Victory! Analytical Dieting Success

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On June 28, 2012 I reached my weight loss goal! Meeting this goal meant I had dropped by body weight by 12% and reduce my body fat by 29%. And I’m still this weight today almost a month later. Details on how I did this can be found in in my other article Analytical Dieting but I just want to highlight some final numbers as it’s always about what we can measure. Here is what my weight loss looked like over these 126 days:

As you can see a lot of ups and downs but there is a long term trend, just like the stock market. In fact losting weight is a lot like personal finance and it’s easy to look at the short term but you have to stay focused on the long term. Here are some other highlights of my change in those 126 days:

As far as weight, I am only 89.9% of the man I used to be! Woot! I went from 187 pounds down to 166.2 pounds which is a change of 20.8 pounds. Now, ideal weight is a hard measurement to make and it will be different for everyone. If you want to find your own ideal weight forget the internet and do what I did to find mine which is to work with your general practice physician to determined where you should be. For me, we settled on between 162 and 167 as the ideal for my body type, age, and activity level. One other measurement of interest is that I did drop 3 inches off my waist which means nothing I own fits me anymore.

Moving on to percent body fat, my starting body fat was 22.4% and after this quest it now sits at 16.0%. This means of the 20.8 pounds I lost, 15.3 pounds, or 73.5% of my weight loss, was fat. Unfortunately this is the one goal I didn’t meet as I was targeting a body fat percentage of  less than 14%. The reason why I didn’t lose more fat is simple, I didn’t exercise at all during these 126 days. So now I’ll be adding some weight lifting (the best way to convert fat in to other tissue) and getting that in line.

The last key measure was my Body Mass Index (BMI). Starting out I was at a BMI of 25 which put me ever-so-slightly in the overweight category. By the time this experiment was done my new BMI was 22.5 which is solidly in the normal range.

One last thing. I know I can get on a rant sometimes but you can do this too and the secret is simple! During this time I did read a lot on healthy living and on weight loss and it comes down to two major factors in life that shape our bodies. A lack of understanding of what even constitutes good diet and exercise, common sense is so wrong, challenge it! Also having the psychological control to resisting the urge to do things we know are bad, it does take willpower and strength. If you want to know more, I found a great video during this time that sums this all up nicely. If you can spend 60 minutes do yourself a favor and check it out and watch all 6 ten minute segments.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSm1dWjMGeM]

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