Getting Started

Good morning – after discussing a little bit with Jo Anna last night, we decided it might be beneficial for me to pass along some tips I have learned.

First off, there was a great response last night at our initial meeting – thank you for participating in this weight loss challenge. What we are doing is not easy – but nothing worth having is easy!
I am not a weight loss expert, but the people I am working with on Augusta’s Biggest Loser are experts, and I am passing along what I have learned from them to you. I wanted to put down, in written form, some of the things I covered in the meeting last night so that you will have them. There were four basic tips I gave last night to help you get started:

1) You are going to have to get some exercise. I suggested walking, and mentioned that I walk 5 miles a day outside of anything I do at the gym. Not all of you can do that – you may have to start with a much smaller goal, and work your way up. People who only diet are more successful at weight loss than people who only exercise, but the people who do both are the most successful. Go to Wal-Mart, pick up a pedometer (as little as $5), and wear it all the time. The steps you take during the normal course of your day count towards that 10,000 steps (5 miles). Whatever you have leftover at the end of the day to walk, go find a comfortable place for you to walk and finish it out.

2) You are going to have to drink water. Water is what the liver uses to process fat and flush it out of the body. How much water? Take your weight, divide it by 2, and that is approximately how many ounces of water you need to drink in a day. If you weigh 200 pounds, you should be drinking approximately 100 ounces of water. If you weight 300, you should drink around 150 ounces of water. Don’t drink it all at once – spread it out throughout the day. I usually do a quart at a time, and I allot myself 2 hours to drink that quart. And don’t drink a lot of it right before you weigh in. I stop drinking about 6 hours before weigh-in time. Your body will get rid of any water it doesn’t need, so don’t worry about over-doing it.

3) You are going to have to reduce your carbohydrates. White bread, biscuits, pasta – any food which has as its first ingredient “enriched flour” – needs to go, as well as anything that has sugar, corn syrup, fructose, or any form of sugar. Be very careful with foods that advertise themselves as fat free or sugar free, because when they take out fat, they usually make up for it with sugar. When they take out sugar, they make up for it with fat. Sometimes they make up for both with sodium, which leads me to my fourth point.

4) NO SALT! Don’t cook with it, don’t add it to your food, and don’t eat anything that you can’t verify the sodium content in. Sodium (salt) will make you retain water, increase your weight, drive your blood pressure up, and make you feel bad. A person should only get about 1200 milligrams of sodium in a day – a Big Mac and a large order of fries is about 1340 milligrams of sodium.

Tomorrow I will send out a more comprehensive list of things that you should not eat, or that you should eat sparingly, if you really want to lose weight.
Be healthy!