How To Lose Weight With Little Sacrifice and Without Going to the Gym – Week #0

Four days ago I canceled my Gymnasium subscription, as I’ve said in my last post: Gym Out, Nature In.

In this post I will present to you my diet plan to lose weight consistently, with little sacrifice and without the need to go to the Gym.

I will write a series of follow-up posts every week to show you my results as I follow this plan.

I’m going to prove to you, and myself, something I have felt for a long time and that works but I never implemented. I realize now I never did it properly because I lacked the focus, the discipline and the organization to make it work.

I’ll prove that it’s possible to lose weight consistently, definitely and moderately quick without the need to go to the Gym and without sacrificing, too much, the food you like to eat and without making  dramatic changes to your lifestyle.

The 4 Pillars Diet

My diet plan has only 4 rules, or pillars:

• Reduce stress
• Eat more vegetables and fruits
• Reduce ingestion of carbohydrates (especially at night)
• Exercise for 1 hour 4 days a week (only walking and small periods of running).

1. Reducing stress is mandatory. It’s more than proven that stress and weight gain ride side by side. When you live your life with high levels of stress you tend to gain weight. And you gain weight from stress due to two reasons.

The first reason is biological. Stress releases cortisol (also known as the stress hormone) to your blood stream. In short doses this is alright, and normal. However, high and continuous levels of stress make the body release more and more cortisol, to a point that the body is no longer able to respond correctly. It is proven that there is a link between high cortisol levels in the blood stream and the storage of body fat, particularly abdominal body fat.

The second reason why you gain weight from stress is because stress leads you to food disorders. This is one of the main reasons why stressed people tend to gain weight. Stress leads to depression and to anxiety. Depression and anxiety leads to you eating more and inappropriately.

To help you reduce stress I suggest you have a look at the following articles:

• Reduce Stress at Work and Life with Organization
• One Secret to Reduce your Worry, Stress and Anxiety Levels and Increase Self-Esteem

2. Eating more vegetables and fruits is key. The objective behind this goal is two-fold. First of all, by ingesting more vegetables and fruits you are consuming more vitamins, minerals and fiber which will help your body function better. The other reason why vegetables and fruits are key on reducing weight is because they are low in calories and fat.

So, by ingesting more vegetables and fruits you decrease your calories and fat intake which will make you lose weight naturally. You don’t need to turn vegetarian, just increase your vegetables and fruits consumption. Eating more fruits has an additional purpose: most fruits are very sweet which can help you satisfy your craving for sweets so that you don’t need to eat candy or ice cream, which are full of calories. So, when you feel like having a bite and don’t know what to eat, eat a piece of fruit.

3. Reducing the ingestion of carbohydrates is extremely important. Carbohydrates are the fuel of our body. We need to eat carbohydrates-rich foods to have energy, to be able to do things and to think. The key is to eat them in moderation, otherwise what will happen is that, if you eat too much carbs, the excess will not be burned and will be stored as fat. It’s that simple.

The short story is this: Carbohydrates are all rapidly digested and quickly converted into blood glucose.  A short time after a carb-rich meal, the glucose in your bloodstream rises rapidly, and your pancreas produces a large amount of insulin to deal with the excess glucose. Insulin is the hormone responsible for body fat storage.

So, to lose weight it is vital that you reduce carbs, and I mean reduce not eliminate.

The most common foods that are carbs-rich are: white bread, cereals, rice, oatmeal, pasta, potatoes, chocolates, candy, cookies, sugar, cakes, and white beans. Some fruits like apricot, pineapple, banana and oranges also contain many carbohydrates.

As a personal remark try to reduce, or in this case eliminate completely, the ingestion of carbohydrate foods at dinner. And after 87pm, try not to eat anything besides a piece of fruit. After this hour your body will not burn much energy and so every carbohydrate you take will be turned into fat.

4. One hour exercise 4 days a week is essential. And finally we reach the 4th pillar of my diet plan: exercise. You will find a huge amount of different advices regarding how much and how often you should exercise but in one thing at least everybody seems to agree on: You absolutely need to exercise to lose weight consistently and in a healthy way.

As the title of this post suggests, the idea is for exercise to be simple so that it does not impact your life too much.

Experts tend not to agree on how much time we should exercise. Some defend that we should exercise every day at least 30min with a simple walk. Others state, that to be effective on losing weight, one needs to exercise at least 1 hour every day. But who can exercise every day? I suggest something in between: 1 hour exercise 4 days a week. I consider this to be the sweet-spot of exercise intensity. It’s not too much as to impact your lifestyle and is not too little to be ineffective.

I propose that you do your exercise on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Why these particular days? Because in the weekends it’s much easier to find time to exercise, and you’re left with only 2 days left to exercise in your working days, which is not that hard to implement.

So, but what exercises should I do?

The answer is: fast paced walking and two sets of 5 minutes of fast running. This is the exercise plan I’m doing and that I also propose to you. When you’re overweight there is almost no point in doing push-ups or abdominal exercises because you carry a huge amount of fat in your belly that you need to eliminate first. It is proven that the best way to eliminate fat, and especially belly fat, is by doing cardio exercises, which means walking, running or biking.

You don’t need to go to the gym to do cardio exercises. Start with a quick walk. Then do a quick running of approximately 5 minutes. You don’t need to run as fast as you can but run intensely for those 5 minutes. After those 5 minutes, return to a fast-paced walk. After some time, do another 5 minute intense running period and when you’re finished walk normally for the remaining time.

As I’ve said before you don’t need to go to a Gym to do these exercises. If you live near a park, sports complex, garden, open country or any other place where you can be in touch with nature that would be perfect. And you don’t lose time in the transfers also. The exercise time starts counting the minute you leave home and the minute you return home.

But if you don’t have any of these open-air areas around, you should still be able to do these exercises very easily around your neighborhood. It’s overkill to the go to gym to do these exercises, in my opinion. But, if you don’t have an alternative then the gym may be the way to go. Alternatively, you can buy a treadmill to exercise at home, but … it’s not as effective as working out outdoors, believe me.

Things I will Not Include in this Diet

Next are some common strategies people follow to lose weight. I will not follow these rules. I repeat, I will NOT follow them in my diet because they are less simple to implement and require more sacrifices.

• Drink lots of water
• Eat every 2 to 3 hours
• Don’t skip meals
• Drink Green Tea
• Eat small portions
• Forbidden foods
• Forbidden drinks
• Don’t mix carbs with proteins
• Do push-ups
• Do abdominal exercises
• Do weight lifting
• Run for 2 miles everyday
• Become a vegetarian
• Don’t eat out
• Eat slowly
• Join a Gymnasium
• etc, etc

With time and, if the initial plan does not produce satisfactory results, I may fine-tune the plan and include some of these strategies. But the central idea is that you don’t need to do dramatic changes to your life style to lose weight. You only need to obey the 4 Pillars to get satisfactory results: reduce stress, eat more vegetables and fruits, reduce carbohydrate intake and exercise for 1 hour 4 days a week.

Where am I today?

At week 0 this is where I am now:

• Weight: 205 pounds (~93Kg)
• Fat mass: 29.1%
• Waist diameter: 111 cm

My objective is to reach 175 pounds.

Stay tuned for my next week’s point of the situation. Join me; it would be twice the fun

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