Lose Weight or Change Shape | JohnBarban.com

There are health benefits to losing weight of course, but for most people the "change shape" part of it IS more important.

I would guess that more people are motivated to change their lifestyle by seeing a photo of themselves (or just the mirror) than hitting a certain number on the scale.

Here's what John Barban has to say on the subject:

Lose Weight or Change Shape | JohnBarban.com

Drink Yourself Thin

When I was in high school I worked at McDonald's.  Say what you want about the quality and/or healthfulness of the food there, I still say it's a great job for a young person.  One thing I often noticed when taking orders was the people (often overweight) who would order a huge super-sized meal....with a diet Coke!  My thought back then was "As if you're on a diet!"

Of course now I am the guy ordering the low cal beverage with my value meals (I much prefer Coke Zero to diet though).

If you are looking to lose fat, one very easy change you can make is to stop drinking your calories!  This is one of the first things I did when I decided to eat less and move more.

Here's a quick look at why this works so well.  Taking my own situation:  Between the three main meals of the day I used to drink some kind of juice, or milk, with each of them.  Let's say I averaged one per meal; so three glasses a day.  Three glasses of those beverages will total about 300 calories (or more). 

Now for some math:

300 calories a day x 30 days a month x 10 months (Oct-Jul) = 90,000 calories!

90,000 / 3500 (The number of calories in a pound of fat) = 25.7

As you can see, making just this one dietary change resulted in over 25 pounds of fat lost for me over the past ten months!  That is nearly half of the 56 that I have now dropped since September '09.  I still have cream (and occasionally sugar) in my coffees, but other than that I don't regularly drink any beverages that contain a significant amount of calories.  I most often choose water, sometimes adding Crystal Light for flavor.

Try making this change if you haven't already, and see what it does for you over the course of a month or more.  Stop drinking yourself fat - drink yourself thin!

Fat Loss - Calories and You

It seems pretty apparent that nobody really likes counting calories.  Actually weighing out your food and then adding things up can get pretty tedious pretty quickly.  I don't think actually accounting for each and every calorie that goes into you is necessary for weight loss.

That being said, however, the only thing that determines how much fat you lose (or gain) is the difference between the amount of calories you eat and those that you burn.  So, you need to at least be aware of calories.

Generally, when we think about calories we generally don't do a very good job at estimating with them.  People will consistently underestimate how many calories they eat, while also overestimating the amount of calories they are burning with exercise.

For example, today at work I played basketball for about an hour.  I was breathing pretty hard and considered it quite a workout.  At my current weight this probably burned about 630 calories.  Not too shabby!  But it can very easily be undone by unaware eating.

Coming home from work, I noticed that groceries had been purchased in my house and there was a new bag of cookies in the cupboard.  Most of the time in the evening I have some light popcorn as a snack (about 160 cals worth) but today I got an extra workout in, so I deserve something extra, right?  That is a very easy mindset to get into whenever we are presented with an opportunity to eat shortly before or after working out.

Looking at the back of the cookie bag, the calorie count is 160 cals for 2 cookies.  I know myself, and realize that there's no way I'm only going to have two, four would be much more likely.  That's 320 calories, and isn't an ice cold glass of milk the perfect accompaniment?  That'll be another 160 cals or so added on.  Total so far is 480 calories, and all of a sudden a very large portion of my workout has been undone.

There's nothing wrong with having an evening snack, even cookies sometimes, but always be aware of how quickly those calories can add up on you. Having a ballpark idea of what the calorie count of certain types of food as well as what an exercise session can burn is very helpful.  I like to use the website FatSecret to reference these facts.  They even have a mobile app that works quite well.

How much attention do you pay to calories in vs calories out?