Half Size Me

Your counterculture alternative to the weight loss establishment.

Weight Loss Tips

How many calories should I eat to lose weight?

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How many calories should I eat to lose weight? 

I get this question often because people will run an online calculator, or take numbers from a personal trainer, or get an InBody scan, a body-fat test, or a Dexa scan and walk away with a slip of paper showing their target calories.

You believe these numbers are accurate, but what you notice, time and time again, is that the numbers don’t match up.

How can you get different numbers from different sources?

The answer is simple:

At best, these are all estimations. Your body is constantly changing—what calories you need today and what calories you’ll be burning next week might be two distinctly different amounts.

Many factors play into your metabolism and your calorie needs, such as your activity level, the foods you select, if you’re sick or healthy. And, if you’re female, your time of the month is a factor.

Since our bodies are so adaptive and changing, locking down one number that is 100% accurate all the time is a wild goose chase. It  starts to feel overwhelming and confusing, and you might want to throw up your hands in frustration and scream, “I don’t know. I give up!”

But what if we take that reaction off the table? Instead, you realize that an estimate is the first step to figuring this out—you are just going to have to put in a little bit of work.

Over the course of a few weeks, your body will give you the feedback you need to determine if those numbers you were given are correct. The numbers generated by scans and calculators are a great launchpad for finding your accurate calories numbers, but there’s another step you must do to make sure you’re on the right track.

You need to create a simple bio-feedback loop.

It looks like this:

Eat a certain calorie allotment (based on what you were given), and then monitor your weight change over time.

This will help you nail down the correct numbers you need to lose weight. And when you understand this process correctly, you can change your numbers as your body and life changes.

I have created a tool to help you with this entire process. It’s called the Master Your Calories teaching toolkit. It walks you through creating the bio-feedback loop, how many weeks to spend on each part of the process, and how to assess your changes over time so you can be in the control.

There really is no need to throw up your hands in frustration. Once you know your maintenance and weight-loss calories, you can be in charge of changing them as necessary.

Once you understand and implement the bio-feedback loop you’ll never again need to turn to generic calculators and online recommendations to determine your calorie needs. You will know your calorie numbers, and, as your body and life situation changes, you will begin to know how to alter your calories, test your new limits, and see if what you’re doing is actually working for you.

For more help, please check out my Master Your Calories teaching toolkit

How to Keep Distractions Out of Your Weight Loss Plan

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Guest Post By LaToya Gay

Whether you’re getting started with a new weight loss plan or you’re nearly to your goal, distractions can easily derail your hard-earned progress in no time at all. Luckily, there are a lot of ways you can manage and minimize distractions to help you stay focused on your goals.

Distractions can come in many guises. For example, taking on an extra project at work, coaching your kids’ soccer team or simple boredom with your current weight loss plan can all distract you from your goal of losing weight. Unfortunately, some distractions seem unavoidable, and so we tend to use them as excuses to ditch our fitness plans.

As we all know, it’s much harder to get back into a routine you’ve abandoned than it is to stay the course and keep moving toward your goal. Here are some great tips for keeping distractions from tempting you out of your weight loss program.

Get a Buddy

As you progress through your fitness plan, it can get easier and easier to talk yourself into cheating a little bit here and there. You tell yourself you’re too tired to hit the gym after work, or you can skip your morning run “just this once,” or it’s okay to ditch your diet for the day because you did so well all week.

Skipping out on workouts and creating unplanned cheat days are the easiest ways to let your weight loss program drift off track. Before you know it, every day will become a cheat day, and you won’t remember the last time you worked out.

One great way to stick with your plan, even in difficult times, is to get an accountability buddy for your fitness plan. Your fitness buddy can be anyone. You can hire a trainer at the gym to help you increase your fitness level, or ask a friend to run with you a few times per week. Either way, it’s much harder to ditch your plan when you know someone else is waiting for you to show up.

If you don’t know anyone you can ask to be your fitness buddy, you can try an app such as FitCliq. It helps to match you with other people looking for a workout partner.

Track Your Progress

If you’re in the middle of a weight loss plan and you’re finding it harder and harder to stay motivated as you move forward, it can be helpful to stay aware of exactly how far you’ve come.

Tracking the changes in your health and fitness can be highly motivating. Try using a program such as My Medical to track all of your health records. Then, at a glance, you can check your medical history and test results and remember how far you’ve come toward your fitness goals.

If you’re nervous about accessing your medical records through an on online app, you can protect your information by using a Virtual Private Network to encrypt your data and ensure it is safe from anyone else who might try to access the information without your consent.

Say “No” More Often

If you’re a person who is constantly volunteering or being asked to help out with things, you probably often find yourself running from one activity to the next, without any “me” time in sight.

All too often when we realize we’ve overcommitted ourselves and find time running short, our health and fitness plans are the first thing to get cut from the schedule. To find success with your weight loss plan, you need to make your fitness commitments to yourself a higher priority than other invitations that come along.

Remember, the word “no” is a complete sentence. If someone asks you to do something, you can say no without offering a lengthy explanation. Your commitment to improving your health is one of the most important commitments in your life. Honor it as such, and don’t allow requests from other people to derail your plan. You deserve to be healthy, and you deserve whatever time you’ve decided to commit to your goal.

Make It Fun

Doing the same workout over and over, similar to eating the same foods repeatedly, can get extremely boring quickly. When you don’t feel motivated to do your normal workout, it’s probably time to try something new. Check out a new workout on a popularYouTube fitness channel. Or drop in on a local fitness class such as Zumba or Pilates. Many places offer a free trial class to new students.

If you’ve fallen into a meal planning rut and you’re tired of eating the same baked chicken and steamed vegetables, consider testing out a meal delivery service. Even if you don’t decide to stick with it long-term, it can provide excellent variety in the short-term and give you some new recipes for your healthy cooking arsenal. Getting your meals delivered can also provide an extra treat that makes cooking something you can look forward to.

Life has a way of creating roadblocks for any goal you set for yourself. The question is, how committed are you to losing the weight and changing your life? If you make the commitment to real change, then no distraction will be able to slow you down.

Leave a reply in the comments to tell us your favorite method of eliminating distractions and staying focused on your goal.

Guest Author Bio: LaToya Gay is a health and fitness enthusiast.

She knows how difficult it is to stay committed to a weight loss plan from personal experience, so she hopes to help those in similar situations with her writing.

You can find more from LaToya at ehealthinformer.com

How You Can Lose Weight Eating More

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42_howtoloseweighteatingmoreAll right, public service announcement time. I am begging you to please stop starving yourselves. I hit my screen weight — which, if you’re in the maintenance world, you know that is the highest end of where you want to be — on April 22; it was 160.6. I don’t want to go over 160, so I decided I was going to reel in my eating, and I didn’t do anything crazy.

I looked at my average burn on my Fitbit, and it was between 2,200 and 2,400 calories — sometimes a little bit higher, but usually within those two numbers. I took a 500-calorie deficit, which puts me near 1,800 or 1,900 calories a day. I stayed in that vicinity, and I went from 160.6 down to 158.8, to 157.76, to 156.4.

The reason I want to share this with you is because I ate almost 3,000 calories on Mother’s Day. I really didn’t think I was going to lose weight that week. This is what’s important: You don’t have to do extremes. I have several of my clients right now adding calories back in because they had gone so extreme for so long, now they can’t lose weight. We actually have to start to increase their calories, because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

The other thing I really want to talk to you about is protein. I push almost every one of my female clients to eat more protein, and there’s a reason for that. Protein is not used by your body the same way carbohydrates and fat are. When you’re eating carbohydrates, there’s a certain amount of calories lost in the process of breaking it down, so you don’t actually get calorie for calorie what you would with a carbohydrate or fat.

I personally eat at least one gram of protein per pound of body weight. This makes a huge difference. For me, being about 158, I try to eat about 158 grams of protein. Now, if you are 200 or 300 pounds, and you’ve got a lot of weight to lose, that’s an extreme amount of protein to be eating. In that case, even just shooting for what you want your goal weight to be — say you know you want to get to 150 —would even be a better marker. I guarantee you, if you pay attention to your tracking, most of you are probably way under on your protein, especially if you’re female.

I’m coming to you because I care. I really, really, really care, and I have so many people coming to me, saying their moms are starving themselves. They’ve been on repeat yo-yo diets. They don’t understand why they’re eating so little and not losing weight. It’s because they have slowed down their metabolism, and it has adapted.

To actually fix the problem, they need to start eating more, so that way they can go ahead and later take a cut and actually get where they want to be. It’s much better to lose more than a pound per week, like I’ve been doing, on a diet of 1,800 calories than it would be if I had to eat 1,200 calories. But I couldn’t do that if my metabolism had been slowed down because I’d starved myself prior to this. I had to be eating close to my maintenance calories and taking good care of my metabolism.

Make sure you have an idea of what your daily burn is. If you don’t have a Fitbit or some kind of a device, there are tons of good calculators out there. One, Fat 2 Fit Ratio, has a really good TDEE calculator. The Scooby Workshop has another good one. It will give you an idea of where you should be. Then, look at what you’ve been doing and see what the difference is.

If you’re burning 2,500 calories a day doing your activities, depending on your body weight and height, in theory you should be able to eat around 2,000 calories and lose a pound a week. If you can’t, then this might be a good opportunity for you to start to increase your calorie consumption, so that later you can take that cut. It’s so much more rewarding to eat more and lose weight.

Look at your protein. Make sure you’re getting enough. Your body needs it.

Are You Struggling With Your Weight Loss?

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38_areyoustrugglingwithyourweightlossHave you been struggling lately with continuing on with your weight loss? Maybe you’ve plateaued or your weight loss is slowing. I’ve had two coaching clients recently in this same situation.

For one client, we decided on a week of maintenance, and her weight went up 5 pounds. The next week she lost the 5 pounds she gained during her maintenance week, and she lost an additional 1 1/4 pounds.

I had another coaching client who took a month of maintenance; she didn’t focus on losing at all. I told her this would be really awesome for her metabolism. Guess what? When she went back, she finally went from 193 down to 184 in a couple of weeks. It was crazy.

What I’m trying to tell you is a lot of times prolonged dieting really slows down your metabolism, and one of the best fixes is to stop what you’re doing. Take a break; go up to your maintenance calories, or take a couple of weeks off from dieting and then go back to it.

I’m going to share a few different podcasts with you from Dr. Lane Norton that I highly recommend you listen to (see links below this post). He talks a lot about reverse dieting. He talks about protein requirements, things that are going to help you. If you’ve been dieting for a long time, I really think you’d benefit from hearing what he has to say.

Those are some tips that might help you. In our Half Size Me community meetings, we address more questions from the community. If these are things you’re struggling with, or if you just need some general support, come join us at our next meeting. Just go to halfsizeme.com/join for more information. We’d love to see you there!

https://www.biolayne.com/media/videos/video-log/biolayne-video-log-24-reverse-dieting/

https://m.soundcloud.com/biolayne/episode-4-reverse-dieting

http://www.podcasts.com/ben_coomber_radio/episode/221-metabolic-adaptation-with-layne-norton

How Much Exercise Do You Need To Lose The Weight?

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40_howmuchexercisedoyouneedtoloseweightI recently got a question about how much exercise you should be doing for weight loss versus weight maintenance. My answer is whatever you can maintain, whatever is sustainable.

For example, if you’re doing two hours of cardio a day right now and it feels like hell, I highly recommend you don’t do that because honestly, it’s more about you staying in this for the long term than it is about losing weight in a short period of time.

I wrote a post a while back called “If You Can Lift a Fork, You Can Lose Weight.” You don’t have to exercise in order to lose weight, but it will speed up the process, and you get tons of great physical benefits from it; you can actually change your body composition if you’re doing the right types of exercises.

If you’re eating at a calorie deficit, you will lose weight, so the question becomes, what is sustainable for you? What is the amount of exercise you’re willing to do for the rest of your life? I call it your minimum. What is your minimum that you’re willing to do? Just as an example, my minimum is I want to walk at least 10,000 steps each day; I like to take several walks a day. And I do a minimum of three strength training workouts a week — that’s my minimum. Anything above that’s gravy.

If I feel like it, great; I’ll sometimes throw in two HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) workouts, but that’s about it. I don’t go out of my way to kill myself at the gym, and I’ve maintained my weight doing that. When I was losing weight, I did a little bit more cardio, but not an excessive amount. I realize even then I didn’t have to; I just enjoyed doing certain classes at the gym.

It has to be enjoyable. If you’re miserable, chances are you will beat yourself up if you don’t do the workout you had planned when you really aren’t feeling it, and then you’re going to let your eating go, and then you’re going to find yourself right back where you started. It’s better to create a very nice minimum for yourself of what exercise you’re willing to do and adhere to that. I started at 280 pounds with lifting weights.

If I had to pick one thing that I would say to prioritize more than anything else, it would be strength training. Pretty much every personal trainer I’ve talked to will agree with me that no matter what weight you’re coming in at, if you’re lifting weights, you’ll get more benefit from that long term and in your body composition than you would if you’re doing excessive cardio. Even if you’re just doing it two days a week, whatever you can do as your minimum is what I would recommend.

It’s got to be sustainable. If you’re miserable doing it, you’re not going to keep up with it, and then you’re going to say, “To hell with it; I’m not doing enough.” Then you’re going to give up on the eating, and before you know it, you’ll be right back where you started. Don’t do that to yourself, OK? Try to find what is sustainable, what you can see yourself doing for the rest of your life. I’ll walk for the rest of my life. I’ll hit the weights a couple of times a week for the rest of my life. That’s doable. Some of this other crazy stuff, not so much.

You have to find your minimum and be willing to do that. If you’re miserable, stop doing what you’re doing; it’s not necessary.

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