How do you lose weight?
I saw an article in the Washington Post today on the popularity of “diets in a box” like Jenny Craig and Slim-Fast. Personally I have never used anything like those programs. I know that my mother has done the Slim-Fast shakes and she has also done the Weight Watchers program. I actually know several people that are currently on the Weight Watchers program.
But here is what I do not get…
Losing weight is really a simple idea. You just need to make sure you do not eat more calories than you need. It is fairly common knowledge that 1 pound is roughly 3500 calories, so clearly you need to burn or have a decrease of 500 calories per day to lose one pound a week. It’s not rocket science, just simple math.
With that in mind, I have a hard time understanding why people need to join programs like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig. According to the article it is because people do not know what an actual portion size should be, so therefore they eat too much. To me it seems that maybe people are just lazy. It makes no difference what size the portion is if you know how many calories are in it and how many calories you should be eating each day.
Granted, I am not a dietician or anything like that.
Here are some helpful weight loss tools:
Calorie counter
BMI calculator
Walking Calculator
January 8th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Well, personally, I’ve always had trouble gaining weight due to my high metabolism. Not to get fat, but just to put some meat on my bones lol. I would imagine that the first step to losing weight would be to learn the basics of nutrition. That means going to a used bookstore or online and buying a cheap book on nutrition (perhaps an older edition of a textbook? Those sell for pennies on Amazon). Read. Learn. Gasp in horror.
January 9th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Some people need the accountability of weekly weigh-ins, or other ways in which someone else is also tracking their progress, in order to succeed in weight loss. Because depression or lack of motivation can sidetrack a person’s solo attempts, knowing that another set of eyes are also monitoring the scale can be the motivation for working out on days when you don’t feel like it, and skipping that second helping of…whatever. It minimizes the self-sabotage.
January 9th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Some folks have no concept of how to count calories, or how to do portion control. That is why they “buy” into the Jennie Craig programs, all this is done for them and if they don’t succeed, they blame the program instead of themselves. I do agree with Quandria, some folks like the accountability of a weekly weigh in and the group support system you get with some of these programs
Like you said, it’s pretty simple, eat less, exercise more, you will lose weight. But it takes some will power to do it alone.
January 10th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Yeah, I guess I get that some people need the whole accountability thing to stay the course.