Really quickly, people ask me how I get my results? I tell them because I closed my mouth to bad food and to bad excuses for eating bad food. The most important muscle to exercise is your mouth. It's 70% diet and 30% exercise. A large whopper meal at Burger King gives you half your salt for the day and all of your calories, for the whole day! It takes me 1.5 hours of hard exercise to burn that much food calories and it takes me 10 minutes to eat it. That makes your mouth 6 times more powerful than the rest of your muscles combined. Only you can fix that. I recommend juicing as a meal replacement one or two meals a day. You have to gradually retrain your mind, tastebuds, shopping lists, and family to your new food program but until you fix your mouth you can run on the treadmill all day and night and not get the results you want.
The older you get the harder it gets too. No changing that, but you must change your food and your mouth before the rest of you can follow.
My rules currently:
- No fast food, it's really that awful for you.
- Way less meat. If gorillas can have big muscles eating plants, so can I. Salty meat makes you want sweet treats, zesty gravy, and comfy carbs. Just avoid meat to avoid those other correlated food items.
- Avoid all processed foods. If it comes in a can, powdered, plastic, or cardboard box, you should probably avoid eating it. Multigrain bar? shhh...please.
- Juice, smoothie, or other freshly prepared foods are the way to go. Start figuring out how to make good food so that when you're done with the strict weight loss diet you have a safe place to return to for eating sanely.
- Avoid eating out to avoid temptation and if you do, then challenge yourself to enjoy the healthy option. It's a lot like smoking, don't think you can go back to just smoking socially or on the weekends, that just leads you back to full packs and sad excuses. You aren't a monk, so you can partake of 'sinful' food, you just need to make sure that you've got a plan to recover from your calorie imbalance.
So find a way to burn 500 calories on average a day. You're responsible for tracking that. Stop eating out, eating too much, eating processed, and eating often. It's OK to feel hungry, people fast all of the time intentionally and not. They make it through just fine and you won't panic as if your car was going to run out of gas.
When you stop making excuses, you'll start making progress. The scales tell important tales.