My 4 month 80-pound weight loss journey

Starting as a kid, I was one of those people who could eat anything and not gain an ounce. I kept this good fortune until my mid 20's and then things started to change. My body changed, by my mind had not accepted the change, so I balloned pretty quickly. I blew through pant sizes until within a few years, I hit 240 pounds. I looked awful, and was certainly not happy with my physique. I tried to lose weight, I read all the weight loss stuff in mainstream media, but none of it worked. The weight would come off a little, then come back. I tried diet pills and potions, some worked when I took them but stopped when I did. I got fed up, and decided to get serious. I looked to bodybuilding resources because what they tell us in popular media simply does not work. I did extensive research on nutrition, fitness, and even biochemistry. On November 2006, starting at around 240, I executed my weight loss plan based on my research. My goal was to lose 10 pounds a month and reach the 150's in 9 or 10 months. Instead, I was blown away. I started losing 6 pounds a week, and kept this up for six weeks. Even after this rate slowed down, my weight loss plan still allowed me to reach 160. That was 80 pounds lost in 4 months. Since March 2007, I have not only kept the weight off, I have improved my body fat percentage, closing in under the 10% mark, and my abdominals are begining to show, as well as made significant gains in my strength.

Knowing that many people around the world are struggling with their weight, I am using the worldwide web to share what has worked for me, and to use my success to inspire others, give them hope and prove that it is possible. Heck, if I can go from a face-stuffing, junk food chomping obese couch potato to a man with a lean body and healthy lifestyle in 4 months, anyone can succeed with their weight loss struggles! I will update my hubs here as I compile my notes from weight loss plan to separate what actually worked from what did not. Please also visit my website as well

My biggest period of my weight loss was during my first six weeks. During those weeks, I was losing six pounds each week. I refer to it now as my "first six weeks plan", but my plan actually called upon me to carry out this program until I reached my target weight. If interested, you can read my journal about my plan here on my website. However, on the seventh week of this plan, I lost two pounds, which is still a respectable loss, but I was still aggressive, and I still had 40 to 50 pounds to go. But since what I was doing was no longer working I needed to come up with a new plan, which I will be sharing in future entries. Anyway, my program required me to start off with doing cardio twice a day, initially at 30 minutes each. I would increase each session by 10 minutes each week until I hit 90 each session, which I would continue until I reached my target weight. I already had been doing cardio, so I was in decent shape. Thrown in would be 3 sessions of full body workouts consisting of compound exercises. My diet would consist of about 1600 calories, proteins being the largest macronutrient. I allowed a cheat day, but after the first two weeks I was so pleased with the results I dropped them. But, when it did not affect the outcome, I resumed them. The execution did not go nearly as good as planned, but the beauty was I still lost the weight.

Please read more about my first six week plan and other ways I used to lose weight, please visit my site.

Okay, you had a bad day, you ate stuff not good for losing weight or skipped a workout - or even several workouts. Like many people do, you're probably feeling like failure, or worse. Well, you're not. You're human. During my weight loss I had plenty of slip ups, gave into temptations, got lazy and skipped workouts. Sure, for those particular incidents my weight loss progress probably took a hit. I felt and still feel the frustration whenever I foul up. But I keep going. When - not if because we all will slip up now and then - you slip up, acknowledge it. Try to learn what triggered it and if you can avoid such triggers in the future. And keep going with your weight loss. The worse thing you can do is quit - no one loses in the battle for weight loss, except those who quit. Let me share my own, recent, very bad slip up - we're taking about the atomic bomb of slipping up. On the July 4th weekend I decided to purchase I chocolate mousse cake. I hadn't enjoyed any desserts for a few weeks, and America's birthday seemed like a good time to have some. My intention was to only eat 2 slices, three at most, then toss the rest of the cake. Well...I ended up eating the entire, 4800-calorie cake within 2 days. When considering I was at that time eating at a slight calorie surplus to build muscle, the consequences were not going to be good. Nothing happened immediately but by Tuesday my barely visible abs were now covered again. In two days, I obliterated that which took me 6 weeks of highly intense, tortuous workouts and bare minimal eating to accomplish. I weighed myself, predicting I had gained between 3 to 4 pounds, and sure enough my weight jumped 3.4lbs - all fat. This was not the smartest thing I could have done as one concerned about fitness. On the other hand, that cake was to die for. But let me also share the rest of the story. In spite of this major foul up, I continued to do my intense weight lifting, I continued, or I should say resumed, to eat healthy, I continued my cardio. Despite still eating at a slight calorie surplus to maximize strength gains, by the end of three weeks I nearly repaired all the "damage" eating that cake had done to my physique. I did not even make any special effort to lose the fat. By simply staying on my lifestyle, the consequences were mitigated and I continue towards not only having the physique I had before the cake but even improve upon that. The moral of this story is we are all going to make mistakes in life including fitness and weight loss - its all part of being human. It is what we do afterward that will make all the differences. Another thing to ponder and think on; it has often been the case where a person's mistake sent them on the path to their greatest personal triumph. If you had a bad day, bad week, or even a bad month, you're not a loser, you're not a failure, you're simply human. Dust yourself off and get on track. As you will see on my websites, in spite of my many slip ups along the way, I still pressed on with using my ways to lose weight and effective weight loss plans to lose 80 pounds in 4 months.

Sorry for the length between my last post, I have been on vacation for the past week. I not only got away from my routine, I even took a break from fitness. What this means is I did not go to a gym, though I stayed active on my vacation. I also took the time to indulge myself in my favorite foods. Again, I did not binge out, but I did enjoy myself. Many people proffering weight loss advice will tell you what I did was wrong and counterproductive to weight loss. They insist you must give up all junk food forever and ever if you ever want to reach and maintain a healthy weight. And they tell you that you must abstain is you want to reach an active old age. However, I tell you otherwise. Realistically, this is not a practical option simply because the vast majority of us enjoy the taste of our favorite junk foods. By trying to deprive ourselves, pretending we want to give up totally these foods. Well, sooner or later, just about everyone caves in and ends up binging. Instead of totally denying myself, my likes, I've decided to strike a balance, a balance between eating clean for most of the week, maintaining a vigorous regimen of exercise, and 1 or 2 days a week partaking in my favorite culinary delights that are not conducive to weight loss. I have successfully maintained an 11 to 12% body fat composition - still quite a lean body and considered athletic - following this plan. Even when I was losing weight, I had one day where I enjoyed myself, and I still lost weight those weeks - even during the time I was losing 6 pounds a week. I feel part of it was that taking in the extra calories, after days of clean eating, jolted my metabolism back up. So, an occasional cheat not only does not negatively affect your weight loss, it can even boost it. It was only when I decided I wanted to become more lean, did I discover it was necessary to totally abstain, in which I did get down to 8.9%. Unless you have the desire to become super-lean, you can still occasionally enjoy your favorite foods and still lose the weight. It is sad that I need to point this out, but some people will read this post as a license to binge and overeat. It is not of course and naturally I am speaking about moderation and self control. It takes knowing when to stop. If this is a weakness of yours, then work on improving that aspect; it not only make losing weight easier, it also will make life in general easier.

For more info on my ways to lose weight and weight loss plans, please visit my site.

Many people refer to their BMI when trying to lose weight. I, instead, prefer to know my BMR, or Basal Metabolic Rate. The basal metabolic rate is simply the amount of calories your cells need to stay alive. The BMR is exclusive of physical activities as well as base functions. BMR itself is not the whole picture then. What you do after you calculate your (you can find your BMR at this site: http://home.fuse.net/clymer/bmi/) BMR is multiply it by a factor below:

Sedentary = BMR X 1.2 (little or no exercise, desk job) Lightly active = BMR X 1.375 (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/wk) Moderately active = BMR X 1.55 (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/wk) Very active = BMR X 1.725 (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days/wk) Extra active = BMR X 1.9 (hard daily exercise/sports & physical job or 2X day training)

Pick which factor best describes your activity level and you have your Total Daily Energy Expenditure, or TDEE. Then you can take your TDEE and, if you have been journaling your meals as I described in my last post, you can check if you are in a calorie deficit or you need to change. Your BMR is not a static value, but changes as your weight changes. Changes in muscle mass produce greater changes in BMR, but even change in fat will affect your BMR. Using my example, when I was at 240, my BMR was calculated at 2193 calories per day, but after I hit 160, my BMR dropped to 1686 calories a day a different of 507 calories per day! That equates to a pound per week! If you wonder why you hit a weight loss plateau, knowing your BMR could shed some light. A final note, the BMR and TDEE are just rough estimates, not precise calculations, and in my experience that was all they needed to be. The most reliable indicator will be observing your own results. Tracking my BMR was one of the ways to lose weight that helped me, please visit my website for other ways to lose weight and weight lost plans. Stay tuned for more.

It is a well-known fact about weight loss that ultimately to lose weight you must expend a greater amount of calories than what you consume. So how do you know how many calories you consume in a day? Do you guess? Try to track it all in your head? I decided to journal my eating. It was a good thing I did, because I was trying to keep track of my meals in my head before. However, once I started journaling, it became immediately clear I was doing a poor job of watching my eating. I thought I kept my eating under 2000 calories per day, but instantly I saw that I was eating over 2500 calories, some days it was as high as 3000. The good news is that once I saw exactly what I was eating, I knew exactly what to change, what I could cut out. Furthermore, because my zeal to record everything, the journal held me accountable. I simply could not cheat on that snack because I knew I would have to record it and see my weakness. This went far in maintaining my discipline in eating. There are several ways you can go about tracking your meals. The first is the pen-and-paper method, not recommended. I used Excel and created my own spreadsheet. I not only tracked my calories; I also use this sheet to track the amount of protein I ate. Eventually I began recording the calories I burned from my workouts, and recorded my weekly weigh in and body measurements, so this sheet was like a recording of my progress. The third and now most common way is to use free online tools. The most common ones are http://www.my-calorie-counter.com/ and http://www.fitday.com/. Both are free to register and use, tracks calories, macronutrients, and workouts. Tracking my eating was one of the ways to lose weight that I use and was an integral part of my weight loss plan, visit my website to learn others.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, summer approaches, and in my country, June generally starts the summertime travel season. As we all know too well, gasoline prices are sky high, making people look for ways to be energy efficient.

Interestingly enough, weight loss is about being energy inefficient. Think about it like this; if our bodies had perfect efficiency, 100% of the food we would eat would be used, for energy needs and to be stored as fat. Not only that, our bodies would fine tune and optimize energy production during workouts or other physical activities, so that we would burn the least amount of energy as possible. For running a marathon, this would be a good thing, but when trying to lose weight, this is a bad thing. The laws of physics do not allow anything to be 100% efficient, so neither are our bodies, but they are pretty efficient. But we can eat things and workout in ways that can boost inefficiency a little.

Certain foods, such as whole grains, leafy green vegetables, and lean proteins are low in calorie density and take more work to breakdown, resulting in fewer calories. But these foods will still signal our bodies we have been fed. Fats in the diet signal satiety and for a longer period, leaving you feeling full for longer - just don't over do it on the fats.

Let us compare two airliners, Boeing's 787-3 and the Concorde. Both airliners can make the London-New York flight. The 787-3 is slow and highly fuel efficient, while the Concorde is extremely fast and wasteful of fuel. Our workouts should be the same. A slow, steady cardio workout is just too efficient for our bodies, even with a long duration. Initially, one may still be able to lose weight with this - especially if you have a lot of weight to lose, but it will soon be ineffective. As with the Concorde, the more intense the workout, the more energy inefficient our body is, forcing more fat to be used for energy. That is why it is possible to lose weight with a shorter workout, such as, High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). If you are stuck at a plateau, consider intensifying your cardio workout, even if it means you have a shorter workout, it might enough to jolt you out of it. It was in my case, I was stuck at the same weight for months, and decided to try much more intensive workouts. And though they were much shorter duration than what I have been doing, I broke through and dipped below the 10% body fat level. Remember though our bodies are adapting, so as you get use to one level of intensity, you will need to increase it.

Energy inefficiency is just one way to help with weight loss. For more weight loss plans and other ways to lose weight please visit my website.

As we know, summer is approaching and many people are getting ready for swimsuit season. Often this involves losing weight. One key to my weight loss was staying well hydrated. Water is essential to life, in fact life originated from water. Even in the bible (Gen 1:20) agrees with that. Water is like no other liquid; it can be a solution for many substances. Inside our bodies, countless chemical reactions, including those related to breakdown of fat into glucose, occur in water. Our muscles are 70% to 80% water. As we become dehydrated, these reactions become sluggish. Some estimates for every 2% our dehydration increases, our muscles can suffer as much as 10% decrease in performance. I can attest on days I slack off on water consumption I feel it during my workouts. A common misconception about drinking water needs to be cleared. Drinking water will not cause you to burn more fat, instead it will allow your body to reach its maximum fat burning potential. Staying well hydrated also benefits skin. Skin will be firmer, and look more youthful when one is well hydrated. To learn more weight loss information please continue to check back on Hubpages. Stay hydrated and look great for the summer!

There were two keys to my weight loss success. The first was finding weight loss information that actually works, not the politically correct feel-good pap that's printed all over the mainstream media. But information is only good if one applies it. That was the second key; discipline. After a lifetime of bad eating habits and sedentary living, it requires discipline to transform into a healthy lifestyle. Discipline to refrain from eating junk food and pick healthy choices instead, discipline to drag myself out of bed and to the gym instead of hitting the snooze button. Perhaps the greatest show of discipline lies not in doing those things, but to continue to do those things when you stumble. This is where many trying to lose weight fail; they get off to a good start, make a mistake - skipping a workout or perhaps binging - and they give up on their weight loss efforts. If you read my journal about my first 6 weeks of my weight loss plan, you will see that I did not have the discipline to completely stick to my own plan. Yet, when I stumbled, slipped up, I continued anyway. Very few people successfully lost weight without having setbacks. Those who do succeed did so because they had the self-discipline to press on in spite of their setbacks. This type of self-discipline is known as persistence. People who persist ultimately succeed, in weight loss, in business, in life. As long as you keep moving on, you will never loss the battle of your weight loss. The good news is that anyone can improve their self-discipline, regardless how much they have been lacking in the past. I found this page a great place to start reading; it's short, direct, and very helpful. Stick with your weight loss efforts, continue to research weight loss information and you will have a great body in time for swimsuit season.

You finally decided you want to control your weight. Perhaps you have been like me; for years and years I struggled with being obese, since my metabolism changed in my mid-twenties. My main problem was my whole attitude towards my weight. I pretended I was comfortable, therefore I would always approach it with disdain, discouragement and without enthusiasm. I wanted to lose the weight, I enjoyed being slim before and did not like being fat. I wanted to lose my weight for all the wrong reasons, to look good, to conform to society's preference for being thin, because my then-wife was nagging me, but in reality I suppose I was resigned to being overweight. Naturally then every attempt would fail. It wasn't until last year when it finally hit upon me. During that time, I was listening to motivational and inspirational audio and reading similar books. I realized then, my whole attitude towards weight loss was completely wrong. So, I changed it. This time I decided I was going to lose weight for me, not for anyone else. This was something I was going to do for myself. It was amazing how the change affected the outcome. When before I would never succeed, with my new attitude, I could not fail, and I did not. My weight dropped faster than anyone thought it was safely possible, and yet I did not feel bad. Instead I felt great.

The lesson here is before anyone attempts to lose weight, they need to start with the right motivation. The desire must come from within, not from outside pressures. Until one is ready from the inside, they will not have the commitment to sustain the effort required to succeed. As you will read on my site about my weight loss plan, my attitude was one of the top reasons I succeeded. On the other hand, when the attitude is right, failure is impossible.

Growing up, my father worked for Saudi Arabian Airlines, and as a kid, I spent some time at the airport. Watching the planes take off and land. And after they land, watching the workmen begin the maintenance process on the planes. One type of plane stood out; Lockheed's L1011. The other airliners it looked as if maintenance was an ad hoc process, but the L1011 it was almost a work of art in motion. What took hours on the other airliners took about 30 minutes on the L1011, and it was ready to fly again. A workman explained to me that Lockheed designed the L1011 around efficient routine maintenance and quick turnaround.

Our post workout period should be planned around a similar concept, especially if you have aggressive weight loss or fitness goals. Rest and recovery is when you grow your muscles, not when you workout - it is when improvements to your fitness levels are made. Simply taking it easy and getting a good night's sleep helps you recover. You should already be drinking plenty of water. However, you can engage in a more proactive recovery process. Immediately post workout, consume foods and supplements that are quickly absorbed by the body, such as whey, creatine, glutamines, and a high-glycemic carb such as dextrose or waxy maize. Whey provides fast acting proteins, creatine helps with energy delivery, glutamines helps with muscle repair and growth, and the high-glycemic carb will reload glycogen (a source of energy) levels in your muscles. At night, prior to sleep, I eat a clean protein (I prefer casein), omega 3/6 supplements, glutamine, and arginine. Arginine assists with NO to the blood vessels, providing more blood to muscles, and helps clear out metabolites. Taking these measures is why I can manage two sessions of intense cardio (not a leisurely walk in the park cardio) a day. Every two or three weeks I like to get a deep-tissue massage, I can feel the difference on my next workout.

By being proactive in your recovery, you can sustain a much greater level of physical activity. Whether your goal is to lose weight, get in shape, or improve your performance in a certain sport, rest and recovery is an important part of any fitness plan. When you are working out, give it all you have, then take it easy.

Such proactive steps allowed me to sustain a level of activity which resulted in an 80 pound loss in 4 months. To learn other helpful tips, weight loss plans, and other ways to lose weight please visit my site.

The other day, I was next to a guy on a cardio machine. We were engaging in the usual small talk that eventually got around to the topic of fitness. I mentioned that whenever I come to the gym, I push myself hard. He said to me when he comes to the gym, he only wants to relax. After he said that, I had an epiphany. For a long time, I wondered why I was not getting any results before from all my efforts at the gym. Additionally, I have observed individuals at this particular gym who have been attending at least as long as I have been going there, since June of 2006. In spite of spending huge amounts of time there, on the treadmill, on the elliptical, on the cycle for all these months, they still look the same. For a long time, I could not understand why this was the case. Then when my companion told me he only wants to relax and take it easy at the gym, it hit me. To get the best results, or perhaps any results at all, one must push their bodies beyond their comfort zones. This means the gym must be the one place we cannot "relax and take it easy", not in the physical sense. Of course a good workout can emotionally relax you since it is a good reliever of stress. But, when it comes the physical, the gym is a place to challenge your body, for it is the only way for it to improve. Looking back, I must honestly admit during my prior endeavors at the gym, I shied away from discomforting myself, and the results reflected that. It was only when I started at November of 2006 that I was going all out, that I pushed myself outside of my comfort zone, and I started getting immediate results. Now, one must not go to the other extreme and push too hard. Aside from risk of injury, there will not be enough time to recover between sessions, making it hard sustain training. That can cause loss of motivation, and so can being injured. Therefore, balance must be struck on individual training sessions being challenging enough to promote improvement but not to slow recovery or injury. While a gym is not the place to physically relax, outside the gym one must remember to relax. Recovery is a vital part of fitness; indeed it is almost impossible to achieve muscle growth without proper resting and recovery. So, remember, take it hard in the gym, but take it easy outside of it.

I need to clear something right from the beginning. My astounding weight loss was the result of hard effort. There were no magic pills I took and the weight went away. I had to watch what I ate, I had to increase my activity levels. My people have asked what I did to lose so much weight, always expecting or hoping I would tell them some no-effort thing I did. Always, they are disappointed when I told them I essentially did the old faithful; eat healthy and exercise. If you are exploring this site looking for easy answers, well I can partially help you. What I did to achieve success was itself not very complicated, the process of doing it required much effort and tasked my mental strength and willpower. With the right attitude, I strongly believe anyone can achieve the same level of success that I did. After all, even when I was at my lowest emotional point, in a state of mind where I would binge eat as if it were going out of style, I mustered the strength and will to embark on a journey to seize control of my weight. That is where the magic comes in, from within you, from your desire to succeed. Without summoning my internal strength, none of the diets, exercising, or supplements would have worked. Bring out your magic today, and soon you can boast your own success. On this site you will find the resources about ways to lose weight and weight loss plans to help you.

If you want to give a boost to your weight loss, you must watch your thyroid. I did not, for years I failed to pay attention to what I was doing to it. When I was doing my research, I discovered I was abusing my thyroid to no end. Of all the changes I made, perhaps the ones with the greatest impact were the changes I made for the benefit of my thyroid. Your thyroid gland controls your cellular metabolism for your body. Have a thyroid with low output, your daily caloric output is low, you gain weight easy, have a high output, you gain wait slowly, and a very high output can make it so you cannot gain weight to save your life. Scientists liken it to the body's thermostat, but gas-pedal seems to be a more accurate analogy.

The first discovery I came across was the connection of aspartame to thyroid function, or I should say non-function. Yes, the artificial sweetener aspartame has been shown to negatively impact the production of the T3 hormone, the hormone that sets cellular metabolism. Aspartame is found in virtually all diet sodas and in many diet foods. This sucked for me, because I considered diet sodas like my last vice I could have, and now I found out drinking them was compromising my weight loss efforts. Nonetheless, I decided to experiment on myself. Drinking Splenda-based sodas and increasing water consumption, I eliminated aspartame from my diet. I credit many things for my success, but in reality, it was almost three days after I stopped taking aspartame that I began to drop serious poundage.

Of course aspartame was not the only problem with my thyroid. Your thyroid needs two primary components to produce the T3 hormone; iodine and tyrosine. Iodine is an element, poisonous in its pure form, obtained mostly from seafood. I am not a big seafood fan, actually I hate seafood. Neither do I use salt, so I was not getting any iodized salt. Among my research, I also found out that old school body builders used kelp tablets, thyroid extract, and olive leaves to manage fat while they ate to gain muscle mass. Kelp supplies the iodine, while the thyroid extract and olive leaves are reported to boost thyroid output. So I added those supplements to my diet, and tyrosine as well (at the same time I quit aspartame). Tyrosine is an amino acid, chicken breasts contain huge amounts of tyrosine. Doctors in conventional medicine seem mock anything that does not pad the coffers of pharmaceutical companies, so most will tell you these substances will have no effect at all. My personal experience proves this is wrong. Using well known formulas for metabolism (I will elaborate on those later) along with calculations calories burnt from my training, the absolute best case, if I were 100% faithful to my plan - and I was not - I could only lose 3 pounds per week. If I cheated, I would only at best lose 2 pounds per week. I cheated on my plan and I still lost 6, and sustained that loss for six weeks. I find it impossible that I could lose that much per week, feel great, without those supplements having some contribution.

Other tidbits of info I came about thyroid function, but have not verified on myself. Supposedly fruits such as peaches and apricots can affect thyroid function, so too can broccoli. I ate broccoli in moderation, but not a big fan of those fruits. As with anything else, moderation is probably key. Stay tuned as I put together more of my research and share my success with the world.

Taking care of my thyroid was one way I lost my weight, for other ways to lose weight and other weight loss plans, please visit my website.