Getting Started

Immediately following my visit to the doctor I got online and researched and researched and researched hundreds of diets. I make no claim to being a fitness, diet or health professional or expert. In fact I am nutritionally ignorant other than the fact that I know organic and natural are always better for you. Diets are so hard to follow. You can have this,  you have to eat that,  you should drink maple syrup mixed with hot pepper and lemon juice,  for what reason - to induce vomiting?  I guess that would also induce weight loss as well, but really?? I sat there thinking....The things people will do to lose weight. It's a huge industry. Anyone with a crack headed idea that may work can sell it for the low price of only $19.95.  I guess that's why America is the fattest nation in the world because we have access to all these fantastic diets.

 The one thing I got from most of the research I did was that the calories in must be less than calories out, or you're not going to lose a pound.  Your body is a big indicator of your caloric need. If you're hungry, you should eat or you're going to slow your metabolism.  You just have to make appropriate choices for what you eat.

I have not discovered a magic pill, food, trick or plan. I have to make conscious efforts each day to stay on track and sometimes it's not easy. I have hit two plateaus and they are very frustrating. Despite claim after claim there is no such thing as a negative calorie food well except water (but that's not a food really).  Eating citrus fruit will not magically shrink your waist, although it may cause your mouth to be rather irritated which could aid in the process of not eating. Liquid diets will work temporarily by giving you diarrhea and dehydrating you. Eating funky soup works only because you can't possibly eat 1200 calories worth of it in a day. Although several of these diets will produce results it's because of the restricted caloric intake and not because they are magic. I recently heard about a man who lost 40 pounds eating Twinkies and Doritos but the thing is he restricted his calorie intake to 1800 per day and that's how he lost the weight. It had nothing to do with magic food.

There are all kinds of calculators to figure out how many calories your body needs each day but if you can understand them you are smarter than I. Weight, metabolism, activity level and a thousand other things go into determining how many calories a day you burn. I plugged in the same info on all of them and got between 1200 and 1800 calories per day. So for the sake of dieting I assume my body burns about 1200. What I do know is that one pound of fat is equal to somewhere around 3500 calories.  There again I have found varying information from 3000 to 3500. So for the sake of dieting we are going with 3500. So I need to have a deficit of 3500 calories to lose one pound. Ok so that sounds simple enough. If I only eat 500-600 calories per day then I should have a deficit of at least 600. But I forgot about the soda calories.  I also failed to realize early on that if your body thinks your starving it will not burn calories. You must have fuel going in or just like a car it will not run.