Originally Posted by
wolfchild
The root causes of obesity is eating too many calories, especially junk calories and not enough physical exertion, not enough movement. Exercising once or twice per week is not enough, it needs to be everyday. The Medical Association can't really do anything, because loosing weight is an individual affair. The government can't force people to stop eating too much or force them to exercise, its up to the individual to make that decision. Most people are not serious enough about loosing weight, others are bombarded with all kinds of false information about how to eat and how to exercise. It's not easy.. The formula for maintaining healthy weight is very very simple: Eat mostly whole foods, make sure that your exercise program includes both resistance training and cardio...Also make sure to have high intensity days, medium intensity days and low intensity days. And make sure to be physically active every single day. Loosing weight has a lot to do with self-discipline. A diet or exercise program is useless if a person doesn't stick with it....Another problem is that many people want to choose an easy comfortable and fun way to loose weight. Sometimes people need to do hard things, be uncomfortable and do things that they don't like, it's the hard difficult exercises that produce the best results.
That's all true advice but I would think not necessarily the best advice for someone who is extremely over weight. WHAT and when you eat matters more than nearly anything else when you are more than 100 lbs over weight. I know because I have LOST 190lbs in the last 2 years. I went whole foods but extremely low carbs and worked toward a 16-8 intermittent fasting schedule until I reached it for an eating window. When you weigh 360 lbs exercise is nearly impossible. I lost nearly 60 lbs before I was able to even start walking. Then my knees hurt so bad I couldn't keep it up. That's when I discovered cycling.
I think the one thing that helped me most was weighing every day. You can't freak out over small fluctuations but it's extremely important to be accountable to your goals every day and be adaptable to change if what you are doing isn't working. I had days when I ate too much but because I was accountable to myself, I would eat way less or even fast the next day until I was back on track. If what you are doing isn't working ,then try something different. I spent hundreds of hours educating myself on what is a healthy diet.
Most of us think that we know what to eat but just don't. The truth is that all of us are only the sum of our education, good or bad. If you really want to change your actions then you must change your education. I tell everyone that wants to lose weight to spend every moment possible educating themselves on diet and exercise. Just like a computer, if we want to do something new and different, then we have to load new soft wear into the computer we call our brain. It is the constant introduction of new ideas that will cause us to act differently.