A Beginner’s Guide to Losing Weight and Gaining Health
(This is a slight update to a similar post I made a few years ago.)
Congratulations on making the decision to change your life for the better! As you begin your journey to health and fitness, there are a few things you should remember:
o This is not a race. You are not in a competition with anyone else. Allow your body to work at its own pace. Ignore all of the weight loss ads you see that claim you can “Lose 30 pounds in 30 days!” You can’t. It won’t happen. And if you try, you’ll end up hurting yourself. What you need to do is be patient and adopt a new lifestyle that will enable you to lose weight healthily and keep it off in the long term.
o Food is fuel. Many people who join the fitness community with the goal of losing weight have struggled with disordered eating in the past. Whether you’ve been formally diagnosed with an eating disorder or not, you MUST understand that the food you eat will be the key to your success. Food is not a hindrance to your goals. Losing weight in a healthy, effective way requires you to eat good food and eat enough of it!
o You will get off track. Things do not always go according to plan, and that’s okay. Life happens. The ONLY thing that matters is that you always start again and continue to move forward. I, myself, have restarted this process three separate times. Don’t give up.
o Find your motivation. I receive messages all the time from people asking me to motivate them to get back on track. That is not something that I can do. Motivation ultimately comes from within yourself. Joining a community like fitblr is great motivation. Sometimes all you need to do is click through a few before and after pictures and you’re all fired up! But it all starts and ends with YOU. Identify why you want to make a change. What goals have you set for yourself? Are they realistic? How are you going to reach those goals? What new things will you be able to do once those goals are met? All of those questions are things you should ask yourself when you’re losing motivation during your journey.
o Everything in moderation. Balance is the key. You should NEVER feel guilty about eating something. Food and guilt do not go together. If you didn’t eat according to your goals one day, that’s okay. You can do better the next day. There will ALWAYS be another chance. You can eat ANYTHING you want in balance with your other healthy choices. It doesn’t matter what it is. You do not need to eat healthy 100% of the time in order to lose weight. Use the 80/20 rule: 80% of your diet should be clean/healthy/whole/unprocessed foods, 20% can be whatever you want. You can aim for this balance daily, weekly or monthly depending on your schedule. Sometimes people find it easier to eat super clean/healthy during the week and then let loose during the weekend. Or you can spread your treats throughout the entire week, having a donut one day, a piece of pizza another, etc. Do whatever works for you and makes you feel like you aren’t on a restrictive diet.
o The scale is not the only way to measure your progress. Take progress pictures (once a month or so) to compare and take measurements of different parts of your body. No change on the scale doesn’t mean you haven’t made progress. The number on the scale is meaningless, it describes your body’s relationship with gravity, nothing more. What if you had your dream body and the scale said you weighed 25 pounds more than your “goal weight”? It wouldn’t matter, right? What you ultimately care about is how you look and feel, the number on the scale is arbitrary. There’s really no reason to weigh yourself more than once a week (and remember that the best time to weigh yourself is in the morning, naked, after you wake up and go to the bathroom). Your weight fluctuates by the hour depending on what you eat, retained fluid, and whether or not you need to go to the bathroom just to name a few reasons. Don’t tie your emotions to the scale. If needed, throw it out.
Here are the keys to getting healthy and losing weight:
The food you put into your body is the most important part of weight loss. YOU CANNOT OUT-EXERCISE A POOR DIET. If you are just beginning your journey and you’re overwhelmed by this entire thing, changing the way that you eat is where you should start. You can begin to lose weight simply by changing the way that you eat (that’s right, no sweat involved!) assuming the dietary changes you make result in you consuming less energy overall. That being said, the most effective was to lose weight is through a combination of a healthy diet and exercise, but more about that later.
Remember that you are not “on a diet”. Diets are temporary changes to your eating that are not sustainable, and usually result in you gaining any weight you lost after discontinuing said diet.
This is a lifestyle change. Not a diet. You are going to learn how to eat differently and improve your health for the rest of your life, not just for the next few months.
WHAT TO EAT: While clicking through fitblr blogs, you might encounter the term “clean eating”. This term can have a variety of meanings depending on the person using it. The idea of clean eating is to do away with all processed foods from your diet. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “ALL processed foods? But bread is processed? And cheese? And milk?” For some people, they would avoid those foods or make them themselves (which is expensive and/or time consuming). What most people mean by clean eating is purging your diet of packaged/boxed/manufactured foods. For example, those microwave dinners you see in the freezer section at the grocery store? Processed and full of extra preservatives and things that you don’t need. Instead, make your own similar meal with baked chicken breast, brown rice, and a heaping serving of mixed veggies! Another example is boxed macaroni and cheese. Instead of eating white, enriched pasta with “cheese” made from a powder, cook some whole wheat pasta and add in your own milk and cheese to make a sauce. And pizza? Well, we all know pizza is delicious! But you can easily make your own healthier alternative to frozen or delivery pizza by buying/baking whole wheat flat bread and adding your own toppings!
The idea is to eat things made from whole ingredients, not food products made from those ingredients. Fresh, in-season fruit is usually the cheapest, and frozen fruit works really well to make smoothies cold and icy! Stay away from canned fruit that sits in syrup. If you have to buy canned fruit, look for a brand that is water-packed. Fresh or frozen vegetables are great, and again, try to stay away from canned. Try sweet potatoes as well as white potatoes, and discover the magic of spinach salads instead of boring iceburg lettuce! Make your grains whole: whole wheat bread (check to make sure it’s actually whole wheat, not just a blend of white and whole wheat flour….going with something that is “whole grain” is usually the safest way to avoid this), brown rice, whole wheat pasta, etc. Get your protein from whole, lean sources like chicken breast, beans, turkey breast, eggs, Greek yogurt, etc.
It’s okay if you eat SOME processed foods. If you put flavored creamer in your coffee every morning or use ketchup, it won’t hurt you. Balance is the key.
Click here to view my grocery list!
Click here to see what I eat!
HOW MUCH TO EAT: PLEASE recognize that your body is using energy constantly to keep itself alive! The bare minimum your body needs to stay up and running is measured by your BMR, your Basel Metabolic Rate. You should NEVER eat less than your BMR. The other term you should know is TDEE, Total Daily Energy Expenditure. Your TDEE tells you how much energy your body has used in a given day. Your BMR and your sedentary TDEE should be pretty close to each other. Knowing these two numbers can A) tell you how much you should be eating in a given day and B) help you create a deficit for fat loss. A daily deficit of anywhere between 500 and 1,000 is great for a healthy rate of weight loss. If this is a new concept for you, please take a look at this page explaining BMR and TDEE. Please keep in mind that the calculator on that page should only be used if you don’t have another means of tracking your activity like a FitBit device or something similar.
You may want to use an app to track your daily intake, especially if you’re getting used to eating smaller portion sizes. There are a number of good ones, but my favorite is MyFitnessPal because I feel it has the best food database and I like the way it syncs with the other fitness apps I use. MyFitnessPal’s default settings are kind of tricky to understand at first if you don’t know that it is giving you a NET calorie goal. This misunderstanding causes a lot of people to get frustrated and end up undereating, which is very unhealthy. I made this page about how to use MyFitnessPal correctly, so check that out and make sure you understand it!
Please note: If you have struggled with disordered eating in the past and counting calories is triggering for you, DO NOT DO IT. Counting calories is NOT necessary for weight loss. Eating intuitively can work just as well. Learning to have a good relationship with food is the most important thing here. Do what you know is healthy for you!
Increasing your activity level is also an important part of effective weight loss. You don’t need to burn hundreds and hundreds of calories at the gym, ANY increase in your activity will help you! Remember, your body is already using a lot of energy to keep itself alive, exercising just adds to that total burn (your TDEE, remember?) Try to purposefully increase your activity 3-5 days a week. That can include taking a walk around your neighborhood, doing a workout video, taking a bike ride, jumping rope for 15-20 minutes, swimming, doing Zumba, lifting weights, ANYTHING THAT GETS YOU MOVING! Do something that you ENJOY! There’s no use doing an exercise that you hate and dread doing.
Cardio is great, but don’t forget the strength training! While you cannot effectively build muscle mass while also losing fat (the first requires a calorie surplus/eating at your maintenance level, the second requires a deficit), incorporating strength training into your workouts a few times a week will help you maintain the muscle mass you already have while you lose fat. This is not to say that it’s impossible to gain muscle when you are just starting out. In fact, it will probably happen! But if your main focus is gaining muscle mass, eating at a deficit will not help you achieve that goal. Pick one, fat loss or increased muscle mass, and eat/lift accordingly. Bodybuilding.com is a great resource for strength training. There are plenty of free programs you can use if you need help getting started. Or you can pick and choose to find exercises that use the equipment you already have – you can even make your own homemade weights using empty milk jugs filled with water, sand, or rice!
Please remember how important it is to give your body a chance to REST! You should have AT LEAST one rest day every week. Give your body time to refuel and recharge. Rest days prevent overtraining and associated injuries and will give you a chance to relax, regroup, and get ready for the next week!
It can be a little tricky to figure out how much you’ve burned during a workout. There are numerous online calculators you can use, and apps like MyFitnessPal have exercise databases that can help you. But this is where having a personal activity tracking device becomes very helpful. If you’re only interested in tracking what you burn while you exercise, consider buying yourself a heart rate monitor. I started with my Polar ft4 and entered the workout burn calculation into MyFitnessPal manually so I had a better idea of how much I needed to eat to create the deficit I wanted.
The most helpful tracking devices, though, are those that track your activity throughout the day, including your workouts, and can give you a better estimate of your TDEE compared to using a generic online calculator. Examples of these tracking devices are FitBits, Jawbones, and Nike Fuel Bands. I personally have the FitBit Charge HR and I love it! I would absolutely recommend buying and using some kind of activity tracker. Having an individualized tracker like this makes it easy to see my total burn and decide how much I need to be eating according to my activity that day. Note that some of the daily activity tracking devices you can buy do not take into account your heart rate. If you are walking for exercise, they should work fine, but I think buying and using something with heart rate monitoring capabilities is the best way to go so you can get an accurate estimate of your burn when you do other activities. There is some info about this in my FAQ, do your research and find one that works for you!
In order to make a big change like this, you have to BELIEVE in yourself! You are an amazing person. You are doing big things with your life, and getting healthy is one of them! If there are people close to you that don’t support what you’re doing, either cut them out of your life or find a way to ignore them. What you’re doing is right for YOU. Other people may look down on you because they’re jealous and wish they had the motivation to do exactly what you’re doing. Don’t let them get to you. This is your body, and you get to decide what happens to it.
If you get tired if what you’re doing and feel like you’re losing motivation and energy, MIX IT UP! There’s no “right” way to get healthy! But DON’T give up! This takes time, and the worst thing you can do is commit for 1-2 months and then quit RIGHT before your body starts to really make progress.
This fitness community is the reason I’ve made it to where I am now. There are good and bad parts, just like anything. But the people I’ve met here have encouraged me to keep going even when the only thing I wanted to do was give up. I’ve lost weight, gained it all back, lost it all again plus some, gained some back again, and now I’m on my final push to lose the rest of it for good. This is a process. You won’t always be happy. You won’t always be making progress like you’d like to. But you CAN do it. Decide that you’re going to succeed and you will.
Simple, right? Haha, if only. It’s going to be hard. You’ll want to give up sometimes. BUT YOU CAN DO IT!
My ask box is always open, please don’t be afraid to talk to me about anything, fitness-related or not. My blog is a chronicle of my journey, and I did A LOT of things wrong before I did them right. I want to help people avoid doing the things that set me back and kept me from being the happier, healthier person that I am today! We’re in this together. You are NEVER alone.
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