Not Fair – Part 4

The weight loss math is easy. I have covered that in the previous three blogs. Basically you have to eat fewer calories than you burn. If you do that you will lose weight. You may know someone that eats like a pig and is skinny as a rail. They are not very nutritionally efficient. I don’t know how their genes survived periods of famine. You, however, are very nutritionally efficient. You turn everything you eat into useful energy. Lucky you!

While we are all subject to the same laws of physics, those laws are expressed differently in each of us. As a result what works for me may not work for you. That goes for running, weight control and just about everything else in life. It is good to listen to what others have to say, but it is better to listen to your own body. Ask yourself, “Under what conditions have I been able to lose weight and under what conditions do I tend to gain weight?”

For me the answer to that question is simple. I have lost weight and maintained the weight loss three times in my post-college life. Each time I eliminated alcoholic drinks and walked a few extra miles a day. Everything else was the same. The elimination of alcohol was worth about 250 calories a day and the walking was worth 250 calories a day. Magically fifteen to twenty pounds were shed over a few weeks.

I can’t tell you what will work for you and neither can anyone else. But my experience suggests that there are a couple of easy shots that you can take that will be relatively painless and can have big results. If you are a super competitive athlete, you might need a scalpel to trim the calories. Most of us just need an axe to chop off a few branches.

Think about two things: 1. When have you been most successful at losing weight and what were those circumstances? 2. Where can you easily eliminate a few hundred calories a day either through exercise or reduced ingestion? Then experiment, experiment, experiment.

Keep Running!