What Hasn't Worked.

07/10/2011

Days until Con : 53

Weigh in day, and down two pounds from last week making me at 207.  It's a good day.

My nutrition is in flux and has been since I began this whole thing. But that feels like the natural order of things. Every person is different, has different cravings and body styles so it makes sense that you'd have to come up with something that works best for you. I'm much less in flux now then when I began. The problem I see with being on a  strict diet is that it's not sustainable over a long period of time. Making better decisions is. Whenever people ask me how I've lost the weight I've already lost, I tell them I'm very aware of what goes into my body, and I stay active. It seems like generic advice and sometimes there's a bit of a sigh from the other party because they're looking for a secret ingredient, but trust me when I say there isn't.

I can tell you what didn't work for me.

Diet pills are a sham. I tried them well before I started Hot for Con and I didn't notice anything different about my weight loss, and experienced side effects. Most of the side effects felt like I'd guzzled about 10 cups of coffee in one go (my heartrate increased on a constant basis and I couldn't sleep at night) You don't need them, they're mostly dangerous and the ones that aren't dangerous are expensive. You can save that money and put it towards better foods.

Calorie counting. If you've followed me from the begin you remember I counted calories on my posts, to be honest it was a gateway into being calorie aware, but calorie counting itself is tedious. You also don't get the full scope of a healthy lifestyle that way as foods are not created equal. It doesn't prepare you to broaden your horizons, to eat more veggies and fruits, it just teaches you to buy frozen diet dinners. This may work for most, and I see the benefit. As a long term solution, it wasn't what I wanted.

Starvation. This is ridiculous, and shameful to say, but I tried it. The problem being 1. The hunger pains, and 2. When you do eat your body, having gone into survival mode, stores everything it can. You cannot keep this up. You'll starve yourself all day long, then on your way home from work you'll get yourself something, anything, to eat. I found myself driven mad, literally, and grabbed the first fast food place I could find and ordered a metric butt ton of food. I'd end up losing absolutely nothing and being miserable in the process.

Fad diets. By the time I started sniffing around fad diets I'd already educated myself enough to just come up with something on my own. Fad dieting is, again, not something you can keep up forever so I wasn't too interested.

The way I see it. Starvation, diet pills, fad diets, and calorie counting is somewhat the order of things when you have absolutely no knowledge of healthy living and you're trying desperately for something to work. Calorie counting being the better out of the group but they all have fatal flaws that didn't work for me. I do suggest calorie counting as a launching pad, anything that gets you aware of what you're putting in your body, but stay the hell away from the others.

A few posts back I talked about fasting, and you'd probably try to call me a hypocrite because what's the difference between fasting and starving? When fasting your body never goes into survival mode, which is the key. You'll also know that I'm not exactly fasting anymore, I used myself as research and found that it's something that is interesting but ultimately not for me.