Losing Weight

Losing weight isn't easy - especially not when you're pushing 30.

Back when I was twenty, I ballooned up to 210lbs after getting ill and breaking up with a girlfriend at university. In three months, thanks to a diet of nothing but oven-baked fish and chips and a regimen of BB gun battles throughout the house - I shed the fat like Jennifer Lopez sheds husbands.

But not at the moment. Now I'm pushing 190lbs and the weight sticks on.

If I'm serious about losing 20lbs and getting down to my ideal weight, I need to think seriously about how I'm going to do it. The fact is - my lifestyle at the moment isn't right.

But before I think of any plans to improve it, why don't I examine my current lifestyle and see where the problem lies?

The Weight Gain Equation

Weight gain and loss is not nearly as complicated as it sounds. It's actually very simple. The food you eat is converted into energy (calories.) Your body burns a certain number of calories per day. If you burn fewer calories than you ingest, your body stores the leftovers as fat - that harks back to the caveman days when you might go hungry later, so your body needed fat reserves 'just in case.'

Conversely, if you burn more calories than you ingest, your body is required to tuck into that fat storage for energy - and you lose weight.

It's really as simple as that. All that stuff about GI diets and Atkins diets and all of that malarky is bollocks, really. At the end of the day, you just need to balance intake and expenditure.

So let's take a look at my life.

Simon Scarlet's Day

I live a pretty sedentary life at the moment.

I wake up at about 7am. I drive to work and sit at a desk all day, typing away. I get home at about 7:30pm, flop down on the sofa and watch TV or read a book. At 11pm, I schlep off to bed and sleep.

Basically, I get no exercise.

Using a Calorie Calculator from Steven's Creek Software, I'm able to calculate my daily calorie expenditure as about 2,969 calories per day. That's 2,047 burnt 'keeping the furnace going' and keeping me breathing and my heart beating. The other 921 is burnt during my active schedule of sitting on my arse typing or reading.

When I then calculate the amount of food I eat, I can see that my daily calorie consumption is about 3,232. So I'm clearly eating more than I'm burning - but not by much.

It's universally acknowledged that it takes 3,500 calories to make (or lose) one pound of fat. So At my current rate, eating about 250 calories every day that don't get burnt, I'm gaining a pound of fat every two weeks. By those calculations, I'll be almost two stone heavier by the time my 31st birthday wheels around.

Something needs to be done!

The New Diet

So it's fairly simple, what happens next.

In order to reverse my recent weight gain, I need to flip the balance of my calorie intake and eat less than I burn. If I can eat 500 calories less than I burn every day, I should end up losing a pound of fat per week. By that reckoning, I'll be trimmed down to 'Saintly' proportions by the time the summer swings around.

But it's not as easy as that, is it?

Because in addition to trimming 500 calories from my diet, I've got to balance out the 250 calories I'm scoffing OVER my daily food intake. So really, I'll be trimming 750 calories a day. Basically, a quarter of what I normally eat.

So what can I trim?

The evening beer? The little squares of cheese I snack on?

It'll be tough. Not least of which because there's not a lot else to do apart from eat when I slump home, exhausted, from work.