Male Weight Loss Now

Weight loss is eating less food than you need. It is that simple. Don’t make it complicated. You may think you need to work out hard at the gymn, lifting more weights, doing more crunches, and more pain and more sweat. That is the male mindset. We think that doing more work is the only way to lose weight. This is the fat loss formula.

You and I are are not wired to naturally think that eating the right amounts will really amount to losing weight. It really is not our fault.  I am not saying that you should not exercise. I am saying that exercise is in a supporting role in losing belly fat. Eating right is the main act.

Don’t Like Laws?

I am living proof that this works. If you eat less than your body needs, you have to lose weight. It is a LAW. It is the only LAW about weight loss. Ask me how I know……

Nearly one month ago, I got serious about losing the gut. I lost more than 10 pounds after changing what I eat.  I had been lifting weights and running my whole life. I always stayed very fit.  Here is a short story that proves my point.

About two years ago, all of a sudden, I gained 25 pounds. I thought at the time that I had been given defective advice from a chiropractor. I decided to try out a chiropractor to get adjusted and keep my posture in check. Nothing serious.

I was told by my chiro-professional that I should use the fitness ball to do sit-ups or crunches (whatever you like to call them). Over a period of weeks, my belly grew. I thought that my belly grew because I had put on too much “muscle.”

The fact was that my eating had gotten out of hand. I was dating a woman that is till the most sleek and svelte figure of any woman I had ever dated. She seemed to eat without concern for her shape. I thought, well, if that is good enough for her, that is good enough for me.

We ended up eating huge late night snacks (wine, cheese, bread, cookies) when we got home. I never had to think about eating right. This period of time coincided exactly with the time that I had started doing the new fitness ball exercises. So I naturally blamed the exercise, rather than the food.

So about one month ago, I got really tired of the gut. I kept my workout routine that I have been doing for years. But instead of following my instinct of cranking up the workout routine, I decided to count up everything that I ate. I was stunned to see all of the calories that I was eating in one day.

Suddenly I decided to start cutting out stuff that really was not even that enjoyable (extra pieces of cheese, a beer here and there, etc.). Pretty soon after a week or two, I had shaved my eating program down to fighting size. The fact is that I do need to watch what I eat. This last month, I changed my weekday diet to the following:

Breakfast

1-1/2 Cups Bran Flakes

1/2 Cup Milk

2 Glass Water

Coffee w/ 2% milk

Lunch

Carrots – one fistful

2 Oranges

Dinner

Spinach Salad with eggs, green onions, blue cheese dressing

1 Orange

2 Glass Water

Why does this menu succeed in helping get rid of the belly fat? It does one thing and one thing only (sounding like Brad Pitt from “Inglorious Basterds”) – it puts my body in a calorie deficit.  What’s so good about that? My body will start cutting into fat reserves if it needs more energy. The body uses fat and I lose my gut. Compare this program to what I was eating a month ago.

The above menu consists of 1,414 calories and that is less calories than I will burn in one day. That means, the body starts using the stored fat if it needs more.  So, I let my body lose its own fat, rather than me trying to sweat it off at the gym.

So, long story short…….on February 8, 2010,  I weighed 220 pounds. Yesterday my weight was 209 pounds. Need I say more? Note to self:  following LAWS gets results.

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If you think that you eat and drink  too much or exercise too little on the weekend, you aren’t the only one. Worldwide, there are many fat men (and women) hanging their heads at the end of the weekend, after marathon eating bouts. This is especially apt for those of us living in the frozen north where snow still covers the ground. We frequently eat for sport here. Some guys even know in advance, despite their quixotic weight-reduced vision for themselves, that they will be heavier at the end of the weekend.

Here is a chance to kick that lame habit. This coming weekend, I am participating in a world wide event called the “Weekend Warrior Challenge.” The weekend is the time of the week, when habits soften and discipline wains. The goal of the challenge is to band together and encourage each other to maintain strong habits.

As part of this event, each of us are creating 2 or 3 measurable and specific fitness or health goals that we will adhere to this weekend. For example, here are mine:

1. Maintain calorie intake below 2,000 calories on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
2. Complete 5 complete gym work outs this week (already at 1 on Monday)
3. Walk a total of 20 miles this week

Since I keep my daily calories well  below 2,000 calories during the week, I am just extending that practice to the weekend. Since I am an active male, my calorie requirements are between 2,400 and 2,600 calories per day. So you can see the above food intake keeps me at a calorie deficit. So my goals this weekend are to complete a week long goal of exercise, and maintain low food intake that I had already started earlier in the week – actually Sunday.

The details for the event are at Weekend Warrior Challenge . This event is just a bunch of nice people helping each other out and having some fun. Check it out and see if this works for you.  Everyone is welcomed.

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The Problem

One of the biggest questions that guys have about weight loss,  is how to get rid of belly fat.  Belly fat is a nuisance. I know that the only thing you want to do with belly fat is to kill it. You  don’t want to talk about, or complain about it or even exercise it. You just want to point a laser gun at the blob, and zap it into vapor.

Belly fat is what being fat is all about. The love handles are sort of Baja-fat – it is just belly fat that hangs over your hips and bulges out of your shirt. In this article I am going to tell you how to lose belly fat. Let me tell you a few things first.

The health risks associated with belly fat are huge. Because of all of the six pack ab adverts out there on the net and TV, the advertisers  give you the definite belief, that you need to exercise your belly fat away. Well, they are at least a little correct, but mostly wrong. They want you to buy their products. Don’t be fooled into buying their crap.

Don’t Get Fooled

Doing intensive ab work – crunches, tightening muscles, hundreds of push-ups is not going to make your belly fat go away. Most likely, it may actually increase your abdomen size. This is because, without removing belly fat, your ab work WILL build muscle below the established fat layers. This increased muscle will bulge your belly out further.

In order to have six pack abs, you need to remove the layers of subcutaneous fat that lies over whatever muscle is there. While you are doing that, you need to slowly build the underlying muscle. The truth is that you can only get six pack abs by reducing belly fat. In order to reduce belly fat, you will also be reducing your overall body fat. Makes sense, right?

Here’s What To Do

Here are the two things that you need to do:

• Eat Within Limits – you need to eat less calories than your body needs.  Your body is like an inbox for food. Only, in this case,  when the inbox is overflowing, the body stores the food as fat. There is too much food going into your body, than is getting used. In this case you get fatter because your body is over-fed. You need to find out how much food your body needs and eat less than that. It is that simple.

• Exercise Daily – the male human being is an animal. All animals are physical beings that are designed to use their bodies regularly. We are not designed to sit and watch TV, play video games or eat for sport.  Create an exercise program that suits you. Many guys hate working out. I know how they feel. I have been in the situation also and it is the reason I am writing you now. But most guys think that exercising needs to hurt. It doesn’t. It does not need to hurt, but you need to get moving.  You need to get both cardio exercise (exercising using your lungs and heart) and strength training. Cardio burns fat now. Strength training builds lean body mass that increases your metabolism rate, which burns calories all day long on your behalf.  Metabolism is like a flywheel on your car – get that thing turning and it keeps burning and burning calories. Just do it.

Steps 1 and 2 must become a habit.  You have a problem with food and exercise. You need new habits. That means, you must know a day before what you will eat (and not eat) and you need to know at what time you will  exercise the next day.  This does not happen naturally. When you plan a specific time to exercise, only then will you do it.

What Will Likely Go Wrong

Now here is what is going to happen. You will start your “habit” for one day and you will feel good about it. The next day, maybe you will do it again, but the thrill of having achieved your food and exercise goal will be gone. Even worse, you will still see yourself as a fat man. This is the critical point. Stay with me here. This is where your breakthrough will occur.

Whether you can see it or not, even one day of exercising and eating within bounds will have an effect. It will reverse weight gain. In a week’s time, you will be able to measure weight loss. Within your new habits, you are not wasting any effort. It is an investment and it is paying off. Give it time and effort.

Be easy but firm with yourself.   If you have finally decided to lose the gut, you will see that the two steps above are  really a simple recipe.  It is like knowing the recipe for a ham and cheese sandwich. The recipe is bread, ham and cheese. There is not much thinking required….you just need to do it.

Get your free E-Book on how to lose belly fat now – Click the book image to your left – provide your name and e-mail address and you will be reading this book in minutes – FREE.

This is the final article in this five part series on male weight loss basics. This topic is dedicated to answering the question about whether eating more frequently can help you lose fat. Let’s start with a statement of the myth.

The Myth

I’m not sure about you, but I have been told many times that if one eats smaller “meals” and more frequently, this favors quicker weight loss. The reason (as heard on the street) behind this is that eating smaller meals initiates and maintains a high metabolism rate. I was told that this metabolism rate is dependent on a higher blood sugar level, provided by the smaller and more frequent meals.

The Truth

Well, the truth is that your metabolism rate (basal metabolism rate as measured in food calories per day) isn’t dependent upon your blood sugar level at all. It’s dependent on at least six other things based on research started many years ago:

1.Height
2.Weight
3.Age
4.Gender
5.Lean body mass – your lean body mass (how much does your “skinnied-down self” weigh). If you’ve got a large % of body fat, your lean body mass is much lower than your overall body mass (your weight on earth)
6.Activity level

However, when your body is digesting food more frequently, there are additional calories burned from the very process of digesting food (called thermogenesis). This might sound like a lot of unnecessary clarification, but there are two important things to remember from this:

1.Metabolism rate does not change with food ingested
2.You can increase calories used if your body is in digestive process more often

These two things take together intimately can change things for you. So, although eating more frequently doesn’t change your ongoing metabolism rate, it does increase calories used simply due to the work of digestion your body needs to do for what you just ate.  To favor fat weight loss, when you eat more frequently, your overall daily calorie intake can’t exceed what your body will use in one day.

According to Wikipedia, about 70% of our total energy expenditure is due to basic processes of the organs within the body. About 20% of one’s energy expenditure comes from physical activity and another 10% from thermogenesis (or digestion of food).

When you eat more often, though, that DOES mean that your blood sugar level is higher more often. That’s a problem if you are trying to lose the fat. Because, when your body uses up calories, it will use the energy available through this enriched blood sugar level, rather than body fat. This means that you aren’t going to be using up body fat.

You’re probably wondering now, OK, then how do I lose body fat? Well the answer is that if you increase energy usage by eating more frequently AND you limit your daytime food intake to less than what you use, you will induce fat loss. Another thing, don’t exercise after you have eaten because the calories that your burn will be blood sugar calories. You want to burn fat calories, so eat after you go to the gym.

Get your free E-Book on how to lose belly fat now – Click the book image to your left – provide your name and e-mail address and you will be reading this book in minutes – FREE.

Over the last week, I have had my eyes opened as to how much I really eat. It’s not that I eat huge meals or overindulge in sweets, alcohol or fast food (at least not regularly – meaning not weekly). I have a couple of personal male weight loss stories from earlier points in my life, but this time, it is a little bit different. This time, it is a matter of my age asking me to eat less food.   The first two articles in this series were exactly what I learned from just simply listing what I ate this week- as best I can remember. This article is about looking at the numbers a little closer.

Since this whole weight gain thing has really gotten my attention, I decided to pay a lot of attention to each specific thing I eat. I mean down to the smallest detail  – pat of butter, a splash of half & half in my coffee, and whether I had one or two beers last night.

Remember, at this point, we are not talking about changing anything. We are just watching what I eat. Don’t change anything about yourselves yet!  That comes later. I know you’ll want to make changes based on what you read here. But try to resist the temptation. I HAVE made some changes. I can make changes, because I already have my weight management program in play. You don’t,  So don’t start it yet. Not today at least.  I have good reasons for telling you this. Keep reading.

I have seen a couple pounds come off, in a few days. In addition to giving you the real truth about how this works for me, I am also going to give you the layout of the chart I use to add up my calories. Sound too simple? It is.

OK, so here goes…..

Let me make one confession. I have never counted calories in my whole life. I never had to. Although I had a couple spells where I got chubby – in college (from eating too much dorm food) and after my 3 sons were born, I still never counted calories! I thought that that was very middle- aged-woman-ish.  Ooops, OK there I said it.  So this whole thing I am doing this week, is something I thought I would never have to resort too.  Today, I am OK with it.  I realize now that this is going to be a simple math game….I just need to eat less calories than I use.

Here is an excerpt from the last 5 days including my meal from this evening.  Alright, so it’s Saturday evening and I’m counting calories, so what.

A couple of notes to make before I go further. As I mentioned earlier in this column, I had arthroscopic surgery on my left knee, in the early autumn of 2009,  after a lifetime of jogging. However on Sunday night this week,  I was celebrating my sister’s birthday at her house, and, my brother-in-law and I (acting like knuckleheads), were rocking-out in the living room and I wrenched my knee. So, no exercising for me this week….no walking, at least. This means, that I have spent the last week in a sort of a “sedentary state” (meaning…… bump on a log). That means I am probably only using about 2,000 calories per day.  My observations from this:

1. The fat loss formula says that I am over consuming calories – more than my 2,000 calories usage. On a daily basis, I may add.
2. Notice how “little things” can add a lot of calories:

• • Half and Half – 20 calories per “splash” in my coffee – OUCH! I thought this stuff was calorie-free!
  • 1 Slice of provolone cheese – 200 calories. I used to consume these by the sheet!
  • Clam chowder in a bread bowl (at Panera cafe) is a delicacy. Unfortunately it is 890 freakin’ calories! That is probably enough to run your lawn mower for an hour (just kidding).

Don’t change anything you eat yet. Look at just the few things that I am changing. I have already managed a couple pounds even though I was not very active. You can do it too.

Get your free E-Book on how to lose belly fat now – Click the book image to your left – provide your name and e-mail address and you will be reading this book in minutes – FREE.

Let me guess. Weight loss is on your mind all of the time. Because of your weight condition, you are constantly aware that you are probably eating too much or the wrong type of foods, right? It is a never ending reminder.

In the first article in this series I talked about how much you are eating now. In this article, I am going to talk about how many food calories you actually need.

As you might guess, the amount of food that you need is based on both calories and nutritional content. In this article, I am only going to be talking about calorie content. For today, let’s just forget about the idea that you need a well-balanced diet. We all already know that we need to eat the right amounts of all different kinds of foods. Let’s take this one thing at a time. This article is about calories only.

You can also imagine that the number of calories that you need is determined by how active you are. If you do nothing but watch TV and go to work everyday, you are not going to need as many calories as someone that is also running 4 miles and lifting a set of weights everyday.

Below is a table that shows the minimum food intake (quantity of food in calories) for people of each of three particular activity levels. Here is a quick explanation of the three activity levels:

• Sedentary - lifestyle that includes only the light physical activity associated with typical day to day life.
• Moderately active - lifestyle that includes physical activity equivalent to walking about 1.5 to 3 miles per day at 3 to 4 miles per hour, in addition to the light physical activity associated with typical day to day life.
• Active - lifestyle that includes physical activity equivalent to walking more than 3 miles per day at 3 to 4 miles per hour, in addition to the light physical activity associated with typical day to day life.

The numbers in the table are estimated amounts of calories needed to maintain energy balance for various gender and age groups at three different levels of physical activity. By the way, energy balance means using all the calories you ingest in daily activity (or inactivity). The estimates are rounded to the nearest 200 calories and were determined using the Institute of Medicine equation.

Male Calorie Requirements by Activity Level

Age	Sedentary	Moderately Active	Active
4 - 8	1400	1400 - 1800	1,600–2,000
9 - 13	1800	1,800–2,200	2,000–2,600
14 - 18	2200	2,400–2,800	2,800–3,200
19 - 30	2400	2,600–2,800	3,000
31 - 50	2200	2,400–2,600	2,800–3,000
50+	2000	2,200–2,400	2,400–2,800

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Department of Agriculture. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2005. 6th Edition, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 2005

So you may ask, so what? For many years, I could care less if someone gave me the above information. The difference is that this time, YOU have a weight problem. You need to estimate how much you are eating on a daily basis and find out how it compares with the above.

In the last article of this series, I figured out that on a daily basis, that I ate about 1,866 calories per day. Looking at the table above, a guy my age (53) and level of activity (moderate) I should only be consuming 2,200 calories per day. So, in my daily program, I should be experiencing weight loss because I am using 234 more calories than I eat.

So what is the problem? Well the problem is that I did not include all of the truth of my daily diet. I forgot to include the extra slices of cheese and ham on my sandwich, frito’s, and the occasional sweets.

OK, so let’s say that the real extra stuff I eat on a daily basis are:

Extra Stuff Frank Eats - Weekdays

Food Item	Calories
Extra slice of provolone cheese	200
Extra slide of ham	50
1 Bag of tortilla chips	234
2 Cookies (store bought)	100
Total	584

So, NOW, I have a better idea of what I am REALLY eating. It happens this way. Often times, you do not count all of the things you actually eat. Now my Fat Formula comes out a bit differently. Apparently I am eating 350 more calories than I am using 5 times per week. Now this is getting really interesting.  Don’t you think?

I know you are very serious about losing weight. If so, you need to do the math. Only when you know the facts, YOUR FACTS, can you know what to do next. Remember, at this point, you are not talking about changing anything……. either eating or activity. But you need to figure out how many calories going through your belly every day.

When you get your calorie numbers together, the whole story begins to take real shape. Stick with me, but do not make any changes in your life yet. Come back for article #3 – Calorie Quality.

Get your free E-Book on how to lose belly fat now – Click the book image to your left – provide your name and e-mail address and you will be reading this book in minutes – FREE.