Project: Fit into the Cmod

It's not just calories, but how your body processes different foods. A glycemic index table is a handy guide for choosing foods.

Cut out the sugars, especially from drinks (soda, juices). Just drop them altogether. It hurts for 10-14 days, then the sugar cycle is broken. Eat as many whole veggies as you like. Fruits too, but things like bananas are pretty high glycemic index. Lean protein in moderate amounts. Starting at the end of the second week you'll be shedding fat.

I like exercise for feeling better and being more functional. I do circuits of body weight or moderate barbell / kb / dumbbell.

But it's the food that will set your fat loss.

Having lost 70+ pounds myself, I can offer a little bit of advice on what worked for ME. I've listed them in order of importance, obviously my personal opinion however-

• There are a million ways to skin a cat, so to speak. You can exercise tons, you can do long/sustained or short/intense efforts. You can eat less, eat cleaner, and eat differently. All of them will yield some form of weight loss, I promise you! Basically, what I'm saying is anything is better than nothing. And the more 'anythings' you can combine and stack, the better the net benefit.

• Avoid all processed sugar, and moderate simple ones. Soda, cereals, yogurt (seriously, look at it!), and to some extent, fruits, should be eliminated or minimized if your goal is strictly weight-loss. Simple sugars (fructose, sucrose, glucose) in a sedentary individual go straight to the liver, and they get processed into glycogen and stored for future needs as fatty tissue.

• Learn what a real portion/serving size is. The first thing that opened my eyes when I was eating clean and not seeing the results I felt were deserved was spending a week weighing, measuring, and counting exactly what was going into my body. I was overeating to the point of making everything moot. The easy way to do this is the plate rule- Split it in quarters, 1 each going to a protein, starch/carb source, and the other 2 fibrous vegetable. While we are at it, learn what vegetables actually are. Corn is not a vegetable- it's a carb source. Perfectly fine to eat (and delicious!), but be sure to put it in the 'carb' corner and not the veggie.

• Muscle mass is a built in fat burner, metabolism booster, and weight stabilizer. Scientific fact. The more muscle you put on, the healthier you'll ultimately be. Muscle cells require energy and stimulus. If you exercise them, they will suck energy up in any way possible- food intake, fat stores, other muscle stores (bad). This increases your total caloric requirement, which is a fancy way of saying it increases your metabolism. You can sustain weight this way because instead of the above formula before where sugar goes to liver and turns to fat, sugar goes to the liver and then gets distributed to muscle cells that need it. It's a game changer. So keep this in mind- running on a treadmill will allow you to lose weight, but so will squats, weight training, and strength building. Some even argue that you lose more trying to build muscle than sustained low-intensity cardio.

• Everyone is an expert, and opinions are like shiny happy people. Myself included. I don't claim to be the carrier of the word of weight loss, but I am a kinesiologist and personal trainer, and I do have my nutritionists license. I have personal experience with losing weight, staying healthy, and ultimately building strength. These are just a few points that I feel are supremely important, regardless of what you choose to do or don't do.

Most importantly, good luck!

One thing that's helped me lately is I started wearing a sleep mask. According to my activity tracker, my deep sleep each night went from about 2 hours beforehand to around 4 hours per night. When I sleep better (and more), I'm far less hungry and don't crave sugar as much.

I also bring my lunch to work just about every day, and eat a bunch of small snacks (banana, nuts, raisins) throughout the day so I'm never starving. I have a plant-based protein shake (Raw Meal or Orgain) every morning with Flax Seed Oil, and that seems to curb my appetite and ensure I'm not dehydrated to start the day.

These are some small changes I've made that seem to be helping. I didn't have a ton of weight I needed to lose, but this has helped me hover around my goal weight for the past 8 months, which is better than I've ever done.

Down to 230, which seems to be my break-even point. My moderate level of activity combined with my half-assed attempts to eat right keep me here indefinitely. I need to change both sides of the equation to start going down. My first step is to add some regular exercise and eat plants. Not just salads, all kinds of plants. And no, breads and chips derived from plants don't count. That ½ of my plate has been filled with extra meat and sugar for too long.

In reply to golfduke:

Your last point is spot on. Inlaws did some new fad diet that worked "wonders" for them. great. Wife and I tried it, and while it was ok for her it made me more unstable mentally and just terrible to deal with. There's a reason there are so many plans out there. We are all different. One B-I-L is a stick. Always has been, always will be. GEnetically he's predisposed to be a thin person. He drinks sodas, eats terrible foods etc and doesn't gain a pound and likes to make snide comments about how we just need to try harder. One of my legs has more muscle than his entire body. It's all I can do to not pick him up and break him in half when he makes those comments.

Week 1 update: 1.8lbs down. OK, not great... but I'm a 3/4inch down on the belly and half inch on the waist. That's improvement.

In reply to Bobzilla:

Keep tracking. Expect the losses to be very gradual, rather than obvious in only 1 week.

Even then, 1.8lbs is pretty decent for 1 week. Most experts recommend a rate of 1-2lbs/week. Others say up to about 1.5% of your body weight in fat is a healthy max to lose in a week. At 230lbs, thats about 3.4lbs of fat. If you built any muscle in that time, expect that number to be lower.

Keep at it. This is a good start.

The scale is a tool that is useful for monitoring progress to make sure you're not gaining or losing too much too quickly. Do not pay much attention to the actual number on the scale. It's much less important than physical measurements and body fat percentage.

For example, The best shape I was ever in was also my heaviest weight on the scale. I was healthier at 210lbs and 8% body fat than I am now at 185lbs and double digit body fat. Going by weight alone, one could assume the opposite of what's actually true.

Other than that, keep up the good work!