let's face it, the way it's planned must be offset by the way it's practiced. The belief of how weight watchers works is starve yourself, lose weight, fit into jeans!
Assumption 4: Weightloss is aesthetic! To be honest most diet places need to push this line to get people convinced they should lose weight. It often fits with the "you should be this size" falsehood. Alternately people also fall into the lie of everyone is beautiful, and we are losing weight to let that inner beauty out, or some crap like that. To be honest, the majority of dieting that should occur needs to happen with complete disregard of how you look. If you are underweight, you need to gain weight. I don't care if you are getting love handles. A healthy fat percentage for women is around 20 to 25 percent you'll see a variation of 2 to 3% depending on the source. And everyone stores fat differently, unfortunately, ladies, your body doesn't let you choose to store all your fat in your boobs, and you need more fat on you than men, we'd be better off if you just get yourself in a healthy range and when anyone calls you fat, you kick their skinny ass down the street. Aesthetics cannot influence you in weightloss, because for starters, it's vain, secondly, it's only a small part of the picture of your aesthetic value, and finally, you will be ugly anyway when you're old. It'd be nice though, to be ugly and not have an amputated foot because you were too busy stuffing krispy kremes down your craw, or to be ugly but not in a wheel chair because you removed too much body cavity fat in your quest for a hot body, and now your body can't sustain itself because you abused it with unhealthy weight levels.
Assumption 5: Losing weight on your own is unhealthy! This is my pet peeve. If you are going to leave a judgement telling me to be careful about losing weight without a "professional plan" prepare for me to tell you to stick it where the sun don't shine. I mean that, I'll print it out, show up at your house with rubber gloves and give you an enema with your own comments, then light them on fire. Losing weight without a plan is unhealthy, and as I've said, losing weight just for weight loss is unhealthy. You don't need a huge group to give you mail order food, you just need to follow some simple rules to stay healthy.
Here's some of the concepts that are key to my diet:
My ideal body fat is between 9 and 15%, My current body fat is around 23%
I am and want to continue to be at least average muscularity.
I have a target to be able to perform arduous cardio tasks. An example of an arduous cardio task is to walk three miles carrying 45lbs in 45 minutes. This is a standard from fire fighting, you can find other arduous standards from the US military, Marines, and other branches of the armed service. When it comes to activity abilities, I suggest these as sources because they rely routinely on the fitness of the human body and have a decent understaning of what your average human should be able to do. Now, just because I want to be able to perform arduous tasks does not mean that an arduous task is a regular part of my exercise. The word arduous should be a tip off. THIS SHOULD NOT BE ROUTINE!!! It should be something I do perhaps monthly, while and ONLY while performing moderately difficult cardio activities as a REGULAR part of my exercise, and these moderately difficult activities should be walked into starting at easy and working upward steadily until I reach a point where I notice I am having difficulty in my daily exercise. At this point, my exercise needs to be felt through. I decrease the difficulty slightly so that I am not hurting at the end of the routine, and then each week I gradually increase the difficulty until I find my threshhold for difficulty again, this way you work your body into the difficulty level. Once you reach a point of moderate to difficult cardio activity, you don't need to increase it. Just stick with it, there's no reason to perform insane cardiovascular tasks on a daily basis. It's often very hard on other parts of your body, like your joints and ligaments.
I am routinely underhydrated. There are two ways to check this out. My scale is one: it gives me a percentage, the quick test is urine color. Yellow bad, clear good! when it's light brown or comes out in powdered form, it's time to break out the 3 liter jug and chug.
one pound of human fat is approximately 3500 dietary calories. I use this as my baseline. I want to lose around 2 pounds of fat per week, this means I need to know my resting metabolic needs, the needs for my activities, and how much I'm eating. This is all really easy information to find, and the calories become instinctive, (much like carbs for diabetics) with practise and just watching what you are ingesting. (one albertson's cookie, 115 calories, a milky way dark 240 calories) I know that to lose 2 lbs of fat I need a 7000 calorie deficit in a week, This comes to in a week I should have a 1000 calorie deficit every day. My metabolic calorie need (calculatable) is around 2100 calories, my usual daily routine provides an additional 600 - 700 calories, putting my consumption level at around 1800 calories. If I put in an extra 200 calories of exercise (rough equivalent of me walking casually 2 miles) then I'm up to the very very easy 2000 calorie daily guideline.
The exercise in there is not optional. It's utterly necessary because your body is very adaptable. It will actually shut down nonessential stuff to conserve calories if it sees you trying to starve it. Like when you unplug your laptop and it dims the screen to save batteries. By exercising you increase your metabolism for about the next 12 hours after you exercise. Like when you hit the button on your cell phone and your screen is bright for another 30 seconds. The exercise is how I keep hitting the button on my body, keeping the screen bright, continuing to burn up the big battery attached to my thighs and tummy.
Eat your vitamins... with food... preferably fat ones. Also drink a full glass of water. Vitamins are not a food replacement, actually most vitamins need something to bind with for proper uptake, take Vitamin K, for example is soluable in fat, and when you add fat to your green spinach, it increases the availability. The principle remains the same for your centrum. You get better usage when the vitamins have something to hang on to. As far as time of day, I've found no one who really scientifically suggests that morning or night is better for absorption. Any recommendations I've seen are actually based on the psychology of forming habits, which I ignore. Your body needs these vitamins, and the multivitamin is there to fill in holes that may be in your diet one day or another, it's not to replace your food. The water is also needed because your body absorbs water very well, and lots of vitamins dissolve in the water, making an ideal delivery system through your intestines. I personally take a multivitamin, similar to Centrum, a LOT of vitamin C (water soluable and non-toxic at high levels) a L-Lysine which is supposed to give immune system health benefits, Calcium with other stuff to help with absorption, and a flax seed oil, which we originally got for Whitney but I hate to let it go to waste and it's too big for her little throat. I don't know what it does other than be really big and hard to swallow. You need the vitamins because in losing fat, your body has to do more conversions than you've been doing, or at least do them in the reverse order. You've been fad dieting wrong so it's been taking your carbs and tying them together in fat chains, or worse, taking the fat you eat and making minor conversions and storing them as-is: fat. Now it has to take those fat chains and break them into a form useable on the cellular level. This needs catalysts and stuff, which the vitamins are apparently useful for.
My favorite delivery for vitamins is almonds, which can be chewed into a paste and then about four pills thrown into your mouth which are undetectable when mixed into the almond paste. Almonds themselves are great for you, one of the closest things I've seen to a miracle food, they are pretty well balanced have good fats in them, one serving is roughly a handful (about 25 almonds) and you can buy a huge bag at bulk stores for under 10 bucks. Skip the organic crap that costs 10 bucks for a couple servings.
Follow your food pyramid. Really, I promise. They didn't lie to you in grade school, contrary to what your harvard profs might say as they try to push their vegetarian agendas down your throat. But honestly, there's nothing wrong with a good couple servings of beef. The problem is that we generally eat beef 4 servings at a time. Did you know that two double quarter pounders with Cheese from McDonalds has about twice the amount of meat you need that day, and about 100% of the calories? I'm not saying don't eat a double quarter pounder with cheese, I'm just saying keep in mind you should be having fruit and cottage cheese for dinner.
Eat your breakfast! Not the most important meal of the day, but you'll notice if you eat breakfast you are more hungry by lunch. This is because your body knows there's food today, and fires up your metabolism. helpful for losing weight.
Coffee and pop are not bad! I get so sick of this I could scream. People berate me for drinking my diet coke. "Caffeine is bad for you" they say, "It's a diaheurretic" they claim (they are wrong, it's actually one of the substances caffeine is metabolized into by the liver that is a diaheurretic, and these levels are around only 4% the caffeine consumed, and in all but extreme cases are purely incidental) Also the amount of water in Diet Coke vastly outdoes the diaheurretic effect of the caffeine contained in the diet coke. The next complaint is "There's sodium in Diet coke" yah, there is, read the label, 40 mg of sodium to be exact, if you read the can it says "VERY LOW SODIUM" what is very low? for US reference, Normal saline (injected directly into your blood stream to treat extreme dehydration) has about 266mg per Oz, Diet coke has about 3.3 mg per Oz, which means Normal Saline is about 80 times more concentrated with sodium than Diet coke. So, yes, Diet Coke actually hydrates you. Some people attack the carbonation (most of it comes out during the drinking process, and your cells naturally give off CO2 during metabolism, hence we breathe it out) and some say "There's acid and it can dissolve a stake (or steak)" check out myth busters. It cannot. The key to acid is molality. Diet coke is WAY less acidic than, say, an orange, or vinegar, both of which I routinely ingest with no one whining.
Drink your diet coke! It has less than a calorie per serving, and unless your pregnant, I really can't find a relevant arguement against drinking sane amounts of it. Obviously you should drink some water too, but there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING wrong with drinking it for something bubbly along with lunch and a snack, and hell, even dinner and breakfast if you're so inclined. People forget, even if I counted my diet cokes as waters, I still need to drink four more glasses of it during the day if I have one with breakfast, lunch, dinnner, and a snack. Which is more water than they are generally ingesting in the first place.
That brings me to my last diet rant: Drink your water! One of the leading problems of people in nursing homes is acctually dehydration. This accounts for things like constipation, and lack of energy, all the way up to eye issues, since your eyes are actually fairly water-intensive organs. Just drink it, and no, there's nothing wrong with tap water. And by the way, take some salt with your water. Your pee should be clear, but you shouldn't be peeing every 15 minutes. You actually need a saline solution to maintain hydration, because your blood keeps the water by a sort of osmotic pressure. If you don't replenish your salt stores, the water passes through and just flushes more salt from your system, reducing your water holding capacity. This is extremely notable on fires. If it is 104, you are cutting fire line, and you pee... you need salt. I have drinken over two gallons in a day and never peed once, because it was mostly being utilized for cooling. Naturally, I also ate a crapload of chips, because in that weather, pee is wasted water. Your blood is a saline solution. Remember I said normal saline, pumped straight into your blood? not distilled water. Distilled water will actually kill you in short order. It has 9 full grams of salt per liter of water. You can use this as a guide... for each liter of water you ingest, you should try to figure in about 9 grams (9000 mg) of salt from your diet. This is way easier than you think and most of the time you won't have to work at it, but if you are peeing every time you take a drink and it's crystal clear... think about downing some pretzels, ok?
All in all, while I'm NOT a dietition, use some common sense and arm yourself with knowledge of what is healthy for a human being before you do any diet, even if it's got a Doctor's go ahead on it... because frankly, you can design a better diet for you than anyone else, if you take the time to stop and think.
Finally, the big thing with dieting is to measure, measure measure! weighing myself everynight has ultimately become a very rewarding activity that keeps me and my diet on track, unless i'm sick. then all dieting rules go out the window, You just rest and drink, and get better before you go hog-wild depriving your body of calories.
