This method is hard to start with, but if you follow it, you should be able to shed pounds without starving yourself. I used it twice, successfully. It's a long read, but might be helpful.
There is no magic to losing weight. You simply have to burn more calories than you put into your body. Simple as that. The most difficult part of weight loss in my opinion is setting yourself up to lose weight. That first week or two are the hardest. You have to basically experiment until you can lose one pound. That includes finding an aerobic exercise you can live with, and also a diet that works for you. Once you have lost one pound in one week without starving yourself, the rest is simple. You repeat what you did the first week the next, and lose another pound, and then another, and then another, until you're done. Then you slightly increase your calorie intake to maintain your weight without it going back up. The first week or so is also crucial because that's when your body adjusts to a lower calorie intake. If you've been eating a lot, your stomach is large, and demands a lot of food. If you eat less, it'll shrink, and eating a lot will be unnatural to you. Clearly, getting it to shrink is a good idea.
Here's the way I did it. It may not work for you, because you're a different person than me, but you may want to try some variation of it. I basically eat three meals a day. No more, no less. If you want to eat five small meals throughout the day instead of three, you can try that, and I hear it works, but for me it's too much micromanagement. I eat two cups of cereal combined with one cup of 2% milk in the morning. The cereal is 100 calories per cup, the milk 120 calories per cup, for a total of 320 calories at breakfast. This is at roughly 9 AM. Then, at 12 PM, I eat a sandwich, or make three eggs. That lasts me till 4 PM. If you're not used to dieting, I highly recommend eggs once a day at lunch, because they stuff you for a long time, but have few calories, only 70 per egg, I believe. Then I eat a fairly large dinner, usually a small frozen pizza with 650 calories. This lasts me until nighttime. As you can see, my diet is designed to get me from meal to meal, not last me through the whole day. I also regularly eat small, healthy snacks to keep myself from getting hungry. My recommendation is apples, lots and lots of apples, especially in the beginning of your diet. An apple is only 53 calories or so, and it is tasty, nutritious and filling. It takes a few minutes to eat an apple, and it fills you up for a while. If you eat, say, a piece of candy, that is more calories, and it doesn't even fill you up at all. You can eat 6 apples a day without really breaking your diet too much, and it'll stuff you something awful. During the first crucial week when your stomach is adjusting to a smaller food intake and shrinking, it is really a good idea to eat lots of apples. Beef jerky also works. A pack of beef jerky is tasty and filling, but it's only 120-140 calories. MASSIVE amounts of salt though.
The key to all this is looking at the calories you're taking in. You don't have to eat the food I eat, and you don't have to have absolute control over what goes in your body, but you should have a pretty good idea. While dieting you should eat out once per week, because that won't set you back too much. Even then, eat out at a decent restaurant, not some place like McDonald's or Wendy's, because honestly, that's just nasty. One package of McDonald's french fries, large, has as much calories as the dinner I eat, and that dinner lasts me for roughly 7 hours, while if you eat fries you'll be hungry after an hour or so. But in any case, don't eat out while dieting, because the bottom line is, you don't know what they're serving you. Few restaurants keep track of their food's nutritional information, and most are not healthy at all, because unhealthy food is generally tasty food. You should almost always eat food from your supermarket, because not only is it cheaper, but it always has the nutritional information on it. You can calculate what you're doing with yourself, and make adjustments at your convenience. That's valuable.
Finally, there's exercise. Exercise is very important, and it's also the stumbling block for many people, because a lot of people don't bother with it. The truth is, the actual number of calories you burn from exercise is not that large. Your diet will lose calories far more readily. But exercise will make you feel good, and it'll boost your metabolism, which will make your body better at burning fat the rest of the time. The bottom line is, if you eat right but don't exercise, you're screwing yourself. What you actually do is up to you. I like to walk long distances. Some people run, some people swim or do elliptical machines, I walk. I have strong legs so I can walk for up to 6 hours a day, though realistically I usually do 2-3. I like it because walking does not even require you to shower after you're finished. You might work up a bit of a sweat, but though you get tired you ultimately can go on with your day immediately. You can also do it virtually anywhere -- in your neighborhood, the local forest preserve, or the gym track, if the weather is lousy. Contrast that with something like running, which does require a cool-down period.
To track your progress, weigh yourself once a week, on a set day, in the morning before you eat anything and after you've gone to the washroom. According to the doctors I've talked to, that is the most accurate way to keep track of your weight, because it'll fluctuate slightly during the course of the week. Also, if you weigh yourself after eating or drinking anything, it's inaccurate because you're weighing the food and drink along with your body weight.
The Teen Sex, Pregnancy and Puberty Guild
A guild for teenagers covering topics centering around teen sex, pregnancy, puberty, and other aspects of teen life.
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