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Very long tl;dr essay...
One of my f-listers has a friend who asked for positive experiences with diet and exercise, so naturally I went on and on at tl;dr length about my own experiences. :)
I lost 50 pounds back in 2007 through sensible eating and light exercise, gained a big chunk back by following the "don't exercise and eat everything you want" diet after I fell out of the habit, and have now re-lost about 15-20 pounds since January, with (once I managed to start again) fairly little fuss - not sure of the exact amount, as I didn't weigh myself at the start. I've also got a lot more to lose, as I'm 5'2" and as of this morning's weighing, 253.
And this will probably be a lot of text because I tend to not be able to stop typing once I get going and think of things.
First, I am a firm believer in experimenting until you find what works for you. I have friends who lost a lot of weight on Atkins, who opted for gastric bypass, who found other diets and followed them, who dropped weight simply by moving the the 3rd floor of an apartment complex near downtown and started walking everywhere, and so on. None of those worked for me, and I don't consider bariatric surgery an option for me, because it won't solve the ultimate problem, which is my eating and exercise habits.
I also am coming from a slightly different angle than you, as most of my weight- and exercise-related health issues are mechanical (knee problems, arthritis in my foot, etc.) rather than blood work-related, as I got hit with the good end of the genetic stick when it comes to cholesterol. Instead, the health-related reasons I'm losing weight and increasing exercise are to put less stress on my problem joints, and because my mom has osteoporosis and has already lost a couple inches of height, so I need to increase the stress on my bones through exercise to strengthen them. However, she had high blood pressure, and after she took up exercise and lost 35 pounds she was able to go off her blood pressure meds.
From what I've been able to look at, when attempting to fight my way through the massive amounts of ridiculous hype and quite often misinterpreted science around weight loss, is that the actual FAT on your body doesn't have a whole lot of detrimental effects. It's the LACK OF EXERCISE and EATING BADLY that contribute more to the problems, and as a side effect, increase the amount of fat you have. There are people who look fat who have good cardiovascular health (as clinically tested) because they exercise a great deal, but since they are not willing to restrict their eating to the low caloric amounts necessary for their particular bodies to maintain a lower level of body fat, they're well-padded. (As far as I've found there are only a very few conditions that have been found to be directly related to excess fat tissue itself which are a problem, which includes ovarian cancer and some mechanical issues like knee problems. So if you don't have a family history of those: great!) Naturally, quite a lot of overweight people don't have the good health of these others, because if you're not used to exercise, moving that bulk around is hard.
I'm not getting into the whole psychological/cultural issue of overweight in our modern society because I think we can call agree that it sucks. If you (by which I mean any of you out there who read this) are able to accept yourself at your weight: that's awesome. I totally support you and your rights, and absolutely do not mean any of this screed to make you feel that I think you should change, because I don't. Conversely, if you (like me), just can't make yourself reach that stage of acceptance, I'm there for you also, and I'm not about to make you feel guilty for wanting to change. What I support is everyone's right to choose for themselves, and if you choose to change, to do so in a safe and healthy manner.
I'm also stressing that this is pretty much all my opinion and what I've found that works for me. Your mileage may vary.
PART I: EXERCISE
What I've found is true for me, and is probably true for most people, is that exercise alone doesn't really help that much you lose weight. The reason is that you just don't burn enough calories to make up for the natural increase in calories you take in as you increase your activity level. This does not mean exercise is worthless! By no means! It's been clinically shown that exercise helps your organ systems and your mood, aerobic exercise works your cardiovascular system, and weight-bearing exercise helps your bones strengthen. Muscle tissue also burns more calories than fat tissue to a small extent, so your RMR (resting metabolic rate) will increase slightly as you lose fat tissue and increase muscle tissue, but it's not enough to be significantly noticeable unless you lose A BUNCH of fat and gain A BUNCH of muscle.
Ignore both the people who don't know anything about it AND that tiny little voice in your head that says unless you're huffing and puffing and feel like shit, you're not getting enough exercise. First, ANY exercise is good, secondly exercise that doesn't make you feel like shit is exercise that is much easier to stick to, and and thirdly, especially if you haven't been exercising much you are probably working much harder than you think you are. There's a story in the introduction to Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
(Amazon referral link), where the author is talking to a middle school coach whose school adopted heart rate monitors for their kids during P.E. The coach said that there was one girl, a bit overweight, who was much slower than everybody else and normally he'd have been yelling at her to move faster But when he checked her heart rate monitor's reading, he saw that she was working near the top of her aerobic capacity: she was working as hard as the other kids.
Once I got a heart rate monitor (I spent $50-60 on a Polaris one at Target), I found that even though I felt like I wasn't working very hard on my stationary bike, and, if the room was cool enough, not breaking a sweat, I was still within my aerobic heart rate target zone. Yeah, ok, it was at the lower end of it, BUT I WAS STILL IN IT.
I've also tried all sorts of exercise and what ended up working best for me was a stationary recumbent bike and a TiVo. I feel guilty if I watch TV when I have so many other things to do, but by exercising while watching, I was able to stop feeling guilty about TV. My mother bought herself a treadmill and a portable DVD player. (more in a bit about low-cost exercise, though!)
I also set low targets for myself. None of this ZOMG YOU MUST EXERCISE AT LEAST AN HOUR A DAY! crap that I see spouted everywhere. Yeah, I'd be better off if I exercised for an hour a day, but you know what? Aiming for 20 minutes a day, every day, worked for me. I didn't achieve it every day, and back in 2007 ended up averaging 5 days a week, but it still worked. I could exercise for longer if I felt like it - and after a while, sometimes I did feel like it - but 20 minutes was the target, and it's a doable target. I also promised myself I wouldn't exercise more than an hour a day unless I was training for something in particular, because I feel that exercising that much is obsessive and would be more of a problem than a solution. (I'm not counting things like "walk around the zoo for three hours" or "paintball for two hours with friends" as obsessive exercise, of course.)
There's a place in the world for the sort of people who exercise and push themselves until they're red-faced and gasping for breath and utterly weak, and throw up or pass out, and then get back and continue doing it, and I am not talking about eating-disordered people. It's extreme athletes of the sort who train for Iron Man competitions, or bike races that travel across the U.S., and so on. The whole point of those competitions is to test your limits. You're probably not considering exercise as a means of pushing your limits, so give yourself permission to stop when you feel bad! Yes, you could push through it, but if you don't have a psychological reason to do so, it's not going to do you any good in the long run because you won't be able to make yourself do it again.
It's been shown in studies that people are pretty good judges of their own effort. You want to aim at whatever amount of effort feels moderate to you, not strenuous. If you want more guidance, then aim for a level that allows you to talk, although a bit haltingly as you breathe, and that makes you breathe a bit heavier than normal. If you can't talk, you're probably working too hard.
If you don't have the money to drop on exercise equipment, then figure out what sort of stick-and-carrot you can use to get yourself to exercise another way. The simplest thing I can think of off the top of my head is to march in place while watching TV. You can count your steps, or get a cheapo pedometer and let it count for you, and record that as a personal way to track your exercise. If you live in a better climate than I do (Texas. Heat triggers migraines. Eek! I'm not exercising outside!), you can take walks outside, perhaps while listening to music or podcasts if you've got an mp3 player, but I know myself and TV is a way better mechanism to get me to stick to it.
Currently, I've also found that I like watching my boyfriend play RPG video games, and he's got a stationary bike also and can play them while on it (I can't - too much motion), so we're working our way through Bard's Tale on the bikes. :) If you're a video gamer and can play while biking, that's another good option.
What also helped me to stick to my exercise plan is sheer nerdiness: the Eowyn Challenge. This site lists the distances that the characters in the Lord of the Rings traveled, and you can track your own travels right along with them. :) I also record my exercise in my LJ - having it public is something that helps me stick to it, because I feel accountable to my f-list, whether they care or not. :)
You'll note that my recent entries there (er, and that I am woefully un-exercised this week) are from the Wii Fit. Now that I've got access to one, it's kind of fun. It doesn't give me long periods of uninterrupted aerobic activity, which means that The Powers That Be would claim that you're completely not getting any benefit out of it, but that's BS. It makes me move, and it keeps me interested in it and coming back. I can do random step aerobics or walking/marching/running in place for 10-20 minutes if I want, but I usually don't want. I aim for 20 minutes total in the various games (although the last time I stopped at 15 because it was making my nascent migraine worse) in a session, just like I aim for 20 minutes on the bike.
That 20 minutes is just a magic number for me. 30 seems to take too much time away from me, and 15 seems like I'm not trying. However, your magic number may be different. Even if it's just 5 minutes - as in "I feel like crap and I so do not want to exercise today, but I will allow myself to stop after only 5 minutes if I want to!" Usually, once you manage to get yourself moving, you'll keep going for a while longer provided you've given yourself permission to stop after a short period. It's a psychological trick, but it works for me and I assume it's worthy trying for you. :)
Another thing about exercise (and this works for eating, also, but that's another post) for me is: mindfulness. If I just don't exercise one day, it's that much harder to exercise the next day, and the next day. HOWEVER, *if* I make a conscious decision: "Today I've got a migraine, and I think exercising will make it worse, so I will not do so today, but I will resume tomorrow if the headache is gone" or "This week I've got four pictures to finish and will be running short on sleep as is, so I will choose not to exercise this week, and will instead re-start on Sunday, when this is over." The active choice and plan to start again on a specific day really helps.
Also, divorcing your actions from morality. I had to make a conscious choice to NOT beat myself up for missing a session of exercise - sometimes I was so busy, I just forgot! Missing a day did NOT mean I was "bad." It just meant that I missed a day. When I used to fell I was bad for missing a day, it was that much easier to internalize it and feel like crap, and when I felt like crap, it was THAT MUCH HARDER to exercise, because every second of it reminded me that I was bad and felt like crap. Actively breaking that connection was one of the best things I ever did.
EQUIPMENT
I've mentioned equipment up there before, and I don't want to give anyone the impression that you need to buy anything before you start. Far from it. I'd say the only equipment you need is pencil and paper, on which to write down your exercise session so you feel accountable for it. If you're like me and like buying toys, a simple weight set (don't fall into the trap of thinking low weights and high reps with "tone" you. Muscle gain is muscle gain is all the same, and you will take less time if you go with higher weights.) or a pedometer is an inexpensive way to play around. Next up, I'd go for a heart rate monitor to see how hard you're really working. This will also be able to give you a reasonable estimate of calories burned - which will always be less than website exercise calculators estimate. After that, or before that, if you're like me and tend to need a toy get get started :), look for a piece of exercise equipment that you think will work for you. I wanted to watch television, I needed a small thing that didn't take up much space, I needed back support at the time since I was recovering from a back injury, and I needed something comfortable to sit on because I HATE HATE HATE regular bike seats. So I went for a cheap $175 recumbent bike that mistakenly was eligible for Prime on Amazon, so i got free shipping. :) My mom bought a treadmill. I love them, but it took up way too much space. There are even cheap, cheap, cheap things like this Isokinetics Inc. Pedal Exerciser
(Amazon affiliate link) that you can use as you sit in a chair.
And, of course, there's always just opening the door and taking a walk outside. If you're the sort of person that appeals to. I'm not, and I admit it.
WEBSITES
I find browing Stumptuous.com to be inspiring. It's a weightlifting site aimed at women, and the woman who runs it has resources available for people at all levels of fitness, and is delightfully snarky, too.
I knew I was going to blather on and on, but I didn't realize I was going to blather THIS MUCH. So I will save the eating section of this for another post. :)
I lost 50 pounds back in 2007 through sensible eating and light exercise, gained a big chunk back by following the "don't exercise and eat everything you want" diet after I fell out of the habit, and have now re-lost about 15-20 pounds since January, with (once I managed to start again) fairly little fuss - not sure of the exact amount, as I didn't weigh myself at the start. I've also got a lot more to lose, as I'm 5'2" and as of this morning's weighing, 253.
And this will probably be a lot of text because I tend to not be able to stop typing once I get going and think of things.
First, I am a firm believer in experimenting until you find what works for you. I have friends who lost a lot of weight on Atkins, who opted for gastric bypass, who found other diets and followed them, who dropped weight simply by moving the the 3rd floor of an apartment complex near downtown and started walking everywhere, and so on. None of those worked for me, and I don't consider bariatric surgery an option for me, because it won't solve the ultimate problem, which is my eating and exercise habits.
I also am coming from a slightly different angle than you, as most of my weight- and exercise-related health issues are mechanical (knee problems, arthritis in my foot, etc.) rather than blood work-related, as I got hit with the good end of the genetic stick when it comes to cholesterol. Instead, the health-related reasons I'm losing weight and increasing exercise are to put less stress on my problem joints, and because my mom has osteoporosis and has already lost a couple inches of height, so I need to increase the stress on my bones through exercise to strengthen them. However, she had high blood pressure, and after she took up exercise and lost 35 pounds she was able to go off her blood pressure meds.
From what I've been able to look at, when attempting to fight my way through the massive amounts of ridiculous hype and quite often misinterpreted science around weight loss, is that the actual FAT on your body doesn't have a whole lot of detrimental effects. It's the LACK OF EXERCISE and EATING BADLY that contribute more to the problems, and as a side effect, increase the amount of fat you have. There are people who look fat who have good cardiovascular health (as clinically tested) because they exercise a great deal, but since they are not willing to restrict their eating to the low caloric amounts necessary for their particular bodies to maintain a lower level of body fat, they're well-padded. (As far as I've found there are only a very few conditions that have been found to be directly related to excess fat tissue itself which are a problem, which includes ovarian cancer and some mechanical issues like knee problems. So if you don't have a family history of those: great!) Naturally, quite a lot of overweight people don't have the good health of these others, because if you're not used to exercise, moving that bulk around is hard.
I'm not getting into the whole psychological/cultural issue of overweight in our modern society because I think we can call agree that it sucks. If you (by which I mean any of you out there who read this) are able to accept yourself at your weight: that's awesome. I totally support you and your rights, and absolutely do not mean any of this screed to make you feel that I think you should change, because I don't. Conversely, if you (like me), just can't make yourself reach that stage of acceptance, I'm there for you also, and I'm not about to make you feel guilty for wanting to change. What I support is everyone's right to choose for themselves, and if you choose to change, to do so in a safe and healthy manner.
I'm also stressing that this is pretty much all my opinion and what I've found that works for me. Your mileage may vary.
PART I: EXERCISE
What I've found is true for me, and is probably true for most people, is that exercise alone doesn't really help that much you lose weight. The reason is that you just don't burn enough calories to make up for the natural increase in calories you take in as you increase your activity level. This does not mean exercise is worthless! By no means! It's been clinically shown that exercise helps your organ systems and your mood, aerobic exercise works your cardiovascular system, and weight-bearing exercise helps your bones strengthen. Muscle tissue also burns more calories than fat tissue to a small extent, so your RMR (resting metabolic rate) will increase slightly as you lose fat tissue and increase muscle tissue, but it's not enough to be significantly noticeable unless you lose A BUNCH of fat and gain A BUNCH of muscle.
Ignore both the people who don't know anything about it AND that tiny little voice in your head that says unless you're huffing and puffing and feel like shit, you're not getting enough exercise. First, ANY exercise is good, secondly exercise that doesn't make you feel like shit is exercise that is much easier to stick to, and and thirdly, especially if you haven't been exercising much you are probably working much harder than you think you are. There's a story in the introduction to Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
(Amazon referral link), where the author is talking to a middle school coach whose school adopted heart rate monitors for their kids during P.E. The coach said that there was one girl, a bit overweight, who was much slower than everybody else and normally he'd have been yelling at her to move faster But when he checked her heart rate monitor's reading, he saw that she was working near the top of her aerobic capacity: she was working as hard as the other kids.Once I got a heart rate monitor (I spent $50-60 on a Polaris one at Target), I found that even though I felt like I wasn't working very hard on my stationary bike, and, if the room was cool enough, not breaking a sweat, I was still within my aerobic heart rate target zone. Yeah, ok, it was at the lower end of it, BUT I WAS STILL IN IT.
I've also tried all sorts of exercise and what ended up working best for me was a stationary recumbent bike and a TiVo. I feel guilty if I watch TV when I have so many other things to do, but by exercising while watching, I was able to stop feeling guilty about TV. My mother bought herself a treadmill and a portable DVD player. (more in a bit about low-cost exercise, though!)
I also set low targets for myself. None of this ZOMG YOU MUST EXERCISE AT LEAST AN HOUR A DAY! crap that I see spouted everywhere. Yeah, I'd be better off if I exercised for an hour a day, but you know what? Aiming for 20 minutes a day, every day, worked for me. I didn't achieve it every day, and back in 2007 ended up averaging 5 days a week, but it still worked. I could exercise for longer if I felt like it - and after a while, sometimes I did feel like it - but 20 minutes was the target, and it's a doable target. I also promised myself I wouldn't exercise more than an hour a day unless I was training for something in particular, because I feel that exercising that much is obsessive and would be more of a problem than a solution. (I'm not counting things like "walk around the zoo for three hours" or "paintball for two hours with friends" as obsessive exercise, of course.)
There's a place in the world for the sort of people who exercise and push themselves until they're red-faced and gasping for breath and utterly weak, and throw up or pass out, and then get back and continue doing it, and I am not talking about eating-disordered people. It's extreme athletes of the sort who train for Iron Man competitions, or bike races that travel across the U.S., and so on. The whole point of those competitions is to test your limits. You're probably not considering exercise as a means of pushing your limits, so give yourself permission to stop when you feel bad! Yes, you could push through it, but if you don't have a psychological reason to do so, it's not going to do you any good in the long run because you won't be able to make yourself do it again.
It's been shown in studies that people are pretty good judges of their own effort. You want to aim at whatever amount of effort feels moderate to you, not strenuous. If you want more guidance, then aim for a level that allows you to talk, although a bit haltingly as you breathe, and that makes you breathe a bit heavier than normal. If you can't talk, you're probably working too hard.
If you don't have the money to drop on exercise equipment, then figure out what sort of stick-and-carrot you can use to get yourself to exercise another way. The simplest thing I can think of off the top of my head is to march in place while watching TV. You can count your steps, or get a cheapo pedometer and let it count for you, and record that as a personal way to track your exercise. If you live in a better climate than I do (Texas. Heat triggers migraines. Eek! I'm not exercising outside!), you can take walks outside, perhaps while listening to music or podcasts if you've got an mp3 player, but I know myself and TV is a way better mechanism to get me to stick to it.
Currently, I've also found that I like watching my boyfriend play RPG video games, and he's got a stationary bike also and can play them while on it (I can't - too much motion), so we're working our way through Bard's Tale on the bikes. :) If you're a video gamer and can play while biking, that's another good option.
What also helped me to stick to my exercise plan is sheer nerdiness: the Eowyn Challenge. This site lists the distances that the characters in the Lord of the Rings traveled, and you can track your own travels right along with them. :) I also record my exercise in my LJ - having it public is something that helps me stick to it, because I feel accountable to my f-list, whether they care or not. :)
You'll note that my recent entries there (er, and that I am woefully un-exercised this week) are from the Wii Fit. Now that I've got access to one, it's kind of fun. It doesn't give me long periods of uninterrupted aerobic activity, which means that The Powers That Be would claim that you're completely not getting any benefit out of it, but that's BS. It makes me move, and it keeps me interested in it and coming back. I can do random step aerobics or walking/marching/running in place for 10-20 minutes if I want, but I usually don't want. I aim for 20 minutes total in the various games (although the last time I stopped at 15 because it was making my nascent migraine worse) in a session, just like I aim for 20 minutes on the bike.
That 20 minutes is just a magic number for me. 30 seems to take too much time away from me, and 15 seems like I'm not trying. However, your magic number may be different. Even if it's just 5 minutes - as in "I feel like crap and I so do not want to exercise today, but I will allow myself to stop after only 5 minutes if I want to!" Usually, once you manage to get yourself moving, you'll keep going for a while longer provided you've given yourself permission to stop after a short period. It's a psychological trick, but it works for me and I assume it's worthy trying for you. :)
Another thing about exercise (and this works for eating, also, but that's another post) for me is: mindfulness. If I just don't exercise one day, it's that much harder to exercise the next day, and the next day. HOWEVER, *if* I make a conscious decision: "Today I've got a migraine, and I think exercising will make it worse, so I will not do so today, but I will resume tomorrow if the headache is gone" or "This week I've got four pictures to finish and will be running short on sleep as is, so I will choose not to exercise this week, and will instead re-start on Sunday, when this is over." The active choice and plan to start again on a specific day really helps.
Also, divorcing your actions from morality. I had to make a conscious choice to NOT beat myself up for missing a session of exercise - sometimes I was so busy, I just forgot! Missing a day did NOT mean I was "bad." It just meant that I missed a day. When I used to fell I was bad for missing a day, it was that much easier to internalize it and feel like crap, and when I felt like crap, it was THAT MUCH HARDER to exercise, because every second of it reminded me that I was bad and felt like crap. Actively breaking that connection was one of the best things I ever did.
EQUIPMENT
I've mentioned equipment up there before, and I don't want to give anyone the impression that you need to buy anything before you start. Far from it. I'd say the only equipment you need is pencil and paper, on which to write down your exercise session so you feel accountable for it. If you're like me and like buying toys, a simple weight set (don't fall into the trap of thinking low weights and high reps with "tone" you. Muscle gain is muscle gain is all the same, and you will take less time if you go with higher weights.) or a pedometer is an inexpensive way to play around. Next up, I'd go for a heart rate monitor to see how hard you're really working. This will also be able to give you a reasonable estimate of calories burned - which will always be less than website exercise calculators estimate. After that, or before that, if you're like me and tend to need a toy get get started :), look for a piece of exercise equipment that you think will work for you. I wanted to watch television, I needed a small thing that didn't take up much space, I needed back support at the time since I was recovering from a back injury, and I needed something comfortable to sit on because I HATE HATE HATE regular bike seats. So I went for a cheap $175 recumbent bike that mistakenly was eligible for Prime on Amazon, so i got free shipping. :) My mom bought a treadmill. I love them, but it took up way too much space. There are even cheap, cheap, cheap things like this Isokinetics Inc. Pedal Exerciser
(Amazon affiliate link) that you can use as you sit in a chair.And, of course, there's always just opening the door and taking a walk outside. If you're the sort of person that appeals to. I'm not, and I admit it.
WEBSITES
I find browing Stumptuous.com to be inspiring. It's a weightlifting site aimed at women, and the woman who runs it has resources available for people at all levels of fitness, and is delightfully snarky, too.
I knew I was going to blather on and on, but I didn't realize I was going to blather THIS MUCH. So I will save the eating section of this for another post. :)