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.

Fasting Plus Low Carb

As I sit here and write this post, I'm hungry, but it's bearable. I have been thinking about food for the last five hours. I'm currently on hour twenty-nine of what I hope to be a 48-hour fast. Will I make it? Probably, but it's rough at the moment.

I have been doing 23-1 or one-meal-a-day for a few weeks. This is the first real attempt I've made at a 48-hour fast. The last time I ate, I had a ribeye steak, collard greens, brussel sprouts, and broccoli. I've had about five grams of carbs in the last three days. I've lost about four pounds according to my fluctuating scale. It's hard to get a good accurate reading from a scale when you can get two readings four pounds apart just by moving slightly forward or backward on the scale. I'm confident that I'm at 231 though.

Add to all of this that I've burned nearly 7000 calories since I last ate, and it's easy to see that I should be at least two pounds lighter regardless. The low carbs for the last few days coupled with the extra long fast I'm attempting along with the large amounts of cardio I'm also doing, have led to a decent couple of days of weight loss. I feel slimmer and my skin feels tighter.

That being said, I can't wait until I get to eat again. I may cut the fast short to only forty hours. That would be like combining a twenty-four hour and a sixteen hour fast. My legs are sore from the extra jogging/walking. I'm hoping that I can have some self control when I break my fast. I'm sitting here thinking about all the things that I would like to eat.

I'd like to have some rice, but that will be high in carbs and I'm not sure that I want to gorge myself on carbs right after this fast. I half-way think that allowing myself to have a reward for going so long without eating would be a good way to reinforce the fasting behavior. I could be completely wrong. I don't have a coach through any of this and I'm having to supply my own will power. My main motivation right now is the desire to see my BMI drop below 29. I have good amount of weight to lose still before that happens, but it's a goal. I really don't know if BMI is a good indication of anything though. It doesn't really consider fat percentage and I'm really just trying to get my fat percentage down below 25%. That's a more healthy goal and the one I'm really interested in. Sure, I eventually want to go further than that, but that's my current goal. I'm only concerned with my BMI because I'm sick of being considered "obese".

I watched a documentary on Youtube last night. It was about a guy that went from fit to fat and then back. He was an underwear model and a fitness coach. He was doing it to show that it could be done and also so he'd have a better understanding of what some of his clients were going through losing their weight. It's one thing to gain eighty pounds in six months and then immediately losing it. It's another thing to be obese for a decade or more and try to retrain your mind. I don't think he had a good idea of how to help people. He needed a longer time in the obese zone I think. Also, he was putting them directly on weights. My goodness that can be overwhelming for someone who hasn't exercised in years. The muscle soreness on top of the already nagging brain that's wanting to eat, makes it very difficult to stay motivated.

I think first and foremost a person has to change their diet, but it has to be in a way that is easy to transition in steps. The first dietary changes should be toward a goal of eliminating sugar. That's difficult to do, but I think it has to be the primary concern of a trainer/fitness coach. You can't eliminate sugar and carbs instantly. You can't take someone who's drinking a sugary soda constantly throughout the day and tell them to stop that plus stop all other sugar they are consuming. It has to happen eventually, but they just won't have much success doing that cold turkey.

I quit smoking in 2008. I started back up in 2011. I quit again last year (2018). I can tell everyone reading this that quitting that habit was ten times harder for me than quitting sugar, but both are hard and I had help with smoking. I took Chantix which helped a lot with smoking. There's not a drug, at least none that I know of, that will make you not want sugar. I'm not sure why that hasn't been created, but it's definitely what we need to curve our obesity epidemic.

Sugar and carbs are such a major part of the American diet that it's difficult to cut them out completely. There's a lot of diets that revolve around low-carb, high-fat and/or high-protein. I don't think that the big concern should be "what do I eat since I'm not eating carbs?", I think it should be more along the line of "eat anything but carbs, where ever you can." Sugar and carbs drive hunger. It's SO hard to cut calories or fast when you are hungry. The first step should always be to remove as much of the hunger as possible, and that means to cut all sugar and carbs. That should be the primary goal of most diets. It's the only way to be successful. There's no way that I could go forty-eight hours without eating if I had just had a big bowl of ice cream and a slice of cake right before attempting it. In fact, I couldn't do a forty-eight hour fast if I'd had sugar in the previous 24 hours. Sugar and carbs DRIVE hunger because the insulin they cause your body to produce makes you hungry when it has processed the sugars you've given it. At least that's how it seems to me. If I have had any sugar, even if it was from a banana, my hunger is increased significantly.

If you want to lose weight or help someone else lose weight, the key to success, at least in my opinion, is to get sugar and carbs out of the system completely. It's very difficult to stop eating. It's hundreds of times more difficult if insulin spikes at all previous to that.