The Most Important Thing: Education

I feel like in order to run this blog the way I want, I need to get my philosophy about losing weight written here early. The first one, the one about mindset, and this post are what I'm going to call 'editorials' about weight loss. The last post about the smoothie represents the tone that I see this blog moving towards after I finish with these.

When I say education I don't mean taking a formal class or joining a group like weight watchers (although those can help). What I mean is learning about food, what it does, and how it interacts with your body. As I said in my first post, I am not a nutritionist and I don't know the subject very deeply, but I have learned the basics.

Diets that claim that you can lose weight by not eating carbs, only eating one kind of food, or anything else crazy DO work - but are not healthy or sustainable. If you don't eat enough of the one of the basic types of food (carbs, protein, and fat) your body will not be able to function properly and you will find yourself feeling tired, hungry and miserable. This is why people quit, and even if they keep going they are harming their bodies in the process and gain it all back later.

Of course you can lose weight by cutting carbs or fat, but that weight loss is not from the lack of those substances but from the lack of calories. Technically, you can lose weight by eating chocolate all day long as long as you eat fewer calories then you burn. The problem with doing that is twofold: 1. You will be extremely hungry and 2. Your body will not be getting the nutrients it needs to run well and you will probably lose more muscle than fat.

The secret to weight loss is calories in, calories out. The secret to healthy sustainable weight loss is the right calories in, calories out. Nutritionists differ on what the right proportion of carbs, protein, and fat is, but most agree your calories should be made of about 50% carbs and 25% of both protein and fat. Going too low on those percentages can be dangerous, as I personally found out and will post about later along with a more detailed explanation about how each works with your body.

Now to the education part. Losing weight in a healthy way involves a lot of reading. Looking up the calories in food, reading about nutrients and visiting forums in order find answers to questions are all just part of the research that goes with learning about food and exercise. In my opinion the most important thing to learn is the amount of calories in the foods you eat. At first, it is very difficult to remember the calorie counts, but after a while you can easily recall the stats of the foods you eat the most. Additionally, you also become good at guessing how many calories are in the foods that you don't know, enabling you to make the right choices when you can't look it up.

Websites like calorie-count.com (which is what I used and will write a separate post about later) offer nutritional information on thousands of different foods. These sites make it much easier to keep track of what you are eating and remember the stats for you to easily look up.

In short, healthy weight loss means learning what is in your food and how it interacts with your body. The best part, unlike systems that send you food and do the math for you, once you finish losing weight that knowledge stays with you and makes it easy to maintain your new lifestyle. Doing it the 'easy' way and buying some program that says it's best point is that you don't have to think just hurts you in the end since you didn't learn anything about real food.

I think that education is so important that when people ask me what I did to lose weight and how I've managed to keep it off I always simply say I that I learned.