Hi
After spending years of reading quality articles and books such as these I would like to offer you my own experiences of losing weight and what worked for me.
After weight training for years and being an active mountain biker, I was shocked three and a bit years ago after working in a particularly stressful job that demanded nearly all of my time for two years, (barely having a moment to train) that without even realising it my weight had ballooned and I had gone up to just under 17 stone/238 pounds/108 kilos in just over a year from a lean and toned 13 and a half stone.
I started exercising more vigorously and became the aerobically fittest I've ever been in my life mainly because my body had to adapt to carrying so much more weight around! At this point I paniced and tried all sorts of diets from low carb/high protein to high carb/low protein, meal replacements, soup diets and many of the varieties of lose weight fast diets that are around.
Needless to say I had many short term benefits, but long term I kept gaining weight. During the high protein/low carb diets I found I experienced a sensation of being spaced out and cranky quite regularly and so would compensate by binging on crappy foods.
Ultimately on these short term diets, you lose weight quickly but then your body begins to store fat and burn protein in order to conserve energy and you're back to square one.
I'd read around the subject a bit and came acoss two books the 5 day Miracle Diet and Potatoes not Prozac. Both dealt with blood sugar levels as the key component of any diet, ie if it goes too low or too high you get cravings for high sugar(carbohydrate) foods.
The second book was most interesting as it was part of a doctor's thesis on alcohol recovery patients. The doctor in question believed she had found a correlation between alcoholics and blood sugar imbalances. In a nutshell the one reason they kept drinking was to make themselves feel normal by raising their blood sugar levels and so keep their mood stable.
She proposed a very simple diet which in my experience worked exactly as it's supposed to: Create good eating habits and keep the weight off. NB: I must point out at this point that I was never an alcoholic!!!! One of the additional benefits of this particular diet was that she had also researched how to elevate mood and lower stress as part of the final diet. Without giving you loads of recipes it boils down to this:
Three meals a day and no snacking.
Each meal should contain carbs and proteins.
Each meal should have a measure of protein about the size of your fist.
Switch to wholefoods rather than refined foods.
That's it simple, easy to remember and you'll find you're eating nicer foods than you have done in years. Over 16 months I lost 3 stone/42 pounds/19 kilos.
More info on this particular book:
http://www.radiantrecovery.com/
So my additional natural law of dieting is this:
Don't consume more than the calories required to be the weight you want to be.
I can't find the figures for working out calories to body weight but this site is pretty useful:
http://ibw.dietitian.com/ibw/ibw.html
Although ignore the BMI index as if you lift weights at all or have a big frame they are generally incorrect but the calorie calculations are useful.
Also useful:
Get yourself a calorie counter book, not one that measures every food product on the market but one that summarises eg: Apple average 80 cals, slice of wholemeal bread average 83 etc. Use it for two weeks on everything you eat, you'll soon have a mental map of what you can and can't eat to hit your target and you won't have to refer to the calorie counter that often after that as you'll know roughly what each food item contains calorie wise.
Weight training as per David's article is a definite must. Or alternatively as I've now been training for a while, I actually want to maintain muscle but not hit the weights as much any more as psychologically I'm always trying to lift more and so keep getting bigger when I really want to get leaner. I've started doing Jonathan's routine from the teen body building part of this site. I'm not a teen any more but I used to do similar martial arts routines when I was (all those years ago!) and have found this great for getting toned:
http://www.teenbodybuilding.com/steh7.htm
Bloody hard work mind you, but worth it.
My final tips are, don't watch too much TV - you'll be amazed at how many calories you'll burn by not sitting in front of the tube.
Don't read too many mens/womens magazines they will only offer you all kinds of conflicting advice and could possibly make you feel inferior compared to all those gorgeous models strutting their stuff.
Once you've found what works for you stick with it.
All the best.
Indigo
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