As a person that has lost over 30 pounds (and kept off at least a good 25 pounds for 1.5 years that I had carried around for about a decade), and is currently slimmer at age 34 than I was at 16, I can tell you a thing or two about weight loss.
If you struggle with your weight, I sincerely hope that you will be able to take something from this. You will. Keep reading.
The first thing I have realized is that after a period of true dieting, then through changing my diet and exercise regime, I created a new "set point" for my body. So although weight fluctuates throughout the month and year, and goes down when you're being "good", if you sort of let things slide a little or live life like a relatively normal person, your weight will stabilize somewhere. The weight you say your body seems to like to be. My set point for many years was 160 pounds. I hit that weight at age 23, and although I would lose and then gain back 5, 10, or 15 pounds periodically, (mostly through calorie restriction - I have always exercised) I would just seem to go back to that weight. Then, as I said, I went on a serious diet, during which I did not eat processed foods for around five or six months. I was largely a raw food vegan during that period, but I did change it up a bit. I didn't exercise a great deal more than I had been exercising before, but the exercise was really regular. Anyway, I've gone up and down a bit in past year, but the main thing is that I have a new set point now, and it is 24 pounds less than it was: 136 pounds. (I am 3 pounds below that right now.) 136 is the weight I was at when I stopped my no-processed foods diet, and I have returned to it several times. Unfortunately, it is still too high for my preference. (My lowest weight is 127.)
I had thought I would be really happy at about 130, and I am certainly comfortable, but I believe in my heart of hearts that I am carrying around about 7-10 extra pounds. I just feel that intuitively. My BMI is currently 21.5, which is well below the maximum for health (25, in case you didn't know), and people tell me how slim I am all the time, but I have decided that with my frame being as small as it is, and the fact that I can still grab fat off my abdomen and hips, I would feel more comfortable at a BMI of about 20.
When I got back to Bikram about six months ago, my body immediately shed pounds, which I have since gained back (more on that in a minute). At that time, I hadn't been eating any grain for several months, (as an experiment, as the last time I cut out grain I was eating vegan and I found I had to rely heavily on fruit. Now I am not vegetarian, so I decided to give some version of 'paleo' a shot.) The problem with eating that way for me was that I had hardly any energy. I am usually really big on fruit and I wasn't eating a lot of it for possibly the first time ever; consequently, it was a period of low activity for me. Sometimes the most minimal of activity really wore me out. It was kind of ridiculous. Anyway, when I went back to Bikram (and actually what inspired me to get back was that my ultra low-carb diet had me feeling shitty), I began carbing out like mad. Pizza, pasta, rice. Everything. Yet I continued to lose weight. I think the shock of Bikram yoga after a few months of relative inactivity was enough to set it off. I was so happy! I thought I could just eat whatever I wanted from then on.
Boy was that a dumb thing to think!
Christmas season rolled around right after that, and I began to gain. I gained and lost five pounds a few times and struggled to keep my weight down, even as I practiced Bikram yoga about four times a week or more. I was finding it really hard to stop myself from overeating, and had become addicted to grains.
Finally, after distancing myself from my scale for a while and just trying to eat normally, I had to admit to myself that my clothes were just not fitting right. I stepped on the scale exactly two weeks ago: to my horror, I was up 9 pounds from my lowest weight! YIKES! Yes, you read that right: after losing five pounds initially, I managed to gain them back plus 4 more pounds: those are pounds that I had managed to keep off for the better part of a year before even starting Bikram yoga again! Not only that, but Bikram yoga is NOT my only form of exercise. I also walk, jog, swim, work out with free weights, do HIIT routines, pilates, and various other routines. Quite regularly!
So if you are one of the mistaken people that thinks Bikram yoga or any other exercise alone (without diet modification) is always going to be enough to lose weight, you are wrong! I have done a lot of internet research on this topic and I have come to the following conclusions:
1. Men are more likely to be able to rely on exercise for weight-loss than women, especially young men. Weight loss success stories from doing Bikram yoga often come from men. I don't know why this is. But peer reviewed studies have confirmed this, and I believe it. When I started doing this yoga 7 years ago, my body changed for the better and of course I became more muscular, but I did not lose fat. That is because my eating went out of control. I made up for all the calories burned during class by overeating. This is a very real phenomenon. That brings me to my next point:
2. Please remember how much easier it is to eat 300 calories than to burn it. A McDonald's cheeseburger, so small you can devour it in about 10 seconds, is 300 calories. Most hamburgers are double or triple the calories of that. It is so easy and quick to eat 300 calories. Meanwhile, many forms of moderate exercise, like the elliptical or biking, only burn about 300 calories in 30 minutes! Not properly understanding what I am saying here (and I sure didn't use to!) is the # 1 reason people are confused about how to incorporate exercise into their weight-loss regime. Exercise can and does help. Absolutely. But unless you're really overweight or a young male, what you eat and how much you eat is far, far more important.
3. When used correctly, exercise will aid in weightloss, but you have to change it up. I know that a calorie in is a calorie in and the same goes for calories out. Weight loss is a numbers game. However, things get tricky when your body gets used to an exercise. It becomes more efficient and starts burning less calories. OR makes better use of the calories it has already taken in. I am not sure of the exact process, but take me, for instance: after six months of steady practice, it's as though my body no longer considers Bikram yoga to be a calorie burning activity anymore. I don't eat any more than I would if I were just biking slowly about 40 minutes a day and maybe doing a 20 minute pilates routine on top of that some days, yet I have weighed LESS when that was my lifestyle than I do now. I had to cut out all processed food and lower my daily caloric intake to the point that I felt hunger to lose 3 pounds in the past two weeks, but I know that if I stopped doing Bikram altogether, and replaced it with say a 45 minute jog per day (which burns less calories, being half the time) interspersed with interval training, I would rev up my weight loss. So frustrating! But true.
4. You mess your body up when you stay overweight for a significant amount of time, and this affects what kinds of food are going to keep you slim and what kinds are going to make you gain. My cousin is a dancer and she has been super-slim all her life. She has had two kids and although her body has probably changed in ways only she and her husband know about, you can't tell at all. She appears to have the body of a teenager. Anyway, she wouldn't dream of doing "low carb" or cutting out a particular food or food group. She eats whatever she wants. The key is, she has never wanted to eat a whole pizza. She has always kept her portions small and reasonable. That's why she can eat grain no problem. For a person that has struggled with weight issues, they have probably overdone it with the processed carbs about a million or trillion times, and now they have some kind of bad romance with them. So, going low-carb or cutting out a food or food group entirely could potentially have amazing results. It could be the key to success. Your history with food makes a big difference to what will work for you, so don't necessarily listen to what a naturally slim person advises you. In a sense, they are clueless. If you've been overweight, chances are you have an addictive relationship with food. Slim people often don't. So they don't know how effective cutting out a food group entirely can be, and they will categorize it out of hand as fad dieting.
I will state this for once and for all: If it weren't for so-called "fad dieting", NEVER would I have had success with weight loss at this level. Calorie reduction was not sustainable for me.
Well, there's my two cents in a nutshell.
Anyway, in my opinion, every single person on this planet owes it to his or her self to be the weight they actually, truly want to be, and to not go for gold is to cheat yourself - to waste your life. I feel like I wasted my entire twenties at a weight I didn't care for at all (BMI 23.4 - 25.8, depending), and although I believe in cosmic order of things, and that I went through that for a reason, I do feel that it is a terrible shame that I didn't do something about it sooner. I will never, ever go back to a weight I am not comfortable with.
Conversely, I am not overly polite or complimentary or a teller of white lies when it comes to people talking about wanting to lose weight. You will rarely hear me utter the words, "you don't need to lose weight". No way. Instead of that nonsensical, unhelpful, culturally enforced politeness, I tell them straight up what I believe their best plan of action would be, based on what I know about them.
To be at a weight you're unhappy with is to suffer great emotional pain. A friend's reassurance that you look OK when you know you don't is cold, cold comfort. It's a bullshit way to deal with one another and I don't believe in it.
Now I am slimmer than I was as a teenager, and I am in my mid 30s. Many (most) of the girls that were always much skinnier than I was, are now the same size as me or bigger. Who am I kidding: it's freaking great! Did you really think it wouldn't be? Despite what I said at the beginning, about still wanting to lose another 10 pounds or so, I am already very happy with the body I have now. It is truly an amazing experience to lose the weight and I would do anything I could to help a person out in that department. It's a major part of the reason I want to become a yoga teacher. Why bother pretending our body size is not as important of an issue for all of us as it actually is?! it's not superficial; it's the reason out species exists.
I would give up my university degree before I took on those extra pounds again, and I do not say that lightly.
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