Maybe you're doing well and everything's gone according to plan, and you're finally starting to notice that you're able to squeeze back into those old jeans that you haven't been able to wear for years now, but I think the odds are much more likely that you slipped up, stopped exercising, and at some point probably rationalized eating an entire cake in one sitting, and just decided to say "fuck it" and went back to how you were living before.
If that's the case, or just for anyone coming through who's open to some advice, here's some of the best I've ever gotten:
Stop attributing emotion to your weight loss.
If you miss a shower do you roll around and feel bad for yourself and give up all hope that you'll ever get clean so why bother showering anymore? Do you do that if you forget to brush your teeth? How about if you forget to shave in the morning? No? Then why the
fuck are you doing it for your exercise and nutritional plans? There's no such thing as a diet that will
keep you thin and get you into shape, the only way to do this is through routine exercise and by keeping an eye on what you eat. There's no magic pill, and there's no permanent diet, so quit waiting for it.
The good news is that you don't need to wake up every single morning and go jogging for ten hours, or spend your entire life eating boiled chicken and drinking water. There's an
incredible number of options out there for cardio, so much so that you'll never even have to go jogging unless you
want to, and some of the best cardio options (
Battle ropes,
burpees, jumping jacks, etc) can be done indoors, and most of them can be done without anything more than the floor and your own, damned body. All you need to do is go at them as hard as you can. Generally speaking, you want high
intensity, not high duration, but that also needs to take into account your current fitness level or any disabilities or injuries you might have. The bottom line is that
any activity is better than no activity. Even if it's just walking circles around the neighborhood or doing yoga in your livingroom, find
something and
start.
The food you eat doesn't matter as much as you'd might expect, either. You don't
need to relegate yourself to flavourless paste and boiled meat, you can eat just about anything that you want--
within reason--but you
need to watch the caloric intake, at least at first. Once you really get the ball rolling you don't even need to count calories anymore to maintain, but at the start of this I'd highly recommend it because it helps you get a much better grasp on just how many calories go into what sorts of foods, and after awhile it'll start to become second nature. If you're just getting started, don't bother digging too deep into "macro nutrients" or you're going to confuse yourself. Focus on proper portioning and eating responsibly first. The macro crap can come later.
Find what sorts of cardio you can stand to do, and just keep up with that every single day. It doesn't even take all that much, just do some jumping jacks and burpees and maybe even sprint from one side of your backyard to the other every single day for a total of maybe 15-20 minutes. Combine that with a caloric deficit of around 1500-1800 per day, and start taking pictures of yourself to chart your progress. I don't care
how big you are: You'll shrink, and
fast. When I was gigantic (
In the range of 280-300) I started off by taking my roommate's dog for a walk every morning and every evening for at
least a mile. I lost weight surprisingly quickly, and their fat-ass dog became a much healthier dog on top of that, too.
Make friends with your spice rack, become more familiar with wraps and oatmeal and eggs and tuna recipes because even with
just those you can make a pretty damned significant number of dishes. You think a wrap has to be a few slivers of meat and a spinach leaf? Do it up properly and you can make a decent wrap in the range of 250-350 calories per wrap, and they can be anything from tuna salad to Cajun chicken. Think oatmeal has to be this bland, boring mush? Add a tablespoon of peanut butter for protein and flavour, and some cinnamon, or go nuts with alternative recipes that have nothing to do with breakfast. Get some onion, some garlic, an egg and some oatmeal and you can scramble it up and it tastes like goddamned potatoes, and you
still won't break 300 calories per bowl.
Just find whatever foods work for you, because there's no "right" answer when it comes to what to eat, all that matters is that you're able to find what foods you enjoy enough to be able to make this a lifelong habit, and the more lean muscle you build, the more you can start to relax your caloric intake because you'll need to be burning even more of them. Once you get there you can heap on 2500-3000+ calories a day without even getting into the "serious" bodybuilding stuff, it's just gonna' be a rough couple of months at the start while you acclimate to the changes and learn how to properly portion things out.
Hell, a couple months into doing this and you'll be shocked by how much food it no longer takes to fill you up. When I first started I could eat an entire pizza in one sitting, or four whole tuna melts and still feel like I had room for more. Barely even two months down the road and a cup of popcorn and a single banana left me feeling too full to bother with much more. I went from what was
easily a 5,000+ calorie-per-day lifestyle to ~1,500 per day and for the first half of the first month I was going slightly insane because I
always felt hungry, but it does stop. It does get easier, but you need to
stick to it.
It's genuinely not as difficult as people make it out to be, it just takes a little willpower and lot of patience. This will not be a fast road, but you can make
serious, physical changes to your entire body in under a year if you stick to it, no matter how old you are. I didn't get serious about this sort of thing until I was in my
mid-thirties, and then in the span of a few months I was seeing changes so significant that I had to go shopping for new pants because all of mine kept falling off my hips, and I hadn't even bothered to get a gym membership at the time. I had two dumbbells that weighed probably 15lbs each, a 25lb kettlebell, and I did all of my exercising in my home or in the backyard, or during those dog walks, and that was all I needed to get started. That was all I needed to go from 280+ and
completely sedentary to being able to wear clothing that wasn't just a repurposed tent.
Either way, how many more times do you want to step out of the shower in the morning, sigh at yourself in the mirror, slap your stomach and go, "Yeah I should lose some weight. Maybe tomorrow." I did it all the way through my teenage years, all the way through my 20s, and then halfway through my 30s before I looked at myself in the mirror and went, "You know you're going to just die fat at this rate, right?"
You don't need to be in shape to get started, but you do need to get started to be in shape.
