Running Alone Won’t Help You Lose Weight
I don’t get it.
I exercise a lot. 1800 miles of joggling. 90 minutes a week of volleyball. Walking to stores instead of driving. Climbing 3 stories of stairs multiple times a day instead of an elevator. I’m a calorie burning machine.
So, explain to me how it’s possible that when I stepped on the scale for my beginning of the year weigh in, I clocked in at 198 pounds? (That’s 89.8 kg for our international affiliates).
That’s a net weight gain of 6 pounds for the year. Clearly, exercise alone is not enough for weight loss. And as we’ve seen, you can even break a world record juggling and running 50 miles and gain weight!
Track your food to lose weight
It’s easier to be fast if you’re light.
In 2003, I weighed as much as 211 pounds. That’s when I started writing down everything I ate. It wasn’t really for weight loss but more for curiosity. I delight in telling people, “Ya know, this is the 44th time I ate pizza this year” or “This is the 79th can of soda I’ve had this year.” This had led many to start calling me obsessive compulsive. I don’t buy it. I just think it’s funny.
And it was useful too. Just by writing down everything I ate, I went from 211 to a low of 190 that year. The next year I was down to 187. In 2005, I was at 183.
26 pounds of weight loss by writing down food intake
Admittedly, it was tough to keep up with food recording. Especially since my old Psion PDA wasn’t working anymore. I just couldn’t repeat the system. And the bit about writing down everything I ate and telling people just wasn’t as amusing to my Urban Tribe.
Determine Your Target Weight
My recent 198 weigh in and the passing of a new year have inspired me to get back down to that healthy BMI level. For me, a healthy weight based on my BMI (body mass index) is 188 lbs. You can find yours using this BMI calculator. Of course, I don’t want to just be healthy, I want to be FAST! I want to set a PR in the London Marathon and really want to compete well in this year’s IJA Joggling championship races in Kentucky. So, my target will by 183 pounds.
Free food tracking tool
To do this, I have already made my joggling training schedule and set my other fitness goals (pushups, pullups, situps, handstands, etc). All I needed was a new way to write down everything I eat. And I found it!
Check out The Daily Plate.
You just click on the things you ate for the day and it records the calories, fat, carbs, protein, etc. And you can’t beat the price. FREE!
This system alone isn’t adequate however, because sometimes you’re not near a computer. For those times, you can carry a PDA (my Treo phone
I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. And if anyone else in the JYAJ community is going to try to drop a few pounds, let us know how it’s going by leaving a comment below.
This Post Has 2 Comments
I’ve had exactly the same experience of running a lot and losing no weight. However, I’m not methodical enough to consistently track my food intake — I’m a software guy, not a research chemist — so I settled on a simpler system and dropped my BMI from 26.8 to 22.3 over about twelve months.
The secret? Eat slowly, eat only when you’re hungry, and eat only until you’re not hungry. When I started doing this, I found that if I served myself about two-thirds as much as I expected to eat, I often found I didn’t want any more — but if I was still hungry I’d keep eating (slowly) until I wasn’t.
I suspect you could combine this with your calorie tracking to good effect. I’m still eating this way (and plan to for the rest of my life), with the aim of eventually getting my BMI down to about 21.
Greg
I’ve had a spot of this too and I got so dejected I gave up on the entire weight thingy. I really do want to drop my BMI from what it is now to a lower number.