Quote:
Originally Posted by AnonymousOne  Here's a simple one: stop drinking soda.
If you go from drinking a can a day (8 oz.) at 150 calories to nothing, you'll lose over 15 LBs in the next year from that change alone. |
I'll give a BIG second to that one. I lost 85 pounds (over about a 6 year period) by doing very little other than not drinking soda or milk (I was a big milk drinker too and people often don't realize there's an awful lot of available sugar in milk). I basically drank nothing but water all those years, and I found that after feeling really, really deprived for about a month, it ceased to bother me and I began to enjoy the water quite a bit more than I used to enjoy the soda because unlike soda,
water actually quenches your thirst. Soda just gives you a brief relief and then makes you thirstier than ever. It's how soda manufacturers increase sales.
Now that I'm close to where I want to be, weight-wise, and I'm also someplace where raw milk is available (healthier and less problematic than homogeonized / pasturized milk, and delicious too), I drink some milk, but probably about one third as much as I used to.
Oh, I was also a HUGE bread-eater and cut bread and pastas WAY back. That was tougher, but I made an unexpected discovery: some intermittent bowel irregularity and fairly annoying levels of gassiness vanished. I had been tested for celiac disease and gluten intolerance and the tests were negative -- but even so, apparently bread and pastas were causing me problems, probably by some mechanism medicine hasn't figured out yet. May have simply caused overgrowth of the wrong sorts of gut flora or something. Oddly, I find that I can tolerate bread products made from spelt flour much better than any other ... but I understand that sort of thing varies alot from person to person.
I don't do well with calorie-counting. It worked better for me to cut out 2 or 3 of my worst foods, and conditioning myself to not stuff myself ... ones stomach shrinks, and it doesn't take so much to feel satisfied, but you have to be aware of eating habits that are no longer necessary or which feed their own problem. Don't distend your stomach at every meal and after awhile you'll feel just as full.
Lastlly, my late wife was instrumental in helping me overcome a mental block regarding exercise. She couldn't understand my intense aversion to it and forced me to talk about it (don't you just love it when women say "we need to talk"). What I realized in thinking it through was that I equated exercise with jocks and jocks with ********. I hated ********, hated ******* jocks, and therefore hated exercise. Once I saw this illogical (if in ways understandable and human) connection, I was able to join the local gym without feeling like some kind of sellout or like I was going to suddenly develop an urge to give people wedgies. Excersize helped, too. You really need excersize as well as reduced caloric intake.
--Bob