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How I Lost Weight (YouTube Video) .

My weight has been gradually creeping up on me over the last few years. Nothing too drastic, just slow and steady. The sort of thing that’s so easy to ignore, but it doesn’t go away. It was becoming more obvious because some of my trousers were becoming a bit too tight to wear, and I was buying larger sizes to replace them. Naturally I kept the old ones because I knew that I would slim down into them. The problem was deciding what to do and then taking action. Life is already very busy and full. I had all the usual excuses.

The final spur to action came when I had two weddings to attend. I had two perfect outfits to wear, the only trouble was that I couldn’t get into either of them. Now, I knew this six months before the weddings, but it was only two months before the first one that I took any action. It was then crunch time, do something or buy something new.Putting things off was no longer an option.

I eat pretty healthily but I know that enjoying a glass of wine with my wife in the evening has become a regular habit. Several morning coffees are also the wrong signals to my body for maintaining a stable blood sugar level , and perhaps I can’t get away with these in the way that I used to.

Over the last few years I have been doing less exercise.  When I was employed as a pharmacist I used to walk into work and be standing all day. When I became self employed to work on the web site I still walked into our pharmacy office, but was sitting down during more of the day. Over the last few years the walking has become less and the sitting has become more, and the last couple of rainy years have well and truly dampened my enthusiasm for walking.

Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes to losing weight. The small bad habits catch up with you over the years. It seems no effort at all to put a bit of weight on, but it takes an effort to take that weight off. Equally important is what to do after losing weight to see that it doesn’t creep back on.

Dieting doesn’t work and it makes things worse. If you significantly under-eat your body goes into starvation mode. Our metabolism still works in the same way it did for our caveman ancestors. Our body doesn’t know we have gone on a diet, it thinks there is a famine and goes into survival mode. It conserves energy by slowing our metabolism, and hanging on to our fat stores for dear life. Energy is obtained by breaking down muscle tissue. We do lose weight, but it is muscle more than fat, and we come out of this diet/starvation scenario in worse health because the proportion of fat to body tissue increases.

Each person’s weight loss plan will be different, depending on what is causing the weight problem in the first place.

So deciding what I had to do was quite straightforward. I needed an exercise routine to lose weight quickly and then incorporate more exercise into my daily routine, and to look at what I was drinking, both coffee and alcohol.(See How To Lose Weight )

I was lucky with the exercise. I just happened to spot a free week’s introduction to a local ‘Bootcamp’ and decided to give it a try. When things turn up at the right time it pays to take note of them. So I went along, a little nervously, to Simon Lovell’s New Body Bootcamp in Exeter . I was impressed with his web site, which showed videos of the sort of exercises that were done, and gave a very good impression of the way that it was organised, to be fun, and done as a group. I knew it would be hard work, but I was up for it. Well, I threw myself into the exercises and survived the first session, but it took the rest of the week for me to recover from the stiffness that hit me by the next morning.

Building muscle is what this is all about. Muscles are damaged by exercise, and grow back stronger. This is what causes the stiffness, but this is the way to strengthen and build muscle tissue which also actively burns fat, and continues to do this for a long time after the exercise. Overall this reduces the proportion of fat as well as losing weight, and these short, intense, varied exercises are the best way to do this. There is an added advantage that these short intense exercises don’t build the sort of ‘body builder’ muscle mass, just toned muscles, and are suitable for men and women.

Over the next month the morning-after stiffness  became less and in the second month I was able to do three one-hour sessions a week with no stiffness. It was hard work, but always different and enjoyable. I cut down on alcohol and diluted my coffees with water.

My suits fitted and the weddings were wonderful. I lost 10 pounds in weight.

I have altered my lifestyle to keep the weight off. I now walk to and from work, and have turned this into productive time by treating myself to an iPod to listen to old and new talks about health, happiness and success. My pedometer shows me that just walking to and from work gives me 7,000 of the 10,000 paces a day that make all the difference to health. I have bought a packable waterproof jacket and over-trousers to remove the excuse for not walking if it is raining or looks like rain.

My health statistics show that I still have some work to do. My Body Mass Index (BMI) came down from 26.6 to 25.0 which now puts me just on the borderline of being overweight (18.5 to 24.9 being normal weight). I now fit comfortably into all my 34 inch trousers. My body fat composition is 34% and this should ideally be 21 to 28%. So I need to do more of the exercise to build more muscle and lose more fat, and lose a bit of weight at the same time. I already take several health supplements, have low stress levels and sleep well. These are areas I already have covered. (See Understanding Your Weight ).

Author: Colin Winstanley

p.s.  Can you recommend a fitness book or video with exercises that can be done at home? Your comments would be appreciated.

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See Also Losing Weight (Products) : How To Lose Weight
See Also Understanding Your Weight (Products) : Understanding Your Weight Information
Related Pages : Glycemic Index (GI) : Glycemic Load (GL) : Exercise :
Related Articles : What Your Body Mass Index (BM) Means) : Calculate Your Body Mass Index (BMI) In Feet & Pounds : Calculate Your Body Mass Index (BMI) In Centimetres & Kilograms ::

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