Hey VerticalZR, that's great that you're starting out on the weight loss trail! I'm working to lose body fat too, and have benefitted a lot from this board and the people on it!
There are millions of diets out there and you might want to find one to stick to, but here are a few things I have come up with that have helped me over the past few months.
1. Do a little reading about the physiology of food and muscles. This will go a long way to helping you understand why you're supposed to eat what your diet says and when. Understanding that will help you figure out which diets are good and which are dumb. (For example, any diet that says you should just eat one thing, like pineapples one day and avocados the next = dumb.) There are millions of resources on the web, but here's a page I found very useful:
Mucle 101
2. The best way to get your body to lose weight is not to starve yourself but to eat regularly and well enough to control your cravings. Controlling cravings (which really means controlling blood sugar and insulin, as far as I'm concerned -- see link above!) is the key to everything.
3. Fiber is your new best friend. Fiber, fiber, fiber with every meal. It slows digestion, helps you feel satisfied, and allows the food you eat to give you more energy over time.
4. Refined sugar is your new worst enemy. Unfortunately, you're going to have to suffer through this one. I had sugar cravings bordering on hallucinations for about a week and then, poof, no more cravings. Trust me on this one, it hurts like hell but when you come out the other side you'll see what a slave you had been.
5. When you change your diet, expect it to be very difficult for a week, but after that it gets easier and easier until it feels perfectly normal.
6. Doing
cardio exercise to lose fat isn't as hard as you might think. I tried to lose weight in the past by getting on a lifecycle and riding for 10 minutes at high intensity until I got nauseated. Well what do you know, I didn't lose weight, I didn't like exercising, and I gave up shortly thereafter. The truth is, for burning fat, it's better for you to exercise at a low intensity than high intensity. Believe it or not, you can take a walk around the neighborhood and if you're out of shape enough (I was!) you can get your heart rate up into the fat burning range. As you get better in shape, you'll need to do more rigorous exercise to get your pulse up, but by then you'll be up to the challenge.
7. Building muscle is the best way to make yourself look better, plus it also turns out to be the best way to burn fat, as Kindachuby mentioned. But right in the beginning, weightlifting could be a great way to generate enthusiasm for exercise. If you're as out of shape as I was, just one or two trips to the gym will yield a noticeable difference in the amount of muscle on your body. When you build muscles, whatever fat is on your body gets lifted up by the muscle underneath, and you look better. For me, this was the most addictive part of exercising at first (looking in the mirror after a trip to the gym), even before I changed my diet and began to lose weight. Fopr example, my chest, which was droopy, began to stand up and look good!
8. Stretch, stretch, stretch. When I was heavy and sedentary, I got really stiff. Touch my toes? Howsabout my thigh... ouch! I have found that stretching = less sore after workout = more likely to workout regularly. I take about 20 minutes before every workout to stretch. Another benefit of stretching is that (at least the way I do it) it's slightly strenuous and gets my heart rate pretty much into the
fat burning zone.
9. A watched pot (belly) never boils. Try as hard as you can to fall into a routine with your diet and exercise and not pay attention so much to how you fare from one day to the next. You may find that on Monday you eat a lot of salt and don't drink enough water, and so on Tuesday you look fatter. You'll feel like a failure if you pay attention to all these little fluctuations. But if you keep your head down for a week of hard work, I guarantee you that you'll be amazed at how much better you look.
10. Use this board as a resource, ask questions, get advice. Everyone is really nice and eager to help.
Good luck! You can definitely do it!
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