If anyone could give me their absolute best tips to lose weight, I would be greatful

[Loser2WinnerGuy]

Hi guys, I've been reading Steve Pavlina's blog for well over a year now, and have learned a lot. I'm trying to make some BIG changes in my life right now, and one of them has to do with my body: I'm severly overweight and out of shape. I started exercising last week, but I've exercised before too and not really lost a whole lot of weight. If anyone here could give me some pointers I'd appreciate it.

Thanks for your time.

[silicon toad2000]

I don't get much time to exercise I have lost about 10kgs over the last year by eating clean whole food and knowing what I am eating in terms of calories, protein, carb and fat content.

I wrote down everything i eat in a normal day, and substituted most things for other things with more nutritional value and a lower calorie count.
I'm not condoning a low carb diet, but I have found that by sustituting food with a higher protein count you can eat much less calories and still feel as full.

One of my biggest finds are little tins/tubs of flavoured tuna. they are only 100 calories but it seems that because they have a very high portion of protein, they satisfy me much more than 100 calories worth of bread/muffin.

I know we need carbs to fuel our body, but since I lead a rather sedentary life at the moment (mostly working at a desk) I have substituted out a lot of carbs in my diet. Seems to work well.

With anything, if you start substituting things in your diet, do it gradually and see how it goes.

[Andrew Brunelle]

I lost about 20 pounds in less than a year eating whole foods and drinking plenty of water. I also make smoothies in the morning using whole fruits and spinach.

[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.

[Ree]

Keeping a record of what you eat every day is an excellent idea. Most of us have no idea the number of calories we consume. This is an excellent website for help with this:

CalorieKing - Diet and weight loss. Calorie Counter and more.

You simply have to burn more calories than you consume. And remember that the weight which you lose slowly is a lot less likely to come back. Make calorie counting and healthy eating a way of life for you, rather than a temporary diet. Good luck!

[AirBreather]

Hmm.

If you are *really* interested in launching off to a "new self", check out the Master Cleanse. I've good personal experience with it and good second hand recommendations. Relative lost 35 lbs in 10 days and pretty much kept it off indefinately.

The Master Clenase/Lemonade Diet
- Full book available free/online:
http://healthandlight.com/TheMasterCleanse.pdf
- Offical Amazon page (good to read the reader comments!)
Amazon.com: The Master Cleanser: Stanley Burroughs: Books
- A current editied text based on the Master Cleanse at Amazon:
Amazon.com: Lose Weight, Have More Energy & Be Happier in 10 Days, Second Edition: Peter Glickman: Books
- Forum dedicated to the master cleanse:
Master Cleanse Forum - Master Cleanser Lemonade Diet :: Index

Misc info in regards to the MC:
- Important to rinse/bursh your teeth after drinking the lemonade and/or use a straw, otherwise teeth issues may develop
- As one of the signs of detox is your sign going totally pink, if it stays cloudy it might be due to Candida: (info & test)
Master Cleanse Forum - Master Cleanser Lemonade Diet :: View topic - Coated Tongue not going Away? You might have Candida
- Info on the stages of fasting:
What Are The Effects Of Detoxification On The Body?

Best of luck on your journey.

[Jennihul]

Walk 3 miles a day at a pace of 3 miles/40 minutes. Every single day.

Eat 2 of your 3 meals as raw foods. Salads, fruits...Avoid dairy and more than 4 oz of meat a day.

If you haven't lost 15 lbs the first month, let me know.

Jennifer

[SonoranBob]

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

[Wilfred]

Very simple: Become a vegetarian ;-)

[krackato]

Originally Posted by Wilfred

Very simple: Become a vegetarian ;-)

Sometimes, it's not that simple. There are quite a few overweight vegetarians. The diet can consist of all the sugar, soda, white flour, and refried beans that you can handle. There is some validity to the suggestion as evidenced by Steve, but doing something like changing your whole diet can often times not be so simple. Then again, it might be very simple. One of the added benefits of vegetarianism is that if you order the vegetarian dish at any restaurant, it's almost always cheaper, and it's usually just healthier in general because they assume you're a health nut.

===========

Tell us more about yourself.

How much do you weigh?

Male or female?

What's your current diet like?

What foods do you find yourself craving? Men usually crave meats and women usually crave sweets but often times it's reversed. I used to find myself craving sweets when I was a vegetarian and then later meat when I wasn't.

What's your current plan?

How old are you?

A little extra detail will help us fine tune our suggestions.

==========

The best tips that I know of after experimenting a lot are:

1. Stop drinking Soda (diet or otherwise)
2. Stop drinking Milk or at least drink Organic milk. Still, just stop drinking it.
3. Don't eat anything WHITE. White sugar, white flour, etc.
4. CHANGE YOUR INNER SELF. Identify yourself as a thinner person that's losing the extra weight that just kinda showed up. Not as a fat person that's working really hard to pretend to join the skinny club. Don't fight your sub-consciouses. It's smarter than you. One of the best books on the subject is Psycho-Cybernetics. Crazy title. Lovely book.

5. Make working out as fun as possible. The number 1 reason you'll stop working out is that it'll suck. Then you go again and it sucks. And again and it sucks. Finally your sub-consciouses figures it out and suddenly you have all these things to do like clean up your house or watch the last 15 minutes or tv or go help a friend move....

6. Work on your emotions. Most people eat to bury emotions. But instead of eating, if you just work on your emotions and deal with them and accept them, then suddenly you're not craving everything all the time. I suggest Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now" and EFT Tapping (tapping.com and emofree.com).

===========

Okay, you want a real tip?

Go to Bikram Yoga. It's like 100 degree sauna and you do yoga for 90 minutes, 3x a week. I used to eat a double cheeseburger after almost every workout and I lost 20lbs of fat and got down to 150lbs and 10%bf in 2.5 months. I ate fairly sensibly otherwise. Still, I gained it all back and then some because I didn't have my inner self down. (point #4 above).

It doesn't put muscle on you so you're very likely to gain weight if you stop. It's better to do it the traditional way of lifting weights and doing cardio, but if you want to drop weight, bikram yoga works like gang busters.

[kpugh]

Rather than a tip here...I'm curious? What's your plan? What have you tried? What has worked for you before? What have been your challenges before?

[Tayrak]

The best way to lose weight and then keep it off, which ultimately is your goal, right? Make changes to your life that you can spend the rest of your life living with.
You already know you have to exercise but, choose a type of exercise that you can continue doing. I love weights and they work great, but if you hate them what's the point?
The sme holds true for food, if you absolutely love , love , love chocolate then denying yourself will eventually backfire. Give yourself permission to have some and then enjoy it guilt free. (Not a whole cake or 3 chocolate bars, be realistic.) Also know what you are eating-- A Big Mac has a whopping 600 or so calories, not a great idea too often. All these mocha lattes and such, huge amounts of calories.
There are a lot of foods that we may decide to hve only once in awhile if we knew what was in them, do some research and find out if there is some you need to cut back on.
Take it slow. It takes time to lose weight. If you starve yourself, it will never last eventually you will binge. If you exercise until you can't move, you won't want to go back.
Plan on about 1 lb a week, yes I know you can push for more but 1 lb is totaly doable.
And lastly do it for yourself 'cause you're going to feel great.

Tayrak

[SmellyOrc]

Originally Posted by Jennihul

Eat 2 of your 3 meals as raw foods. Salads, fruits...Avoid dairy and more than 4 oz of meat a day.

If you haven't lost 15 lbs the first month, let me know.

Jennifer

Tip: Eat more than 3 meals a day.... Try eating 6 times a day, to keep firing off that metabolism.


Train with weights.
Don't hang on the couch all day long, and get out.
Get that junk food out of your system and house.
Drink enough water.
Eat enough fat.
Use the bike instead of the car, whenever possible.

Losing weight is easy, given that you don't have some metabolic disorder.

[Thomas H]

Steadily increase the amount of fruits and vegetables you eat.

[Loser2WinnerGuy]

Guys, thanks a lot for all your tips! That's like a miniature weightloss encyclopedia in one thread... Remember, not so many years ago I'd have to pay to get this information....

I really appreciate it. I'm going to use several of these, I'll let you know in further detail. Right now my strategy is to eat high protein / low carb meals often (keeps me from getting hungry for several hours by keeping my insulin levels low) and eating as much vegetables as possible. I will also walk for an hour four times a week, and do a circuit training workout coupled with walking three times a week. I am not able to join a gym right now (I can't pay the fees, to be honest), but will do so as soon as I get a job...

Anyway, about me:

I'm a guy
I weigh 248 pounds
I'm 6'1"
I'm 29 years old
My bodyfat percentage: 30.1 (I am so ashamed of this, you have no idea)

Thanks again, I'll be back later - right now I have to get some sleep....

[Wayne Collis]

I have lost 20 kg in less than four months , mainly by not eating red meat , drinking green tea and walking 65 minutes per day minimum. I now thrive on a walk and enjoy fresh food with no preservatives. Dont become a prisoner to your body work with it !!!

Cheers Wayne

[DayInTheLife]

There's some great advice so far.

Nothing will work though, if you don't address WHY you eat. Hunger is not the main reason people eat.

Every time you open the fridge, or even just get the impulse to do so, ask yourself what triggered that impulse. Did someone just say something to piss you off? Did you just finish what you're doing and you're suddenly bored? Did you just remember something painful? Is it the time of day when you usually have a snack?

There's always some identifiable trigger for the impulse to eat. Don't eat until you know why you are doing it. An impulse to eat is just your mind saying "Hey man, don't you think you'd feel better if you ate something?" Usually the mind is just trying to comfort itself. Don't comfort yourself with food.

My tips:

1) Eat mindfully. Don't do anything else while you eat. Pay attention to the taste and texture of the food. You'll get full faster, and smaller portions will go a long way.

2) Eat defensively. Don't eat just because you have the opportunity. It is FAR easier to avoid taking in calories than it is to burn them off. Every donut you turn down, every drink you decline, is a victory, and not a negligible one.

3) Stick to water. If you drink a lot of anything else, you can cut hundreds of calories easily this way.

4) Don't go overboard! If you completely cut out bad food and try to live on kale smoothies or whatever, you'll give up quickly. Any changes you make have to be sustainable.

5) Don't let people convince you that carbs are bad. It's nonsense. Choose whole grains instead of refined grains, and you'll stay full longer.

6) Whenever you feel too tired or upset to work out, go start working out. You'll find the energy you need once you're into it.

Have fun!

[Kent F]

This sounds simplistic - but - watch the Biggest Loser - every episode. It's good stuff. You'll not only learn, but it will motivate you.

Kent F.

[Rose of Cairo]

go raw

[danas]

besides all the great advice here, find out why you have the need to eat so much. Notice when you find yourself going into the kitchen to eat- are there strong emotions? often when someone doesnt want to deal with strong emotions, they stuff themselves with unneccesary food in order not to feel. find new ways of letting out your emotions.
you first have to love yourself- when you do you will want to nurture yourself and you will know intuatively what will be good for your body.
fat is like a protection belt- what are you protecting yourself from? or perhaps you feel you dont have enough private space and so you create more body space for yourself.
in other words, I think that overeating is a psycological problem, just like starving yourself, and until you dont work on that your weight will be going up and down

[danas]

oops- i just saw DayInTheLife wrote something similar...

[Ali from The Office Diet]

My quickest tips:

• Write down everything you eat for a week, figure out where you can make changes.
• Read good blogs on dieting -- I really like Diet Blog -- for daily inspiration.
• Get some exercise every day. Even if it's just half an hour's walk.
• Weigh yourself weekly and record the results.
• Keep a journal or blog about how you're feeling -- particularly if you're eating because of emotional reasons.

And feel free to check out my blog The Office Diet which has a new post every weekday: it's targeted at office workers, but a lot of the advice is appropriate for anyone. You might particularly like the article I've just put up, Stop making excuses and start making changes.

Good luck with your weight loss! Keep us updated on how it goes...

Best,

Ali

[KTWILSON]

I find it helpful to clean out my system before I begin.

for about a week

fruit in the morning - something green or a different fruit for lunch - protien and other things ing the evening - plenty of water.

some people go on a juice fast and I hear that is a good way but I have not tried that yet.

after this I start my diet.

KT

[Ree]

Winner Guy, I had another thought that you may find interesting: several members of my family have recently used acupuncture for relief of varying conditions and one member in particular has begun acupuncture treatment for assistance in losing weight. Sometimes insurance pays for acupuncture treatment; sometimes not. Might be worth checking into

[FoodforThought]

There are plenty of ways to lose weight and maintain a healthy lifestyle. My blog in my signature is dedicated to this, so you may want to have a look! I am not a nutriionist or trainer, but I know what has worked for me...and know what it takes to keep the weight off.

1. Change up your routine. Never ever do the same thing everyday. This will only set you up for failure. Love cardio? Try alternatives, such as cardio kickboxing, biking, elliptical machine, etc. Enjoy weight training? How about resistance bands or even Pilates? When you change your activities, it will keep you motivated.

2. You should be realistic. I give myself 1 cheat day per week. This allows room for a sweet or two, which everyone needs. We are only human and perfection is impossible. Reward yourself for healthy behavior and you'll be fit in no time.

3. Five small meals a day keeps the fat away! You should always have breakfast, a mid morning snack, lunch, an afternoon snack, as well as dinner. This will not only increase your energy, but will keep you metabolism up. Starvation does nothing.

4. Green tea! I love it because it also speeds up your metabolism and makes sure your immune system is protected. I hate the taste of it though, so you may want to try Lipton's Orange, Jasmine and Passionfruit green tea.

Hope this helps
Heather

[AnonymousOne]

Another quick tip- set *reasonable* goals. I personally wouldn't tie the goals to weight loss, because your body composition can change (less fat more muscle) without a change in weight. What I would do it set goals related to fitness feats you'd like to be able to preform.

For example, set a goal to improve your bench press by 20 LBs in the next month, or your mile run time by a minute.

The reason? Motivation- you'll WANT to work harder when you start accomplishing the goals you set for yourself.

[Keith]

Originally Posted by Kent F

This sounds simplistic - but - watch the Biggest Loser - every episode. It's good stuff. You'll not only learn, but it will motivate you.

I find Biggest Loser quite demotivating.

The expectations in Biggest Loser are impractically high. Every week you have at least one person moping about how they've 'only' lost 3kg (~6.5 lbs) in a week.

Apparently if you're spirited away to a mansion, insulated from the real world and work out 4 hours a day with the aid of top personal trainers you lose a ton of weight. Great. That helps me how?

It doesn't help that the focus of the show is increasingly about screwing over the contestants (especially the Australian version - it's on nightly so there's some sort of 'twist' every day of the week) with things like "The team that wins this challenge actually gets to communicate with their families". Weight loss shouldn't be a win:lose proposition. Everyone can win.

[borntosucceed]

Hi;
About 8 years ago I lost about 10 kg in 3 weeks to get back to my ideal weight. It is important that you have a why! Why do you want to loose the weight. I my case the motivation was playing squash again and be quicker in the court.
What did I do? I made sure that when I had a meal I had small portions and I learned that it is not a sin to leave something on your plate. I didn't eat any sweets for the three weeks, no alcohol and I started to excercise with running, swimming and jogging.

After the 3 weeks it was simply maintenance and I keep eating in moderation. Nowadays I keep fit with Bikrams Yoga which helps to regulate your body and is also a great way to loose weight or simply get your body into balance.

My latest discovery is a drink called Goyin, which I take every morning and evening. Since I am drinking this, I don't have any cravings for chocolate and coffee anymore.

Mind you I am still endulging in some sweets from time to time - but all in moderation!

[DayInTheLife]

Squash is fantastic exercise. I love it!

[borntosucceed]

It certainly is, unfortunately I had to stop because I starting to get knee problems. What I loved about it was after one hour in the court you felt like you run a marathon.

I am doing Bikrams Yoga now - never thought I would like yoga - but it is really challenging, you work out a good sweat and you still feel like you run a marathon at the end of it. There are claims that your body heals and I am hoping that I get my knees back into shape so I can start playing squash again.