Losing Weight, Is It Really That Simple?

I was looking through the Idea Bank and found the topic "How to Become Thin" and was curious to see the answers. Among the answers was one that claimed to be the "only true and reliable way" to become thin:

1. Eat less
2. Be more active

Sounds simple enough, right? Theoretically, it should be simple enough to do this that anyone with the gumption should be able to lose all the weight they want. Right?

Technically speaking, the person that answered that is correct. Many people who are overweight are so because they aren't active enough and/or they're eating too much.

In this day and age of fast food, third pounders, and king sized milkshakes, overeating is a very easy thing to do. Did you know that Big Mac, Large Fry, and Large Coke is somewhere in the ballpark of 1500 Calories? That's two-thirds of the typical person's average recommended intake in one meal!

That 8oz New York Strip you're having for dinner? That's nearly three servings of meat, right there.

Seems strange, right? That the helpings we're so used to are actually two and three (and sometimes more) times the size of recommended portions. That might not be bad for one of the items on your plate (especially if you hadn't had any other portions of that group in the day), but it adds up quick, especially when everything is oversized (and especially when the oversized items are high in fats, carbs, and/or sugars).

In this sense, eating less is certainly a good thing.

One of the most important things to remember is that you need to maintain a balanced diet in order to stay healthy, and we're not just talking about losing weight, we're talking about your body being able to function properly.

For example, if you decide to go on a vegan diet because you want to be healthier, you have to make sure you get enough iron. Iron is one nutrient that humans absorb better from meat sources than from vegetable sources. Without enough iron, you'll risk becoming anemic (ever give blood and they put a drop in what looks like blue water? That's copper sulfate, if it floats, you don't have enough iron), which can bring on muscle pain, fatigue, insomnia, and cravings for non-edible items. While you may not have had to think about your iron intake when you were an omnivore, now that meat has been cut out of your diet, you need to make sure you get enough iron from other sources, and to help absorption by accompanying the iron-rich foods with vitamin C-rich foods.

Eating less is great in theory, but if all you're eating is junk, then you're going to be left unfulfilled and always be hungry. Hunger is not the goal. The goal is to eat fewer Calories while keeping your daily amount of nutrients up. How do you do this? By changing what you eat.

Instead of having a Big Mac meal at lunch, perhaps trade it in for a salad with an ounce of chicken or steak pieces on it. A well-rounded salad will include several servings of vegetables, including things like carrots, bell peppers, radishes, spinach, lettuce, maybe some tomatoes, and perhaps a little cheese and a few croutons. Right there, you have vitamins A and C, Calcium, Protein, Fiber, and other nutrients, as well as balanced servings of vegetables, grains, dairy, and meat, for about 400 calories for a large salad.

I always found it funny how the latest fad diets seem to fly in the face of everything we ever learned about the food pyramid. With things like the Atkins Diet and the South Beach Diet everywhere, you'd swear carbohydrates were these evil things that you should never touch because it all goes straight to fat.

The truth is, though, carbohydrates, along with fiber and protein, are key nutrients that help keep you from eating less. Carbs are slow-burning fuel sources that provide you with energy all day. They keep you feeling fuller for longer and help keep your blood sugar from crashing between meals (which, in most people, is one of the "I'm hungry" triggers, and in some people leads to fainting, grouchiness, and dizziness). Carbs are especially good at breakfast and lunch, since you'll be active for several hours after eating. Dinner should be lighter on carbs, as you're typically winding down for bed and less likely to be active enough to burn off all the fuel from the carbs before it turns to sugar and, ultimately, to fat.

It's entirely possible to lose weight by only making changes to diet or increasing activity, but that will only work for so long. The optimal solution is to eat healthy and exercise.

Don't be surprised if you don't lose a ton of weight or lose it right away. When you exercise, you work your muscles and, therefore, build them (yes, even lean muscle gets built). Muscle is very dense, so while you may be losing fat, you're also gaining muscle, and the scale doesn't really show you this. Your clothing, however, will.

About six months ago, I went to my doctor. I was frustrated, I had been determined to lose weight. I was about 120 pounds overweight and was miserable. I had never been "thin" per se, but I had been in significantly better shape and significantly thinner. I knew I should have been able to do it, I didn't know how much work it should have taken, but I knew I should have been coming off. I changed my eating habits and was eating something like 1500-1800 Calories per day and was making sure I got all the nutrients I needed, which meant eating healthier. I had cut out the junk food and was watching for things like high fructose corn syrup (an artificially-made sugar that is as simple as it gets, so takes next to nothing to turn it into fat). I was exercising upwards of an hour a day, five days a week, doing a variety of different exercises, including walking/jogging, swimming, dancing, and weight lifting.

I never lost an ounce. I had gotten a Wii and had picked up Wii Fit and had been using it to track my weight, so that I'd have a visual reinforcement of my progress. The only problems was, I wasn't making any progress. Sure, some days it'd dip down a few pounds, but the next day, it'd spike back up to a couple pounds higher than before it dipped. The overall movement, however, was completely horizontal. There was no long term movement one way or another. This had gone on for a year.

The final straw was reading a friend's blog. She talked about joining Curves as part of some survey thing and was so pleased with the results she was seeing that she stayed. She went three days a week for half an hour and hadn't made any conscious changes to her diet (though she was noticing that she wasn't hungry as much, so she was eating less). In the first week, she had dropped between one and two pounds, and after a month was averaging a consistent two pound a week weight loss. I know everyone is different, but if she was seeing those results that quickly and easily, why wasn't I seeing anything?

When I went to see my doctor, she ran some tests and found out I had a hormone imbalance. I had high insulin resistance (pre-cursor to Diabetes if left unchecked), which was somehow elevating my testosterone levels, which in turn was keeping my estrogen and progesterone from cycling like it should and keeping them in a high state. Some women might know these symptoms as Poly-Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). Thankfully, I didn't have the cysts, though, but my doctor treated it the same. She prescribed me a medicine that would help with the insulin resistance. When the insulin resistance went down, so did the testosterone (a known "side-effect" of the medicine), which also kick-started the cycles again.

After about a month, I started losing weight. About two months later, I was down about 10 pounds. This sudden change confirmed that my previous lack of change had been because of that hormone imbalance.

The moral of this little story is that while "eat less, exercise more" is the basic premise of weight loss, you're not guaranteed to lose weight if other factors are involved. If your diet and exercise regimen shows that you should be noticeably losing weight and you're not seeing any changes (remember, not just the scale, but in your clothes, too), then it might be time for a check-up with your doctor.