Eat Less, Exercise More

Well, the more I deal with weight issues the more I am convinced that the key to success in losing weight can be summed up in those 4 simple words…Eat Less, Exercise More. Several different times in my life when I have had significant weight loss through dieting.  It happened each because I reduced the volume of food I ate and increased the amount of exercise I did.  It worked, plain and simple.

Over the years I have seen a variety of weight loss programs and they seem to have that same thing in common.  Oh, they call it by different names and have different ways to encourage people to modify their eating and exercising behaviors but in the end it always seems to add up to, you guessed it, eat less and exercise more.  I’m sure some of you are familiar with some of these programs.  One such plan involved purchasing meals from the program you were on.  I noticed that most of the time the items were smaller than normal portions.  One plan from the past had people dealing out cards from various categories of food and placing them on a large planning board with pockets.  There again it looked as though the intake was reduced when following the plan.

As you probably have read in my other posts, I started with Weight Watchers in September of this year (2014) and am having success with that program.  I really like the way it is set up and the tools that are available through the program.  I also like the focus that you aren’t on a diet but are developing life-long changes in the ways you view and use food.  They don’t focus on calories but, instead, use a points system which simplifies keeping track of, or  “tracking”, the food being consumed.  I have done both and find that the points system works much better for me.  They also encourage increases in your physical activity.  They have an electric monitoring device called “ActiveLink” that tracks your daily activity and helps you set goals to keep building on your weight loss successes.

Another feature of the Weight Watchers program that I like is that most fruits and vegetables are counted as zero points.  This encourages you to use your available points each day on good food choices and then use fruits and vegetables as “extra” food for snacks, etc..  As I understand it the old system included points for fruits and vegetables and folks would skip eating them so they could use their points for other food.  Now you can eat this healthy food anytime for snacks or to complete a meal without costing you those precious points.  It’s a great encouragement to eat healthier.

In my case, I have tracked my foods daily as a means of keeping my food intake under control.  I purchased the Activelink to help monitor my exercise and track my daily efforts at increasing exercise.  It’s been a great encouragement in ramping up my efforts.  I have found that, for me, the easiest exercise is simply to walk.  I started trying to walk for half an hour each day and have been able to increase that to 1 to 1 ½ hours per day.  I am walking outside and hope that I can continue that because I have found treadmills to be pretty boring.  I think my walking regimen has been key to the success I have had so far and plan on continuing with it.  I will also be adding some weight training in the future to build additional muscle tone as well as burn more calories.

The Canadian government came up with a phrase that I have adopted.  They called it “Participaction”.  Really, it’s simply a call to ‘get moving’ and that makes perfect sense.  Whether it’s walking every day, parking at the edge of the parking lot, walking a lap through the mall before stopping to shop or one of a number of other techniques, the idea is to ‘get moving’.  It’s not new, just another great reminder that an increase in physical activity is just as important as reducing the calories of food that you eat.  Some people attend meetings without monitoring their food intake while other keep closer tabs on their eating but can’t find time, for whatever reason, to increase their exercise (burn more calories).  They seem to meet with limited success.  If folks can combine tracking their food intake AND increasing their activity level they usually find success in their weight loss journey more readily.  ,I’ll probably write more about all this in a future post but for now won’t you join me as, together, we EAT LESS AND EXERCISE MORE!  God bless and, oh yes, get moving!  J