The First Step to Healthy

In order to become more healthy, you usually have to do two things: lose weight and exercise. I recently watched a documentary called Fit and Back which showed a fitness instructor gaining weight for six months and then losing it again in the next six months. He knew how to lose weight. He knew his body pretty intimately. One huge problem I saw with his take on fitness was that he tried to apply what he used for himself to others who came from completely different physical backgrounds.

The difference is that he was losing his weight with the prior knowledge and ability to overcome weight training fatigue and the ability to limit his eating substantially more than someone who has been fat for ten to twenty years. There's a reason said person has been fat for a long time. There's a lot of it that is mental, and some of it that is physiological.

Having been overweight for a long time, I can say the hardest thing for me to overcome initially. I'll go into that more, but let's examine further what a person has to do in order to become more physically fit. In this scenario, the person starts out overweight. Weighing too much is a symptom of an underlying problem. Some may say that the problem is laziness. That could be somewhat true. I know plenty of overweight people who aren't mentally lazy. They just don't exercise enough physically. Lazy isn't exactly the answer.

So this fitness coach from the documentary was trying to coach these overweight people, and the first thing he did was to put them on weight training. Why the heck would anyone think this is a good idea? It was probably a good idea for him when he was trying to get back into shape because his body was used to physical activity, even though he hadn't been doing much of it for six months. His body was able to bounce back into a routine that he had been doing for a decade. Likewise, it's hard for an overweight person to bounce out of a routine that they've been doing for a decade.

Exercise, especially weight training causes a lot of muscle pain. Fitness experts and coaches thrive from muscle pain and love exercising. An overweight person has years of inflammation and typically doesn't like exercise. You could say that most people don't like exercise. However, people who are in great physical fitness tend to power through physical pain easier, especially muscle pain. They thrive from the endorphins released from exercise. A person who has been overweight and not exercising for an extended amount of time can't enjoy the endorphins because they are experiencing immediate pain in their muscles and joints.

So throwing an overweight person onto a weight training routine seems like a terrible idea. They will soon become unmotivated. In order to motivate an overweight person, they have to see results from the huge amount of effort that they have to put forth. If you put them on a 1500 calorie per day diet, they expect to lose weight. It's difficult for them to not eat at least 2500 calories probably, and here you are taking away almost half of their intake. Which leads me to this formula:

• In order to be healthier, you have to exercise and lose weight
• In order to exercise, you have to reduce your pain
• In order to reduce your pain, you have to reduce the problem that's causing your aching joints and muscles
• The primary cause of those issues is your extra body fat and possibly insulin resistance
• You have to reduce body fat and fix any insulin resistance FIRST or at least be well on your way before getting into intense exercise

That all being said, light walks should be incorporated from the beginning, and the duration of those walks should be increased over the first few weeks. Then, once the person is at a comfortable level with the walking, increase the pace and add inclines.

That is the extent of exercise an obese person should be doing at first. The impact of their own weight could actually injure them and cause them more problems than good. I'm going through all of this and I've hurt myself in the past because I was jogging too hard for my health. I have a left ankle that makes noise every other step as a result of this. Keep away from high intensity for someone who isn't used to exercising regularly. It's just a bad idea to introduce that too early. You have to decrease the body fat first. 

So if reducing the body fat is the primary concern, how do we do that? By reducing calorie intake and improving what type of food we intake. Some people attempt to reduce calories without some good prior knowledge. We've all heard of the Atkins diet and that we should eat less carbs and more protein. Or at least that was my idea about it before I researched a few different diets. I think the underlying benefit to Keto, Atkins, etc is that by reducing or eliminating carbs, we reduce hunger. Pay attention to that, because it's the most important thing in any of these low-carb diets. Eating little to no carbs significantly reduces your hunger cravings. 

It's the key to helping overweight people lose weight. If they can replace their carbs and sugars with other foods that they like, whatever that food may be, let them have as much as they want, because if they aren't eating carbs, they'll eventually require less and less of that food. That food may not be the best thing they could eat, but at least it's not making them more and more hungry. 

I mean if you try to get an overweight person to cut calories, without paying attention to what calories they are eating, they will have at least some sugar and carbs in there. A single 12 oz cola may have 140 calories, which can be fit into a 1500/day calorie diet and still leaves you with 1360 calories for the day. So if I drink that soda, I'm not even wasting ten percent of my daily calories, but I'm significantly increasing how hungry I'm going to be tomorrow, which in turn makes it significantly harder for me to only eat 1500 calories tomorrow. So I think that the best first step for overweight people is to allow them to eat as many calories as they want, as long as they have 0 grams of carbs, and I'm actually more strict than a keto or Atkins diet when it comes to this. I'm not talking about net carbs. Eliminate carbs completely. Any cheating on this will make the person more hungry. More hunger pains makes it more difficult to continue with everything else that needs to occur.

Eating protein and fat, whenever you feel hungry, greatly reduces the hunger you will have later on. Eating any sugar or carbs significantly increases future hunger. So if you are having trouble counting calories and getting your calorie intake low enough, take a look at the types of foods you are getting your calories from. When you get hungry, don't eat carbs. Plain and simply this is the first step to becoming more healthy if you are an overweight person.