One Of The Most Important Things You Can Do To Achieve Healthy Weight Loss

I think one of the most important things you can do for your health and your weight loss journey is to educate yourself as much as possible about how your body reacts to things like food, cardio and resistance exercises, sleep, and anything else you can think of. Learning how your body works gives you a solid foundation to make informed decisions rather than basing your lifestyle, and therefore your health, on the frequently inaccurate advice of your friends, family, and the internet. Sure, knowing what the best path is and actually choosing to follow that path are two very different things, but at least you will have the option.

The most dedicated, disciplined individual would still be at a disadvantage if he or she religiously stuck to “fat free” foods unaware that these foods often contain ridiculous amounts of sugar to make up for the taste of the fat that has been removed. Or that the sports drinks that are popular after heavy workouts might have so many calories and such a large amount of sugar that the benefits of the workout are all but completely negated. Or that, despite the prevalent opinion that a massive amount of cardio exercise is the best workout for women who want to lose weight without getting “bulky” from weightlifting, most people (women included) can have great fitness and weight loss results from adding resistance training to their workout program.

This self-education is important for normal, healthy people, but it is even more so for people with diseases such as PCOS, diabetes, and other issues that affect the way the body works. I honestly believe that I would not have been as successful with my weight loss as I have been so far if I hadn’t taken the time to research and understand how food, exercise, and PCOS affect my body. I think a lot of weight loss frustration stems from simple misunderstandings. After all, how are you supposed to do what works for your body if you don’t know how your body works?

A good friend of mine was also able to lose a lot of weight last year. She figured out new, healthier ways to eat, what kind of exercises to do, and then she did them, to great success.

The process is simple, but of course it isn’t easy. You can know that the piece of pizza you are eating has 400 calories and not care. Or, you could care, but find yourself in the throes of a binge and feel helpless to stop yourself from eating it anyway.

The problem many people have with finding and using correct information is that there is a humongous amount of incorrect information circulating around. As just one example out of thousands, someone you work with reads an article online that Joe-Bob from Cleveland (not ripping on Clevelanders, mind you) wrote for a couple bucks about how to lose a few pounds of water weight for a special event by eating nothing but grapefruit for a weekend. Your well-meaning coworker comes to you excitedly and tells you she has a new idea for your diet – “something about how eating nothing but grapefruit helps you lose weight!” You figure, okay, well, that will at least make the grocery bill cheaper, why not give it a shot for a week and see what happens? You try this diet and fail miserably, feel depressed about your lack of discipline, and go back to eating normally. Or, you manage to stick to it and lose five pounds over the week because you ate no sodium and your body let go of all its water weight and your muscle tissue ran away screaming because of the lack of nutrients. If the latter is the case, you excitedly tell your coworker (and probably a few other friends) that “it works!” and the misinformation spreads.

As I can’t think of a way to actually prevent this from happening, my advice to you is to take your education into your own hands and figure out for yourself why, continuing in the above example, eating nothing but grapefruit will result in a several-pound drop in weight. You will learn that, while the weekend grapefruit diet is silly, it will probably work for getting rid of a few pounds of water bloat if you have been eating a lot of sodium recently – however there are much better ways of doing this. You will also learn that a misguided attempt to follow a diet like this in the long term can have really awful health effects that can actually detract from your successful weight loss.

It is always a good idea to check the sources of the information you are using, too. If you want to start poking around some websites looking for reliable information, you might want to start with large, well-known organizations. I find the following has some interesting tidbits available:

http://health.nih.gov/see_all_topics.aspx

and especially:

http://health.nih.gov/topic/WeightLossDieting

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