This should be easy

Seriously, I'm not kidding. Losing weight shouldn't actually be that difficult.

First of all I point blank refuse to count calories. I think that is a monstrously depressing way to live. I really do. It's nigh on impossible to exist in this day and age without knowing what a healthy balanced diet should consist of, so calorie counting seems excessive to me. All it's really attempting to enforce is a sense of portion control. As I see it, we all eat way to much. This leads me to the conclusion that the simplest way to lose weight can be summed up as follows:

PUT DOWN THE FORK!

To be clear, this applies to me as well. I have the habit of picking up the fork and eating, and eating and eating some more. This is 1 of the 2 mistakes I'm making. In the picture I posted below I had a body fat percentage of 14.7%

The second mistake of course being that I'm not taking enough exercise. There are no magical weight loss pills, acupuncture won't make me thinner (though perhaps more religious, sorry, terribly joke) and doing 5000 sit-ups everyday won't give me a visible 6 pack (the fat will still be on top of it, you need <12% body fat for a visible 6 pack). The sad but simple truth is that you can't target the area for fat loss. It all comes off at once. This means cardiovascular exercise. Which sucks because it's so much nicer to sit on the sofa, swallow a pill and get thinner. Sadly that pill doesn't exist so its time to get up and get moving.

This is the part where it becomes less easy, though not difficult. All we really need to ditch the extra kilo's (and I can name 2 people that I think don't need to do this, wish I was 1 of them) is the willpower to exist on a calorie deficient diet. That's it:

lower the amount of food that goes in, increase the amount of work the body does, the weight will then drop off.

To be perfectly frank I believe this to be nothing more than an exercise in discipline. If you've ever kicked a habit then this is the same thing, just a different habit.

In the next couple of posts I'll outline my plan to implement the above.

Couple of things though. The first thing to realise though is that this isn't about dieting. Diet's don't work because we've evolved to believe a  lack of food is famine and our bodies then actually store more fat. No, diet's don't work, lifestyle choices do however. I'm not going on a diet, I'm changing the way I live to become healthier, there is no end to this 'diet' for a very long time.

The other thing is that if I'm not in for the long haul I should just order a pizza and give up right now. Ever see those magazines with a headline, 'Get a beach body in 4 weeks,' 'Slim for the summer in 2 months,' 'Lose that Christmas gut in the 12 days'? Yeah, they're all full of crap. Ugly truth, it's going to take a long time to get my body back the way I want it. It may not even be this year, but that's okay, because I can accept that at the outset, it's why I can do this.