Losing Weight is Like a Marathon, and it’s Just as Painful Too

Let’s talk about weight loss. It’s hard and it sucks and it’s painful. There are a hell of a lot of facets to it, and navigating through them is kinda like a maze of custom-made fragile mirrors; bump into one and congratulations, you’re full of shards and bleeding everywhere. You’ll lose some blood as you find your way through the maze, probably become a little anemic, and once you see that sweet, sweet light at the end of the tunnel, it’s always possible you’ll collapse. You gotta make sure you bandage yourself along the way; clean the wounds up. With a strong enough will; you’ll reach that end 100% of the time. If you want to lose weight, will is important, but knowledge, my friend, is even more important. If someone has a map to navigate through a labyrinth, things become a whole lot easier.

So before I start talking about weight loss itself, I want to ask the question: why are people fat? Like weight loss itself, this is a deeply complex issue, but I’ll try to simplify it. I’ll use myself and the time I gained 50 pounds over the COVID-19 lockdown as an example. I was home all the time. I would frequently find myself the victim of excruciating boredom, and what activity alleviates boredom more than eating? Cheesesteaks, brownies, gyros, and all kinds of sugary delight were shoved down my happy gullet, and honestly, it wasn’t too bad. I was feeding my food addiction and gained a couple pounds in return. I’m a young guy right? Weight isn’t going to affect my health all too much, it’s only decades later that I'd start feeling the ramifications of my eating habits. I had the feeling of invincibility that all humans have, until ya know, I saw my blood pressure was high as fuck and got real scared. Everyone needs to find their own reason to lose weight, I can offer very little insight on why you should start. Finding that reason requires a little soul-searching, that or getting scared shitless. 

The Basics of the Basics of Nutrition

Before we even think about losing weight, we need to understand how nutrition works, especially dieting. At the end of the day, losing weight is all about a single core tenet. The calories you expend must be greater than the calories you consume. There is no trick to weight loss and there is no diet that will automatically manage this for you barring fasting and even then, fasting has its flaws: it’s an extremely painful dieting method that if managed improperly, will lead to overeating. To manage the amount of calories you consume, there are two steps. Find your basal metabolic rate and count the calories you consume. If you consistently stay under your basal metabolic rate, you’ll lose weight assuming you have no medical conditions. If you’re fat, you’re in luck, there is no human condition more conducive to weight loss than being fat. All that fat in your body uses calories to maintain itself and so your basal metabolic rate will rise.

At its simplest, losing weight is not difficult, but because we as humans are complex creatures, it’s usually not that simple. Life will always get in your way. You’ll have good days. You’ll have bad days. Your good days must be greater than your bad days. 

When looking at specific diets, you can disregard them. I would only suggest the ketogenic diet to diabetic individuals as it greatly limits sugar intake. Designed diets are created to limit calorie intake, there is nothing inherently special about fasting or a paleo diet or even a keto diet. Between all diets though, there is a common pattern, and that is to limit sugar intake. Sugar is the dastardly villain of nutrition, unless you're an incredibly active individual, it’s more often than not, pretty harmful. After eating a sugary food low in fiber, your pancreas starts working overdrive from immediate sugar absorption (fiber slows sugar absorption) and you’ll likely crash hard. 

Since the good ol’ cave-dwelling times have we loved sugar, it’s instinct. Hell, we've enslaved humans, beat humans, and slaughtered humans for our love of sugar. Sugar’s a powerful thing. At a biological level, we have no control over the dopamine that gets released after consuming sugar. It’s an incredibly addictive substance and it's also a major yet nearly nutritionally useless contributor to caloric intake. If you’ve ever heard of empty calories, this is where the concept comes from. More often than not, the simplest solution is the most effective, and with the problem of excess sugar intake, this is no different. The first step to limiting caloric intake is to abstain from eating processed sugars. You’ve likely heard it already, but when it become much easier.

Start Looking at How You Eat

Once you do start abstaining from certain types of foods, it’s time to take a look at your eating habits. I myself used to eat to relieve boredom and it was effective. The more sugar and fat the better. From a young age, I taught myself to prefer calorie dense foods. To lose weight, I had to force myself to eat the bare essentials. If you’re like me, you’ll never enjoy it, but you’ll get used to it. Save good eating for special occasions. Willpower is a hard thing to build. Perhaps the easiest way you can abstain, is through simply not buying certain food items at all. If you’re like me and eat out of boredom, it’ll be too much of a hassle to go to the store and get that box of doughnuts.mes to processed sugar, soda and pastries are the absolute killers here. A full bottle of cola has about 60 grams of pure sugar, that’s kinda like an atomic bomb for your pancreas. Once you begin to abstain from excess sugar, weight loss should become much easier. 

Exercise Sucks too, But Give it a Try

Now that you have the most important bits of nutrition knowledge I can give you, let’s talk about exercise as a means to lose weight. Exercise, like dieting, is torturous. It’s also not necessary to lose weight. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t exercise, you absolutely should. If I had to give a rough estimate on how much each contributes to weight loss, I’d say dieting to exercise is about 75:25. Aerobics (likely the best exercise for weight loss) for 30 minutes is hard for a fat person to do and gets harder with age and. It’ll also usually result only in a loss of around 200-500 calories depending on intensity. I myself would skew that to the lower end. Where weight loss happens with exercise, is in consistency. Exercising 3 times a week will result in about 600 calories lost. That’s a pretty great number, but more things must be given consideration. The more you exercise, the more you’ll have to eat. Your natural bodily processes will most likely even out the calories burned from exercising. 

So why even exercise at all? To get ripped of course. If you’ve been fat for a while, you’ll probably have some loose skin at the end of a weight loss journey, fill that skin up with some muscle. Muscle takes an incredibly long amount of time to develop so we might as well be proactive. If you’ve lost a lot of weight and you were strength training the entire journey, don't be disappointed if your skin hasn’t filled up with muscle, that’s only normal. Muscle building takes a really long time.

Still, this is optional, though I very much recommend it. I myself am no expert on muscle growth and even then, I’ve gained a few pounds of muscle here and there from doing simple weightlifting. Exercising is also just ya know, good for just about everything in your body.

Don’t Give up

With all that being said, weight loss is an individual journey and at the end of the day, I am only offering the general advice that I find most important in weight loss. Each person’s a unique case. Conditions like Hypothyroidism, PCOS, and insulin resistance make my advice and my experience largely irrelevant. I’m sure any individual with a condition that causes them to gain weight is tired of hearing it, but weight is best managed with medication in those cases.

Anyways, that’s my 2 cents on the whole weight loss thing. Give it a shot. I believe in you.