Why don’t I lose weight!

So I thought I share with you some of the things I learned by try and error for my or others weight management experiments.

I often find women complaining about their weights but complaining is far real than actually acting and taking control. If you find yourself in that situation, just forget about weight management, diet and pills. It aint gonna work!

You have to be realistic. Weight loss is a matter of gradual change. You cannot drastically do a makeover (like the ones the reality shows try to force feed you) over a night! So be real. I am sure you have heard this before.

Don’t try to write down a log of your daily intake! It is not sustainable. You need to cut down one item at a time. Start from the most starchy, fatty intakes. Take a look at what you are eating and loving it every day. Realistically you need to stomp over your heart and desire to eat. So identify that one big item. For me it was rice and bread. For someone else can be mayonnaise. For you might be chips and chocolate bar.

After cutting that one item, start doing exercise. Now here is the trick. I see a tone of people every day at the gyms I go. And believe me, I have executive membership at one of largest Canadian fitness clubs and I go around everywhere. The biggest mistake I see in the gyms is that no one understands that IT IS HARD! It should be hard. Gaining muscles and losing that fat in your arm lady, is hard!! No kidding about it. So before wearing that spandex and thinking about the color of your outfit, think hard about the PAIN! No pain no gain! And yet we are the ones who carry the child and go through labor! Go figure! Be careful, there is a difference between pain from hard workout to pain from an injury, which I find a lot of people cannot differentiate. I couldn’t at first either.

If you are over-weight by more than 10 Ibs, I highly recommend you don’t jump and jerk that knee! You need that knee for a long time! So stop jumping around or up and down.

I propose you to start from high intensity intervals of cardio workout. You will only need 20 min. of workout but you need to (very important):

1. Check with your doctor about your heart condition
2. Check with you doctor about your maximum heart rate
3. Buy a heart rate monitor and make sure you know how to use it!
4. Learn about 75% resting heart rate (just Google it)
5. Start with a 5 min. warm up then reps of 1 min. anaerobic zone 1 min. aerobic zone workouts. Then 5 min cool down!

What is anaerobic vs. aerobic? If you cannot talk while running, that’s anaerobic, if you can talk that’s aerobic. Easy!

Then you need persistency and patience! All that matters is a will to change the situation. And yes, there will be a plateau but funny enough; I found that plateau is nothing but a state of mind. There will be a time where your mind won’t let you progress. That’s when you need to move to a harder zone and change your eating habits again because as you recall we just removed one item and we said start with baby steps. So now that you have learned how to walk tip-toe move to holding the rail and walking! Now you need to sit and think for a minute or two (all that it takes from your brain to respond) and see where you can improve to move on forward.

And please don’t weigh yourself everyday! Your dresses will tell you the truth way more accurate than your daily weighing.

Last but not least is adding a whole lot more vegetable and protein to your diet. With our fast pace life in Toronto, I find it really hard to keep bringing food to work everyday. But realistically, there are not a lot of healthy options around in fast food or chain stores that we all buy food from in the food courts.

Be careful about the intake of those items you are trying to cut. If you stopped taking starchy food, at least replace your bread with wholegrain or whole wheat bread. Try to have vegetables a lot! These days a large number of vendors sell salads (although ridiculously much more expensive than your own salad). Eat eggs (but be mindful of that cholesterol). It is really easy to boil that egg! Eat Greek yogurt. Add flax seed to two table spoon of Greek Yogurt and there you have a spectacular super healthy snack.

You need to eat a lot less than you think. Major issue with people I found is that they are always afraid of being hungry. They think being hungry will lower their energy levels. But seriously, not working out will lower your energy.

And please don’t eat that spaghetti at lunch and go back to your desk sitting another 4 hours or so! You are basically turning all that starch into fat without a doubt!

Stop eating sweets intermittently! Do not eat sweats in between meals. It just signals your body to secrete more insulin which holds the use of fat as an energy source. So, your body will stop using the fat that is stored in your muscles and liver, which in turn stops you from loosing weight!

Also, please please please…. Stop drinking that DIET SODA! It is just not going to help you loose fat at all. It actually works the reverse.

So hopefully this can help you become realistic about your weight loss and weight management.