How I Went From 340 to 199 Pounds

I spent two years losing over 140 pounds the old fashioned way: proper diet and exercise. No fads. No pills. No surgery. No crazy machines. I was 30 years old and 340 pounds. With a history of heart disease and obesity in my family, I decided it was time to shed the pounds.

 Almost every day I get people I haven't seen in years coming up to me saying "Wow! You look great!" and then the next question... "What have you been doing?" That's why I wrote this article.

  Disclaimer
 Now, of course, as a general disclaimer, I have to say that the tips I'm sharing with you here are just from my own personal experience. I'm not a professional health expert - although over the past couple of years I've read dozens of books, and hundreds of articles on nutrition, exercise, and weight lifting. I'm not a doctor. You should, of course, seek your own doctor's advice before starting any kind of a weight-loss or exercise plan. I firmly believe that with the right diet and proper exercise, almost anyone should be able to lose weight and get fit safely.

  Tip 1. It's All About Calories First, the bad news. Weight gain and loss is directly tied to the amount of calories you eat versus the calories you expend through exercise. What's a calorie? A calorie is a unit of heat energy. Specifically, it's the amount of heat energy required to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. How this relates to your body is that when you eat food, the food molecules are broken down chemically and that energy is either used by your body to perform work (like building muscle, or constructing new cells) or is stored (as fat). If you take in more calories than you burn, you will start to get fat. Now, in the world of calories, it takes 3500 calories to equal one pound of body weight. So, if you take in an extra 3500 calories in your diet this week without exercising, congratulations... you've just gained one pound (probably all body fat). The good news is that you can lose one pound of fat by either removing 3500 calories from your diet, or adding 3500 calories of exercise to your weekly schedule, or a combination of the two. What's 3500 calories? It's actually not much if you're eating the wrong kinds of food. You can consume 3500 calories in one meal if you eat two Double Whoppers (1010 calories each), a King Size order of french fries (590), a King Size onion rings (600), and a chocolate shake (440). Don't laugh... this is what I used to eat for dinner if my family went to Burger King... or something similarly outrageous. So the bottom line here is that if you want to lose weight, you have to create a calorie deficit. That means you have to burn off more calories than you eat. You had to eat more calories than you burned to get fat... now you have to reduce the calories to get lean. It's that simple. In order to know how many calories you're taking in and burning off, you need to write them down.

  Tip 2. Eat Frequently Throughout the Day Think of your body as a furnace. You want your furnace to burn fuel as efficiently as possible. In order for that to happen, you need to let it burn hot and steady throughout the day. You need to stoke your fire often to keep it burning. Keep your metabolism running all day long by eating every 3 to 4 hours. My personal tip: I eat on hours evenly divisible by 3. That means breakfast at 9am (if I'm up that early), lunch at noon, a snack at 3pm, dinner at 6pm, a snack at 9pm, and if I'm still up another snack at midnight. Now, I personally work late (I usually get most of my "real work" done between the hours of 10pm and 2am) but if you need to eat at different hours, that's fine... Just take the total number of calories you're going to eat throughout the day and divvy them up into 3-hour intervals. Keep that fire stoked! If you can't take a break at work to eat every 3 hours, bring a protein bar with you. If you skip breakfast, then you're extremely hungry by the time lunch comes around. Skip lunch, and you're more likely to gorge yourself at dinner. Why? Your body is saying, "Hey! I need food badly!" If you feed yourself often, throughout the day, your body doesn't go into shock, and you won't get those wild cravings and hunger pangs when it's time to eat.

  Tip 3. Start a Food & Exercise Journal Don't just dismiss this section. I did! The first couple of times I read about doing this in fitness and weight-loss books, I said to myself, "I don't have the time to do this." But you know what - it really works! I cannot stress how important it is to write everything down that you eat. All you need is a little notebook. Make four columns: what you ate, how much of it you ate, how many calories were in it, and what time of the day you ate it. It's that simple. Also write down any exercise or other activities that are more strenuous than just sitting around. Taking the time to recognize what you're eating is the first step to losing weight. A lot of people truly don't realize how much crap they're eating. When I first started doing this - and writing down everything I was eating - it really opened my eyes to the volumes of junk food I was eating before. I was a slave to cookies, chocolate, chicken wings, and pizza. When I first took the time to look up the fact that a chicken wing has 150 calories in it (yes, one wing), I was astounded. I used to eat 20 wings and 2 or 3 slices of pizza for dinner.