How to Track your Calories and Weight
-What gets measured gets improved-
When we start on a diet it is important to know where our body is currently, right at this very minute. If we don’t know how much we weigh, what our fitness level is or our current dietary trends it will be impossible to say how much we have improved later on. We can make all of the small, simple changes detailed in this book, but without tracking ourselves we can’t say for sure if we have improved.
That improvement is what we want! Not only will it be a huge motivating factor when we hit some slumps on our fitness journey, it will also be a reminder of how far we’ve come and reinforce our understanding of how possible improvements are.
First we have to get our mindset right.
Small.
Simple.
We are going to repeat those two words throughout our entire journey. Our goal is to better our bodies and the small simple changes we are going to make will help us achieve that goal.
We have a few measurements that determine at a basic level our fitness. The number one being our weight.
It is a hard number to look at. It is tough. It is difficult. It is sometimes almost impossible. BUT. We have to be able to remember where we started. We have to look at that number and acknowledge its’ truth, accept it and then get started improving it! So our weight is the first number we will look at, and the good news is that you’ve already taken the first step to bettering your body by learning how important it is to look at your weight.
The next number we will look at is our level of fitness. This level is unique for everyone, and is something we should never compare with other people. Right now we can assume that we want to improve our level of fitness, and that improvement will be in any area we choose. Later in this book we will look at some of the incredible exercise options available to us. Some of the classics include running and weightlifting, but we can also branch out into hiking, rock climbing at the gym or out in nature, crossfit, swimming, competitive sports like tennis, soccer or even walking a few holes of golf! Before we get way ahead of ourselves, let’s refocus on those other two measures we are going to use, and save the opportunities we are going to open up for ourselves for later in this book.
So far we know that weight is going to be an important measure of our health and one of the main ways we are going to better our bodies, but what scale are we going to use to improve it?
Tracking our calories is the best way to measure what we are putting into our bodies, and there are some truly incredible tools available to help us on our journey. We will cover how our bodies gain and lose weight in the next two chapters, but we will come back to the following mantra throughout this entire book.
Calories In - Calories Out = Caloric Surplus/Deficit
This is the single most powerful piece of advice we will cover, and it’s important to note that the equation works out in two ways, either a Caloric Surplus or a Caloric Deficit. Now we get into one of the small, simple ways that The 99 Calorie Diet is different, we are going to create a healthy range for our diets to live in. It is ok to eat more some days, and less on others, what we want to do is live within a healthy zone. To find out our healthy zone we are going to calculate our TDEE. TDEE stands for your Total Daily Energy Expenditure and means exactly what it sounds like, how much energy does your body use in a day?
There are a number of ways to calculate your Total Daily Energy Expenditure, remind yourself that you are just starting out on your fitness journey, it is absolutely ok to have a Body Mass Index that looks scary right now, we are going to improve it! We recommend going to 99caloriediet.com to calculate your TDEE and BMI easily! This will give you a basic idea of your current fitness level, and remember that what we are looking at is the honest situation, and we can work to improve ourselves starting right now!
Your Diet Started Yesterday
Let’s get one thing straight to start off with. Your diet started yesterday. It might sound surprising but we are all on a diet. It just might not be the diet that is right for you. Somewhere along the line we ended up with foods that have an incredibly high caloric content, something that in years gone by would have been a good thing has now turned into an honest overabundance. It is too easy to eat more calories than we can burn now. A few hundred years ago we would all have been moving throughout the day, and consuming foods that didn’t have as many available sugars and carbohydrates. Now we are more sedentary, we just don’t move as much as we used to. Being sedentary isn’t a terrible thing, but when combined with a high caloric intake we will gain weight.
So, now that we have so many incredible options for food we need to revisit a word that has been hijacked by marketers in the last couple of decades.
Diet: the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats.
This is the first definition of a diet, and the one that we are talking about when we say The 99 Calorie Diet. We are going to find out how many calories that we should be consuming and then match the foods we eat to our corrected zone. We can eat whatever we want, it’s our choice, but what The 99 Calorie Diet will explain is how those foods affect our bodies. This gets us to the next definition of diet, one that we will acknowledge exists, but remember to take it with a healthy grain of salt.
Diet: a special course of food to which one restricts oneself, either to lose weight or for medical reasons
This is about restrictions. It is about a “special” course of food, it is about only allowing some things to be consumed. This definition is not what The 99 Calorie Diet is about. We will all eat all kinds of food, their is no reason to restrict which types of food we eat, it’s a wide wild world full of incredible food and the point of life is to enjoy what we can while we can. In the following chapters we are going to look at how our bodies interact with food, and what small simple changes we can make to better our bodies. Some foods are unhealthy, does that mean we are never going to eat them? No! It is important to understand that we are going to change our habits so we can lead a healthier life, we are not going to alter the entire course of our lives in one instant. A rapid change allows a rapid fall back into bad habits, what we are going to do instead is make those small simple changes that form better habits over time, so we can enjoy both a better life and the occasional vacation into whatever it is we like to enjoy.
and remember…..
Small.
Simple.
2. How Your Body Gains Weight
Eating at a Caloric Surplus, Hormones & Sleep
Our bodies burn energy constantly, in fact we are calorie burning machines! A blessing that has become a curse is just how efficient our bodies are at converting calories into energy. We are really good at transforming food into available energy, and in recent years our food has become more packed with available energy than we could have possibly imagined! So, what does our body do with all of that available energy? It stores it!
Storage of excess energy is one of the features that allowed us to survive when energy wasn’t as easily available as it is today. Our bodies could take the excess calories from what we had hunted and gathered and store it away in small reserves so that we could continue on our ways. Our bodies are really good at taking advantage of this idea, so much so that we can keep creating reserves even when we have plenty to last us until our next meal, or even if we skip a few. This storage of energy, of fuel so that we can survive during the tough times we no longer face, are the fat reserves we are going to change!
We first need to recognize that this ability to store energy as fat available on our bodies is a good thing! It is what enables our bodies to go between meals, take time to accomplish other things and still function. Without this ability we never would have advanced to this point as a species, so we need to remember that this is a good thing our bodies can do. What we need to do next is understand that our body is not going to stop doing its’ job. Whatever we put into our body is going to be broken down into the ingredients and fuel types that the body needs to keep working (thank goodness we don’t even have to think about it!).
Whatever we eat gets broken down throughout our bodies and converted into different chemicals which fuel our body. These fuels are now available in such high concentrations and with such ease that it’s difficult for us to understand how much we are giving ourselves without learning about it first. So let’s dive in, how do we gain weight?
Caloric Surpluses
We all know that eating too much causes us to gain weight, but the key difference we are going to learn about is how we can consume our calories too quickly. We gain weight when we increase our food consumption beyond the calories it takes to keep our bodies working. One of the factors, a sedentary lifestyle, can be changed by adding activities that make the body use the excess energy it has taken in through food. The other factor would be to change the amount of calories we put into our bodies through foods that have a high caloric density. To start The 99 Calorie Diet we don’t have to make any changes, what we are going to do is simply record the quantity of calories that we are consuming. We have to understand that at this point we are not going to try to eat less, or exercise more. We are simply going to change our habit of eating without recognizing to eating and recording what we consume. That’s it. That’s the only change we are going to ask for the start of this entire program. But before we get ahead of ourselves with how easy these changes are going to be let’s restate what we know about caloric surpluses.
When we eat more than our bodies needs to function we are eating at a caloric surplus, we are providing our body with more energy than it needs to survive. Our bodies are happy with this and are naturally trained to store these extra calories in case we need them later. What we need to recognize is how easy it is to get extra calories through our greatly enriched and easily available modern sources. We have made it incredibly easy to survive! Whenever we crack a soda or grab a coffee with a little milk and sugar we are supplying our body with caloric sources it was never used to having. These great caloric additives can give our bodies more than enough energy to survive, so much in fact that we can store it for later! So, we know that our body will store the calories that it doesn’t use to function, but what determines how many calories we need?
Metabolism
Metabolism, or our basal metabolic rate, is the amount of energy we need to keep living when our bodies are at rest. Some of the processes that contribute to our metabolism are breathing, blood circulation and controlling our body temperatures. Our cellular growth and regeneration also contribute to our metabolism as our cells get replaced or we grow. One of the most important factors of our metabolism is the contraction of muscles. When our muscles contract we are expending energy, so just by having and using a little extra muscle our metabolism will actually be higher!
Our metabolism is the amount of energy that we need to expend to stay alive, and anything we do to increase the amount we breath, circulate our blood, change our temperature, or increase our muscle mass will all affect our basal metabolic rate. If we are not working, or even creating muscle mass then we know our metabolism is going to be slower. If we are not increasing our breathing rate or getting our blood pumping our metabolism is going to stay right where it is now. unfortunately there is some bad news, our metabolism actually slows down as we age. Our bodies begin to lose free mass and our metabolism slows down as we get older. In order to counteract that slowing down we are going to have to introduce something to increase our metabolisms, like exercise to get our blood circulating and build some muscle that will increase our basal metabolic rates!
As we age our metabolisms slow down, if we are not doing anything to counter that decrease we can actually gain weight just by living the same way! So now we know that our metabolism is going to change as we age, and that we will have to alter at least one of two things. We either have to alter our diet to decrease the number of calories we consume or increase our exercise routine to accommodate that change if we want to stay the same weight. If we don’t allow our routines to change we will gain weight as we grow older.
Hormones
Our hormones have a key role to play in how we interact with our hunger and our level of energy expenditure. The first hormone that plays a key role in our regulation of energy levels is called Leptin and it is responsible for the inhibition of hunger. When we have a significant amount of unhealthy weight our sensitivity to Leptin is decreased, causing us to think we are not satisfied with the amount of food we have consumed even if we have passed the amount of energy reserves we need to survive. The other key hormone that plays a role in weight gain is called Ghrelin, also known as the “hunger hormone”. Ghrelin is a hormone that has two pivotal functions. The first function is to tell us when we are “full” and the second is to regulate and distribute the rate of use of energy. Leptin and Ghrelin both prove to be hormones worth learning a little about.
Leptin
Leptin comes from the greek word for “thin” and is also known by another name; the satiety hormone. Regulation of fat stores has been deemed to be the main function of leptin, although is also has a number of both researched and unknown other functions and properties.
Leption levels can dissociate from their role as communicator between brain and body in a number of significant areas, including:
Leptin levels are decreased after a short period of fasting (24-72 hours)
Leptin levels are increased after periods of emotional stress
Leptin levels are increased insulin
Leptin levels are decreased by sleep deprivation (something we will cover soon!)
Leptin levels are decreased by increases of testosterone levels
Leptin levels are increased by increases of estrogen levels
Leptin levels are chronically reduced by physical exercise training
Now that we know that leptin levels increase and decrease during certain activities that we may come across on a day to day basis we can tackle what we will take a small look at how this hormone functions in our bodies.
In our hypothalamus (from now on referred to as our brain) the hormone leptin plays two roles in two different areas. Leptin inhibits hunger by counteracting two chemicals our body produces. One of these chemicals promotes hunger when it is produced in our gut, leptin inhibits this chemical and decreases our hunger. The other chemical resides in our brain and is another potent hunger signal that leptin reduces. When our body is telling our brain that it needs more energy leptin is there to decrease that signal and tell our brain we are not that hungry. The other role it plays is similarly related to hunger suppression, this time by promoting a chemical in our brain that creates a hunger suppressant.
The absence of leptin causes uncontrollable hunger, so we are lucky our body produces it in response to our hunger signals and other chemicals already existing in our bodies. If our brain gets injured in either of two spots on the side or the middle it can cause increased or decreased hunger, taking care of our brains is one way to make sure we can take care of our bodies!
Now comes one of the tough parts we have to understand about leptin. When we decrease the amount of food in our systems by reducing the amount of food we consume the amount of leptin can increase. If we are overweight our body can actually develop a resistance to the leptin signals, meaning that a leptin response that could signal being satisfied for a healthy person might still be interpreted as hungry for an overweight person. When we start to decrease the amount of food we consume our body can still be thinking like it used to, making us much more hungry than we need to be. If we can understand that our brain has not caught up to our way of thinking, and understand that we want to make a change and our feelings about food are not going to match our goals for a period of time we can overpower those sensations and better our bodies!
This is going to be one of the key concepts we have to understand. As we lose weight we are seeking a new body fat-set point. That new natural point we are seeking is going to be reached before our brain can understand on its’ own that we are ok, and even healthier at this level of fat! In response to losing weight our body will try to hold on to calories and lower its’ basal metabolic rate. That’s right, unfortunately as we lose weight our metabolism could slow down, making it a little harder to continue to lose weight!
Ghrelin
Ghrelin is the other key hormone that we are going to learn about. Ghrelin is also known as the hunger hormone, and for good reason! Ghrelin is secreted by the body through the intestinal tract when we become hungry. When our stomach is empty our body secretes it, and our body stops when our stomach becomes stretched. Ghrelin helps regulate our appetite in this way, and is also responsible for regulating in part the distribution and rate of energy use in our bodies.
When our stomach is empty and our gastrointestinal tract secretes ghrelin our brain interprets this and tells us that we are hungry. It also prepares for food by increasing the ability to contract muscles and the amount of acid in the gastrointestinal tract. Ghrelin also plays a role in the “reward” mechanism part of our brain. The reward site plays a key role in processing reward, reinforcement, and developing addiction. The same site plays a role in all of these areas, so ghrelin is something we have to understand in order to move towards better rewards that reinforce choices we want to make in order to better our bodies and our lives!
norEpinephrin, cortisol, hgh, insulin
Cortisol, testosterone and estrogen
Water Weight
One thing that we have to keep in mind throughout our fitness journey is the amount of water weight we hold in our bodies. A lot of fad diets and “cleanses” actually just deplete our body of one of the most critical elements we need to survive, water is a key part of how our body functions. When we lose a large amount of water weight the number of pounds we weigh might seem to drop rapidly. While this is an encouraging number we have to recognize that our water weight is going to fluctuate and throw off our body readings throughout our losing weight phase.
Water weight can make our legs and arms, especially our ankles and hands will look swollen. While water weight can make it appear that we are heavier than we are we have to keep in mind our water weight is a fine number to fluctuate our total weight. Our water weight is not linked to the amount of food and calories we consume and it will go away after some time. If you are a lady you will notice that water weight will contribute to a swing in your overall weight more because women are typically smaller than men.
There are many factors that contribute to water weight. One of them is our level of sodium, so when we eat a lot of salt are body holds on to water to keep the amount of salt in our blood at a good proportion. Carbohydrates also increase the amount of water that we hold on to, as we typically can hold 4 parts water to each part carbohydrate we consume. One thing we can do to make sure we don’t hold on to extra water is make sure our bodies are well hydrated, if we don't consume enough water our body holds onto every drop it has left. Water weight will fluctuate through our lives, not just when we are dieting but in our everyday lives.
Sleep
http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/repaying-your-sleep-debt
http://www.sleepdex.org/stages.htm
We all say that we need to get more sleep, but the surprising truth is that more sleep might not be what we need! We may, in fact, need more consistent sleep! Our sleep and part of its’ effectiveness are ruled by a circadian rhythm. This means that we need to get and stay in a rhythm of sleeping and staying awake in a repetitive pattern. It also may be true that the amount of sleep we are getting needs to be increased. When the body is sleep deprived it can lead to higher levels of cortisol, increasing your appetite and potentially helping the cycle of weight gain or regain. Another factor that is somewhat anecdotal is the increased chance of grabbing an easy unhealthy snack or meal that derails your weight loss or increases your weight gain.
Sleep debt can accumulate over a period of time and can lead to a heavy crash. A sleep deficit can lead to both mental and physical fatigue. Sleep debt can result over the course of time by consistently getting a little less sleep than needed or by pulling one or more nights of extreme sleeplessness. Medical evidence has shown that the average adult needs to get between 7 and 9 hours of sleep every day in order to function and ensure the best case for your health. Sleep deprivation can cause extreme fatigue, irritability, and unclear thoughts.
Our circadian clock is important to keep on time. It not only regulates our sleep cycles but also has a role in keeping our body temperature, blood pressure, and a lot of our enzymes and hormones at appropriate levels. Most people fall into a typical pattern of needing sleep between midnight and 6 a.m. but we also have a smaller period in the early afternoon from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. where sleepiness often occurs. Almost none of us can regularly take a little siesta in the middle of the work day so it is extra important that we get all of our sleep at night.
Sleeplessness can have serious consequences. Higher levels of the hormone cortisol, which we learned about earlier, and blood pressure can be exhibited in people deprived of sleep. The immune system also takes a major beating with some people only producing half of a typical amount of antibodies when given a flu vaccine. Last of all, people deprived of sleep can show signs of insulin resistance, another important thing we learned about earlier. Getting enough sleep is obviously important, but how do we get the best sleep and what constitutes a good rest for our bodies?
Sleep comes in two stages and is determined by our brainwaves during our rest. These two stages are called REM and non-REM. REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement. When we are experiencing REM sleep our eyes move rapidly and our brain waves are faster and not as controlled. When we are getting non-REM sleep our eyes move in a more controlled manner and our brainwaves are slower and more controlled.
Falling into restful sleep requires non-REM sleep, which happens in the following four stages:
Our brain has slowed down and our brainwaves have reduced their frequency, our eyes move slowly and we can still wake up pretty easily. If you’ve ever felt a falling sensation and then jerked out of sleep you’ve had your first stage of non-REM sleep interrupted by a sudden muscle contraction.
Eye movement has slowed down completely and has now stopped, our brain waves are infrequent.
“Delta” waves are the majority of our brain's’ activity, along with small amounts of faster activity.
Those small Delta have now developed completely into deep sleep. Now we experience no muscle or eye movement at all and it is incredibly difficult to wake up from this stage of sleep.
After we go through the stages of non-REM sleep we reach a period of Rapid Eye Movement. Just as the name implies our eyes will move rapidly, our breathing becomes faster and can be irregulat and our legs and arms do not move. Our brain wakes up, our heart rate increases, and our blood pressure increases. A typical sleep cycle lasts around an hour and a half, so we should try to schedule our amount of sleep within a multiple of 1.5 hours. As we age we spend less time in REM sleep and more time in the three main stages of non-REM sleep.
3. how your body loses weight
Now we are finally to the part that we have all been waiting for! We know that our body gains weight when we consume more calories than our bodies use, and we know that our diet, metabolism, hormones and sleep patterns all have an effect on how we gain weight. Now let’s learn how we lose it!
Topics that we will cover:
What the 99 Calorie Diet really means, eating within our bounds
The 99 Calorie Diet is all about simple, small changes. The single most important change we are going to make is the adjustment of our diets to a healthy amount of calories consumed for our bodies. This is not a restriction on what we eat, it is a redefining of the kind and possibly an adjustment to the amount of food we consume. We know that our body only uses so many calories to function, and we have learned how to calculate that number for ourselves. Now it is time to apply what we have learned to see what ways we can change ourselves to achieve our goals.
The 99 Calorie Diet is eating within a healthy bound, in order to do this we will take your calculated TDEE, subtract the amount of calories we need to change our bodies and then create our healthy zone!
For this example we will use a calculated TDEE of 2000 calories, you will have a number greater or smaller than this depending on how tall you are and how old you are.
In our example I am an inactive person who wants to steadily lose a little bit of weight, I am aiming to lose 10 lbs in a few months, with no deadline on when I reach my goal but the motivation to make a small amount of progress each month.
First we will subtract a small percentage because my weight loss goals are not that extreme, lets say 10% to start off with. My new TDEE would be 1800 calories a day. Now this is the single moment that will change your life, we are going to add and subtract calories from our new TDEE in order to establish a healthy zone that will help us accomplish our goals but also allow for some changes in our day to day diet.
First we are going to subtract 99 calories from 1800 to get around 1700 calories. This is our lower bound. We want to make sure we are eating at least 1700 calories a day, we have to consume this many or else we might get too hungry and increase the chance of making a bad decision. We know that as we change our diets our bodies are going to react in specific ways to try to maintain the path that we used to be on. Once we have a lower bound for calories we will know that we are consuming enough to keep our body supplied with a reasonable amount of energy, this can make the mental fight to overeat easier to win by making sure we know that we aren’t starving, we know we are getting at the very least enough calories to keep ourselves at a reasonable level of energy.
Next we are going to add 99 Calories to get around 1900 calories. This is our upper bound, we want to try our best to stay under 1900 calories, but we can make amends and understand that some days we will go over and it is ok. The powerful part about this is that we will be losing weight no matter what. Even if we overeat by 100 calories in this instance we will not have gained any weight, but will have instead simply maintained our previous weight. Anything to maintain and reduce our weight is a victory! Each and every one of those victories moves us one step closer to achieving our ultimate goal of becoming fit!
This one powerful concept is going to be the major shift that can really get us on the right track to bettering our bodies and accomplishing our goal of becoming fit. Now we know that we can eat between 1700 and 1900 calories and still be making progress to our goal of losing weight every single day!
These bands make losing weight so much easier it almost seems likes. Most other diets focus only on the one number we have to stay under in order to lose weight quickly, but most of those diets allow you to ping pong back up to your previous weight once you have worked so hard to lose it all! Now we have an effective way to understand that what we eat on a day to day basis is going to change, we can switch up our meals and eat a little extra and not have to worry about it. Once we are in our healthy bounds zone we can even afford another snack and still stay in it. To put into perspective just how much food we are allowing ourselves to eat once we have come into our healthy bounds zone we could eat two whole chicken breasts and still be under our upper bound! We could still eat that much and be losing weight, I know this will come as a comfort to everyone who has ever seen their total calories for the day pass over their “limit” and have to face the fact that they can’t eat any more that day if they want to succeed. What a terrible way to look at eating!
Once we hit our lower bound for calories it sets off a tiny alarm in our brains. We know that we can still eat more and accomplish our goal for the day, but it lets us factor and prioritize what we consume. Two Chicken breasts and some broccoli is a lot of food, and we know that we can eat all of that food once we have hit our lower bounds! These bounds are the insurance system in The 99 Calorie Diet, they let us know that we are still going to make progress and remind us to make a good decision once we are in the zone.
So now we know the secret to The 99 Calorie Diet, by creating a healthy living zone we know that we can accomplish our goals while keeping ourselves realistic. Go over to 99caloriediet.com/tdee to calculate your daily calorie expenditure and find out what your healthy eating zone is going to be!
Creating a Caloric deficit or neutrality with food choice.
The powerful way that The 99 Calorie Diet works is by us always eating at a caloric deficit while trying to lose weight, but in a way that let’s you choose the speed and comfort level. The healthy eating zone makes sure that we are not going to lose weight too quickly and end up making a poor choice because our hunger signals got too high and we caved in to eating a bunch of unhealthy foods. The most powerful part of The 99 Calorie Diet is the choice of how much weight to lose and over what period of time. We want to make sure that the amount of weight we are losing is maintainable, in other words we want to choose an amount of weight that we can lose week after week. We don’t want to go on a crash diet and then binge on bad food at the end of it, instead we have to adjust our mentality to understand that eating at or below our maintenance level is a victory, every single time!
In our last example we calculated that the imaginary person had a TDEE of 2000 calories, and then created a healthy eating zone of between 1700 and 1900 calories. This zone guaranteed that our person would be expending at least 100 calories every single day, getting them closer to their ultimate goal through their daily victories. The healthy eating zone had an extra safety built into it! Our imaginary person could accidentally eat more by having a few extra chips during a snack, or an extra scoop of pasta at dinner and know that even though they over ate according to the goal of eating within the healthy eating zone, they might still be maintaining their current weight. This is a small victory, but an important one to recognize with pride if and when it happens.
Understanding how to increase our metabolism by adding muscle
Trading calories for exercise in order to burn off the extra
Trading our caloric surplus for exercise in order to burn more calories than we take in
Helping our hormones: we can’t cure or prevent anything but we can understand what might be happening
Understanding the healthy diet
A healthy diet is one that balances all of our body and minds needs. One of those needs is enjoyment, and we are not going to restrict a massive cheeseburger, pizza or a sunday with salty fries. That being said we are going to recognize what those foods do to our body and make sure that we are enjoying them for what they are. Later we are going to cover the micro and macro nutrients our body needs to survive in detail, but right now we are going to focus on the emotional side of understanding your diet.
Eating is a habit, one that we hopefully won’t stop soon. What we want to do is shift our diet away from what we know doesn't work to what we think will. As always we have to keep our mindset correct and know that water weight and life are going to get in the way of achieving our goal on some days, but always remember that there is another opportunity to win immediately after every time we fall a little short.
Foods and fullness
Every food we consume has a property that contributes to that feeling of fullness. Some types of food will create a more full feeling than others. These foods are great filler, and it is important for us to understand what these foods are and how we can use them to our advantage.
4. what your weight really means
Why being overweight is bad for you
Our body can handle extra weight for quite some time, we can look everywhere and see that people live and are overweight all over the place. Extra weight can lead to some serious health complications, but we all know that. The fact is that we know being overweight is bad for us, but at most levels of being overweight it is still livable. What we really want to take a look at and think, really think about, are the opportunities that we miss when we don’t give ourselves by being overweight and out of shape. What we want to be able to do is take advantage of every chance we get to enjoy our bodies. Food might be a great way to enjoy our sense of taste, and it feels great to be full of food, having all of that potential energy just waiting to be used available to our bodies.
What an acceptable level of weight actually is
When we look at our weight in terms of body composition we can get a view of how healthy we are. Weight can come in a number of forms in our bodies, water, bone, fat and muscle all play a part in our body composition at any point in a day. It is important to remember that two people who are identical in most ways including their numerical weight can look entirely different because their bodies have different compositions. The problem with body composition measurements are difficult to get. There are a number of ways we can get body composition, most of the accurate ways to get your body composition just aren’t available to the public or are more difficult to measure. If you do want to pursue getting an accurate body composition reading speak with a doctor about getting measured with calipers or have an air displacement measurement taken. In general we would recommend taking a different approach to assessing your weight and an acceptable weight level that requires less time and equipment to get.
Speaking with a doctor is a great way to get an idea on what an acceptable level of weight actually is for your body. Your general practitioner will be able to point you towards an acceptable level of weight for your body frame and fitness level.
Muscle weighs more than fat. The same pound of fat takes up considerably more space than a pound of muscle. When we lose fat and gain an equal amount of muscles our body will be more lean than it used to be, even if we still have the same number on the scale.
Why a weight is only the start on the path to measuring Fitness
Our journey encompasses much more than a number that we are lowering on a scale. We can accomplish the goals we set out for ourselves with reasonable expectations, and the most exciting part about accomplishing those goals is the huge world of fitness that opens up to us once we have reached our first basic level of fitness. We have to understand the mindset that there is a something after we have accomplished
What Being Fit actually means
Fit. The word itself ushers in thoughts of well being, of mountains climbed, lakes swam, and trails run. But what does being fit really mean? Fitness is a personal definition past a certain basic level, we all have to come up with our own definition of what being fit will mean to us, and how to measure that when we get there. The fit journey is what we are embarking on together, we all start at different places, some of us are more out of shape then others, and it is important to realize that we are going to end at different places. The fit journey never really ends, it is matched with our life and exists at every point, we just might not be at our best that we could be right now. The fit journey is about what we options we have available to ourselves. Right now we might not be able to hop up and go on that run, or go hit the free weights and swim a few laps afterwards. The fit journey is about getting to that place where we have the exercise options we want to have open to ourselves available any time we want to go get those experiences.
So, I want you to imagine something right now. Take a few deep breathes,and get ready to close your eyes. When you do i want you to feel your body moving, and it doesn’t have to be something definite, but pay attention to what parts of your body you are using. Are your arms pumping? Your legs pounding? Start to define the sensation, has it been a long time coming, the sensation building up over a long burn or is this a sharp sensation brought on quickly? Start to think about the activity that might move you, what is it? What is the exercise that is driving you? How many miles? Or is it meters in a sprint? Are you stacking weight on dumbbells, or surrounded by friends on mats stretching your body in ways you thought never possible?
Those people you see exercising really are doing those things, people really do run miles and miles every day, or lift weights, or contort their bodies, or climb even the highest mountains. It is possible, the next question is are you ready to take the first steps towards accomplishing them? Almost every form of exercise is attainable at some level, it might not be at the olympic level, but you very well could be a contender!
So, what does being fit really mean? The answer is up to you, and we have to remember that every person is going to have a different level of fitness that they can reach. The key is to remember that a basic level of fitness is attainable by most of us, and once we have a basic level of fitness we can try some of the incredible experiences this world has to offer us.
...just imagine - the view from the top of the mountain, the salt on your face from windsurfing, the breeze cooling you down after a run… All of those are out there being enjoyed by people every single day, come and join us and experience all life has to give.
Why Being Fit is good for your body
5. What are macros
Fat
Carbs
Protein
Energy Density
6. What are Micros
Tolerable upper limits (UL’s)
6. Diet options
Kickstart
Paleo
Keto
If It Fits your Macros
Intermittent fasting
Mediterranean
Atkins
Simple green smoothie
Rainbow smoothie diet
7. Exercise options
Now we have reached the start of our real journey. Once we have a basic level of fitness we can start to explore the incredible world of fitness activities that surround us. Once our bodies can move in the basic ways we have discussed we can begin to get out in the world on our own or with each other and experience all there is to enjoy!
Weightlifting
The first exercise option we are going to take a look at is weightlifting. It is where we recommend someone who is not fit to start out. Weightlifting might seem intimidating at first because there is so much to learn and it in general happens in public, but trust us, this is the perfect way to get the base level of fitness that will open up all kinds of great activities.
Lifting weights in the gym can let you target every single part of your body in specific ways. We highly recommend learning about the different exercises prior to hitting the gym, that way even though your body might not know the exercises you can take some comfort in understanding what you are supposed to be doing. We recommend you join a gym and then decide for yourself if you need a trainer. Gyms have a lot more equipment than a typical home gym can fit, and even though it might be scary to go to a gym where everyone else can see what you’re doing we can actually gain a ton of important experience and knowledge from other people. We have to understand that everyone at the gym had to start sometime, and even though some people there might be absolutely shredded and doing really advanced exercises they too started out with small dumbbells and low repetitions on the pull up bar.
Bodyweight- you are your own gym!
Gym Equipment
Dumbbells
Kettlebells
Running
Swimming
Yoga
8. The Importance of Sleep
9. Determination
SOAPNOTES - the persons why
What do you want? Do you want a better body? A better life? More contentment? Better opportunities to enjoy life? All of these things are possible if we commit to living a better life. One of the things that is going to get us through both the easy times and the hard times is a determination to see our goals through until the end.
We know that it is going to be hard, and once we have accepted that losing weight and getting fit are going to be hard we have to acknowledge the reality that we are going to fall short at some points on our journey. To think that we are going to make the decision now to change all of our habits into new, more productive, more difficult habits in an instant is ridiculous. So we have to remember that we are going to take this change in small, simple ways. We are going to take each change one at a time, implement it into our lives, become comfortable with it, know that we can do it, even if its not every time, before we even think to add another change.
10. Motivation
We’ve all been excited before, we have all at some point felt that massive upwelling of emotion, that pulls us from up from the very bottom of our souls and tells us that YES we’ve found it, that one thing that is going to change everything, that one thing that is going to make all the difference, tip the scales in our favor towards the biggest win of our lives and make everything all right. Then… comes a break…. Just a little one, a tiny distraction that takes away from that initial movement, diverts it, and we stop, for just a moment. By the time we look back we (incorrectly) think we’ve failed. That feeling of failure is terrible, and shakes us to our very core just like that last feeling of motivation, but this time it is in the opposite direction, and it pulls us down, WAY down. That feeling can so easily result in giving up, especially when we have all given up before. But… that’s exactly it… we’ve given up before, in fact we all have probably given up tons of times! And that is OK! With just one small shift in our perspective on giving up we can change that failure to a life changing victory!
So, we’ve felt a surge of good feelings and decided to make a change, then something came up and we didn’t do what we said we were going to do, and this made us feel terrible and we gave up. Fine. We’ve done it before, and I am here to tell you that we are going to do it again. BUT, this time we are only going to give up for one day or less. After the first week of this program we know that we aren’t going to change unless we make one for ourselves. So we can apply that same thought to when we realize we have given up. Acknowledge that failure, feel that feeling, and then look to tomorrow. Because tomorrow, we have the same opportunity we had the first day that that great feeling took hold, we can change for the better!