Quote: (09-06-2014 12:21 AM)ThePianoMan Wrote:
Unfortunately my career requires a lot of travel and sedentary behavior. I've worked out off and on for years but I really have had enough of feeling overweight. I'm currently 5'10" and 240 lbs and really want to shed about 50 pounds in a healthy amount of time. I will admit my eating habits are poor and I do have urges to eat carbs and sweets regularly.
I'd love to get some suggestions on initiating a workout routine for weight loss and some diet tips as well. I've been trying to run for the past months but I always start and then get distracted with work. I also wonder if running is an efficient enough workout for weight loss.
I'm happy to answer any follow up questions to get better suggestions. Thanks to everyone for this advice as I finally take the red pill once and for all.
Personally, I prioritize controllable aspects of healthy living into three categories.
Diet comes first, then sleep, then exercise. In other words, if I am too tired, I skip exercising.
There are quite a few threads on diet in this forum, and you seem to identify one of the main culprits in our diets, and that is the need for a lot of people to cut carbs.
Also, if you can figure out how to cut processed foods out of your diet and to eat more natural and whole foods, then that would be good, which can be somewhat of a challenge if you travel a lot.
You may want to read, Gary Taubes' book "why we get fat and what to do about it." It is NOT specifically a diet book, but it does give you an idea the extent to which we have been lied to by various mainstream sources including the FDA about fat being bad for us... Anyhow the punchline should be that some natural fats and animal fats and butter and fish fats and avocado and coconut are good and transfats and man made fats such as vegetable and corn and soybean oils are bad.
I personally attempt to eat a lot of natural whole foods, which can be more difficult when you are traveling a lot, and to keep carbs down (less than 25% if possible) (also harder when you travel a lot), but boiled eggs can be good and portable. Same with bacon... if you get good fats into your diet and otherwise filling foods, your cravings on carbs will cut down.
In about the past 3 years, I have NOT been drinking either sodas or other manufactured drinks or diet drinks (because they tend to put in quite a few additives that cause your body to have an insulin responses in spite of there sometimes being NO sugar contained therein.. but the sweetness still causes your body to react as if there were sugar in those products).
Guys in this forum do NOT always agree about dietary approaches and about how much carbs are good, and I personally believe some of the information is wrong and misleading and each of us have to study up on these kinds of topics to make a plan for ourselves.
I posted a bit of a protest in this other
RVF belly thread. Also, contained within that post is a link to a real decent video, too about butter and insulin resistance.
You may want to look up westin price as well and wheat bellies.
Actually, if you consider making a plan for yourself, you may want to start by considering ways to cut certain processed foods from your diet and which natural foods to put in their place in order that you do NOT get as many cravings for bad food.
Maybe it would be good to post here again about the plan that you are making.. ? and possibly just changing one or two things at a time is better than trying to make some plan that would be too difficult for you to follow.. especially if you have some erratic scheduling and traveling matters.