[ThePianoMan]

Unfortunately my career requires a lot of travel and sedentary behavior. I've worked out off and on for years but I really have had enough of feeling overweight. I'm currently 5'10" and 240 lbs and really want to shed about 50 pounds in a healthy amount of time. I will admit my eating habits are poor and I do have urges to eat carbs and sweets regularly.

I'd love to get some suggestions on initiating a workout routine for weight loss and some diet tips as well. I've been trying to run for the past months but I always start and then get distracted with work. I also wonder if running is an efficient enough workout for weight loss.

I'm happy to answer any follow up questions to get better suggestions. Thanks to everyone for this advice as I finally take the red pill once and for all.

[LeBeau]

Diet info and workouts in this thread, often not needing equipment (useful for when travelling)

http://www.rooshvforum.network/thread-38372.html

[The Reactionary Tree]

P90X

[JayJuanGee]

(09-06-2014 12:21 AM)ThePianoMan Wrote:  

Unfortunately my career requires a lot of travel and sedentary behavior. I've worked out off and on for years but I really have had enough of feeling overweight. I'm currently 5'10" and 240 lbs and really want to shed about 50 pounds in a healthy amount of time. I will admit my eating habits are poor and I do have urges to eat carbs and sweets regularly.

I'd love to get some suggestions on initiating a workout routine for weight loss and some diet tips as well. I've been trying to run for the past months but I always start and then get distracted with work. I also wonder if running is an efficient enough workout for weight loss.

I'm happy to answer any follow up questions to get better suggestions. Thanks to everyone for this advice as I finally take the red pill once and for all.

Personally, I prioritize controllable aspects of healthy living into three categories.

Diet comes first, then sleep, then exercise. In other words, if I am too tired, I skip exercising.


There are quite a few threads on diet in this forum, and you seem to identify one of the main culprits in our diets, and that is the need for a lot of people to cut carbs.

Also, if you can figure out how to cut processed foods out of your diet and to eat more natural and whole foods, then that would be good, which can be somewhat of a challenge if you travel a lot.

You may want to read, Gary Taubes' book "why we get fat and what to do about it." It is NOT specifically a diet book, but it does give you an idea the extent to which we have been lied to by various mainstream sources including the FDA about fat being bad for us... Anyhow the punchline should be that some natural fats and animal fats and butter and fish fats and avocado and coconut are good and transfats and man made fats such as vegetable and corn and soybean oils are bad.

I personally attempt to eat a lot of natural whole foods, which can be more difficult when you are traveling a lot, and to keep carbs down (less than 25% if possible) (also harder when you travel a lot), but boiled eggs can be good and portable. Same with bacon... if you get good fats into your diet and otherwise filling foods, your cravings on carbs will cut down.

In about the past 3 years, I have NOT been drinking either sodas or other manufactured drinks or diet drinks (because they tend to put in quite a few additives that cause your body to have an insulin responses in spite of there sometimes being NO sugar contained therein.. but the sweetness still causes your body to react as if there were sugar in those products).

Guys in this forum do NOT always agree about dietary approaches and about how much carbs are good, and I personally believe some of the information is wrong and misleading and each of us have to study up on these kinds of topics to make a plan for ourselves.

I posted a bit of a protest in this other RVF belly thread. Also, contained within that post is a link to a real decent video, too about butter and insulin resistance.

You may want to look up westin price as well and wheat bellies.

Actually, if you consider making a plan for yourself, you may want to start by considering ways to cut certain processed foods from your diet and which natural foods to put in their place in order that you do NOT get as many cravings for bad food.

Maybe it would be good to post here again about the plan that you are making.. ? and possibly just changing one or two things at a time is better than trying to make some plan that would be too difficult for you to follow.. especially if you have some erratic scheduling and traveling matters.

[JayJuanGee]

A couple further points regarding Gary Taubes.

Taubes' book, Good Calories bad calories - written in 2000 - is considered one of the seminal books in the low carb community, and he wrote why we get fat and what to do about it as an easier reading and shorter book with similar content.

Within those two book, Taubes spends quite a bit of time putting forth evidence about two myths regarding why people are fat... and that is the common assertion that 1) we eat too much and 2) we exercise too little. He asserts both of those to be myths and sets forth evidence to show why those assertions are NOT true.

Regarding eating, Taubes' assertion is that we can eat as much as we want so long as we are eating good foods. Accordingly counting calories is dumb - on the other hand counting carbs may NOT be so dumb because, probably, we should be striving to cut back on our carb intake.

Regarding exercise: Taubes asserts that it appears that we are exercising as much, if not more, now than we were 50 years ago; however, people are fatter now than they were 50 years ago. Accordingly, exercising does NOT make us skinny, but instead the kinds of foods that we eat matter more than exercise. Also, he suggests that we are NOT fat because we are lazy, instead we become lazier after we become fatter. Accordingly, if we lose some of those excess pounds, by eating better foods, then our energy levels would naturally go up. Therefore, we do NOT have to force exercise because we will naturally want to exercise and become more energized after we lose some of the excess pounds from our bodies (mostly from eating carbs and the wrong kinds of fats).

[Hannibal]

Diet : Eat more meat and vegetables. The crockpot is your weapon against hunger. Throw a large chuck roast in there or whatever meat you desire and cook it on low for 8 hours. Anyone who says they don't have time to cook a good meal is a liar. Corn is not a vegetable, neither are peas. I'm talking about spinach, cauliflower, kale, asparagus, that kind of thing. Maybe the occasional sweet potato. Look up guidelines for the paleo diet, it's not perfect but it's a good place to start if you want a mindless way to lose fat without having to count calories or keep track of macros.

Exercise : The most minimalistic exercise program is known as Bryce Lanes 50/20 program. It's where you pick an exercise, any exercise at all, and do 50 quality repetitions in 20 minutes. If you can do 50 reps in 20 minutes, bump the weight up 5-10%. It's so easy, anyone with a stopwatch app on their phone and the ability to count up to 50 can do it. This sort of lifting style is very organic. A system like this is very easy to keep track of in your head so that you can actually push yourself to make progress.

You'll want to pick compound movements such as clean and press, deadlift, back squat, front squat, benchpress, weighted pullups, weighted, dips, and power cleans. You can use other forms of training too, but I'll refer you to the article because he explains it better. After your 20 minutes, if you feel like you want to do some extra work like curls, calf raises, or abs, go right ahead.

Here's the original article for more information.

http://web.archive.org/web/2006061805294...it_all.htm