It has been a while since my last entry. Over the past month, I've been studying for IT exams, and regrettably that has taken up a great deal of time. Now, this has passed, so I look forward to continuing my weight loss blog, which I hope has helped at least some people who have read it. If all goes well, next week I should resume my weekly entries on topics and that I found to help me with my weight loss. Stay tuned...

Sorry for the length between my last post, I have been on vacation for the past week. I not only got away from my routine, I even took a break from fitness. What this means is I did not go to a gym, though I stayed active on my vacation. I also took the time to indulge myself in my favorite foods. Again, I did not binge out, but I did enjoy myself. Many people proffering weight loss advice will tell you what I did was wrong and counterproductive to weight loss. They insist you must give up all junk food forever and ever if you ever want to reach and maintain a healthy weight. And they tell you that you must abstain is you want to reach an active old age. However, I tell you otherwise. Realistically, this is not a practical option simply because the vast majority of us enjoy the taste of our favorite junk foods. By trying to deprive ourselves, pretending we want to give up totally these foods. Well, sooner or later, just about everyone caves in and ends up binging. Instead of totally denying myself, my likes, I've decided to strike a balance, a balance between eating clean for most of the week, maintaining a vigorous regimen of exercise, and 1 or 2 days a week partaking in my favorite culinary delights that are not conducive to weight loss. I have successfully maintained an 11 to 12% body fat composition – still quite a lean body and considered athletic – following this plan. Even when I was losing weight, I had one day where I enjoyed myself, and I still lost weight those weeks – even during the time I was losing 6 pounds a week. I feel part of it was that taking in the extra calories, after days of clean eating, jolted my metabolism back up. So, an occasional cheat not only does not negatively affect your weight loss, it can even boost it. It was only when I decided I wanted to become more lean, did I discover it was necessary to totally abstain, in which I did get down to 8.9%. Unless you have the desire to become super-lean, you can still occasionally enjoy your favorite foods and still lose the weight. It is sad that I need to point this out, but some people will read this post as a license to binge and overeat. It is not of course and naturally I am speaking about moderation and self control. It takes knowing when to stop. If this is a weakness of yours, then work on improving that aspect; it not only make losing weight easier, it also will make life in general easier.

For more info on my ways to lose weight and weight loss plans, please visit my site.

Many people refer to their BMI when trying to lose weight. I, instead, prefer to know my BMR, or Basal Metabolic Rate. The basal metabolic rate is simply the amount of calories your cells need to stay alive. The BMR is exclusive of physical activities as well as base functions. BMR itself is not the whole picture then. What you do after you calculate your (you can find your BMR at this site: http://home.fuse.net/clymer/bmi/) BMR is multiply it by a factor below:

Sedentary = BMR X 1.2 (little or no exercise, desk job)
Lightly active = BMR X 1.375 (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/wk)
Moderately active = BMR X 1.55 (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/wk)
Very active = BMR X 1.725 (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days/wk)
Extra active = BMR X 1.9 (hard daily exercise/sports & physical job or 2X day training)

Pick which factor best describes your activity level and you have your Total Daily Energy Expenditure, or TDEE. Then you can take your TDEE and, if you have been journaling your meals as I described in my last post, you can check if you are in a calorie deficit or you need to change.
Your BMR is not a static value, but changes as your weight changes. Changes in muscle mass produce greater changes in BMR, but even change in fat will affect your BMR. Using my example, when I was at 240, my BMR was calculated at 2193 calories per day, but after I hit 160, my BMR dropped to 1686 calories a day a different of 507 calories per day! That equates to a pound per week! If you wonder why you hit a weight loss plateau, knowing your BMR could shed some light. A final note, the BMR and TDEE are just rough estimates, not precise calculations, and in my experience that was all they needed to be. The most reliable indicator will be observing your own results.
Tracking my BMR was one of the ways to lose weight that helped me, please visit my website for other ways to lose weight and weight lost plans. Stay tuned for more.

It is a well-known fact about weight loss that ultimately to lose weight you must expend a greater amount of calories than what you consume. So how do you know how many calories you consume in a day? Do you guess? Try to track it all in your head? I decided to journal my eating. It was a good thing I did, because I was trying to keep track of my meals in my head before. However, once I started journaling, it became immediately clear I was doing a poor job of watching my eating. I thought I kept my eating under 2000 calories per day, but instantly I saw that I was eating over 2500 calories, some days it was as high as 3000. The good news is that once I saw exactly what I was eating, I knew exactly what to change, what I could cut out. Furthermore, because my zeal to record everything, the journal held me accountable. I simply could not cheat on that snack because I knew I would have to record it and see my weakness. This went far in maintaining my discipline in eating.
There are several ways you can go about tracking your meals. The first is the pen-and-paper method, not recommended. I used Excel and created my own spreadsheet. I not only tracked my calories; I also use this sheet to track the amount of protein I ate. Eventually I began recording the calories I burned from my workouts, and recorded my weekly weigh in and body measurements, so this sheet was like a recording of my progress. The third and now most common way is to use free online tools. The most common ones are http://www.my-calorie-counter.com/ and http://www.fitday.com/. Both are free to register and use, tracks calories, macronutrients, and workouts. Tracking my eating was one of the ways to lose weight that I use and was an integral part of my weight loss plan, visit my website to learn others.

If you want to give a boost to your weight loss, you must watch your thyroid. I did not, for years I failed to pay attention to what I was doing to it. When I was doing my research, I discovered I was abusing my thyroid to no end. Of all the changes I made, perhaps the ones with the greatest impact were the changes I made for the benefit of my thyroid. Your thyroid gland controls your cellular metabolism for your body. Have a thyroid with low output, your daily caloric output is low, you gain weight easy, have a high output, you gain wait slowly, and a very high output can make it so you cannot gain weight to save your life. Scientists liken it to the body's thermostat, but gas-pedal seems to be a more accurate analogy.

The first discovery I came across was the connection of aspartame to thyroid function, or I should say non-function. Yes, the artificial sweetener aspartame has been shown to negatively impact the production of the T3 hormone, the hormone that sets cellular metabolism. Aspartame is found in virtually all diet sodas and in many diet foods. This sucked for me, because I considered diet sodas like my last vice I could have, and now I found out drinking them was compromising my weight loss efforts. Nonetheless, I decided to experiment on myself. Drinking Splenda-based sodas and increasing water consumption, I eliminated aspartame from my diet. I credit many things for my success, but in reality, it was almost three days after I stopped taking aspartame that I began to drop serious poundage.

Of course aspartame was not the only problem with my thyroid. Your thyroid needs two primary components to produce the T3 hormone; iodine and tyrosine. Iodine is an element, poisonous in its pure form, obtained mostly from seafood. I am not a big seafood fan, actually I hate seafood. Neither do I use salt, so I was not getting any iodized salt. Among my research, I also found out that old school body builders used kelp tablets, thyroid extract, and olive leaves to manage fat while they ate to gain muscle mass. Kelp supplies the iodine, while the thyroid extract and olive leaves are reported to boost thyroid output. So I added those supplements to my diet, and tyrosine as well (at the same time I quit aspartame). Tyrosine is an amino acid, chicken breasts contain huge amounts of tyrosine. Doctors in conventional medicine seem mock anything that does not pad the coffers of pharmaceutical companies, so most will tell you these substances will have no effect at all. My personal experience proves this is wrong. Using well known formulas for metabolism (I will elaborate on those later) along with calculations calories burnt from my training, the absolute best case, if I were 100% faithful to my plan - and I was not - I could only lose 3 pounds per week. If I cheated, I would only at best lose 2 pounds per week. I cheated on my plan and I still lost 6, and sustained that loss for six weeks. I find it impossible that I could lose that much per week, feel great, without those supplements having some contribution.

Other tidbits of info I came about thyroid function, but have not verified on myself. Supposedly fruits such as peaches and apricots can affect thyroid function, so too can broccoli. I ate broccoli in moderation, but not a big fan of those fruits. As with anything else, moderation is probably key. Stay tuned as I put together more of my research and share my success with the world.

Taking care of my thyroid was one way I lost my weight, for other ways to lose weight and other weight loss plans, please visit my website.