I am about to share every tool I use and every trick I know  and how to get your mindset ready to lose the weight even when your stomach is rebelling.

There is a certain point you reach being overweight that you really don't care anymore.  Honestly.  Yeah, you're sad for the days when you looked just as good as the chicks on the fitness mag covers, but you just can't give a rat's arse.  It's like the Give-A-Crap meter goes down for every pound you gain.  After awhile, it seems like such a big obstacle that you really don't even want to bother.  You don't have the energy to do it anyway.

However, something almost always happens that makes us realize how far we've let ourselves go.  For me, it was several things...but there was a moment when I was lying in bed watching TV and I looked down at my stomach.  It was sticking up so far, it looked like I was still pregnant.  When I rolled on my side, I noticed how my stomach slid off my body like someone had strapped a weight inside it.  It was the most disgusting thing I had ever seen...and it was on my body.

The next day, I gorged on McDonald's to make myself feel better...and then I had some kind of mid-gorge epiphany. I raced to the computer and looked up the calories in a typical McDonald's meal.  The amount of calories in your standard large fry, cheeseburger, and large soda combination is about what my daily caloric intake should be...DAILY.  That means I could eat McDonald's every day, sure...if I ONLY ate that one McDonald's meal and didn't have a heart, arteries, organs, you know...all that important stuff to worry about?  Heck, if I did a lot of exercise, I could be a skinny walking heart attack, but right then, I KNEW:  I had to change my eating habits.

Remember those panic attacks I had been having?  GONE.  I haven't had one.  I have felt amazing since I started working out.  There are no words to describe how I feel, but I do want EVERYONE to feel this way.

If you have made the commitment.  If you've had your epiphany of knowing you have to change, then take note.  Here are the ultimate steps for losing the weight:

Step One - Open a Fitday Account

I immediately opened www.fitday.com and re-opened my old account there and started tracking everything I ate.  I started tracking every calorie I burned.  I researched the hell out of everything I ate.  I challenge anyone to open a Fitday account (I know I've been talking it up like crazy, but it's been a lifesaver) and track every calorie you eat for a few days to a week.  It will scare the living hell out of you.  Not only that, it creates graphs and pie charts and cool thingies.  That is what will kick your butt into motivation mode.  When you see a graph illustrating that you are just barely burning more calories than you are eating, it's all the motivation you need to make a change.  It's also FREE.  Because Fitday can be complicated, at first, I will offer you a small tutorial.

Tracking Foods

The default page for Fitday (after you have registered) will be your 'Foods' page.  This is where you enter in everything you eat.  EVERYTHING.  Even that guilty spoon of peanut butter you ate straight from the jar.  There is one blank search field and three drop down menus.  Whenever possible, for the most accurate readings, if you are eating a packaged food, keep the package and enter the nutritional information into Fitday.  I know, this is tedious and it requires data entry but after a few weeks, you'd be surprised how much of the same foods you eat every single day.  Fitday records those foods and then you can simply select them from the drop-down menu.  Say you are eating a pack of crackers, you would open the drop-down menu that says 'Enter New Custom Food' - When you click 'Go' it takes you to a blank nutritional label which you fill out from the information on the pack.  The next time you eat a pack of whole wheat crackers with cheese, for example, all you will then have to do is select it from the drop-down menu.

If you are eating a whole food (and good for you!), then you probably won't have a nutritional label (how many bunches of bananas have you seen with nutrition labels slapped on them?).  Fitday has the nutritional values of many whole foods pre-programmed in.  You would then go to 'Browse Foods', then the subcategory, which would be 'Fruits and Juices', and then choose 'Banana - raw'.  You click 'add' and it adds it to your list of foods eaten for that day.  The data entry is annoying at first, but it's been two weeks, and I have to enter in very little now.  I think I've gone through my basic repertoire of food.

Reading Your Pie Chart

This is brilliant.  Fitday provides this really cool pie chart on the Food page that shows you where the majority of your calories are coming from.  This is where you may have to educate yourself some on nutrition.  For reference, the recommended breakdown of where your calories should come from is approximately as follows:

Protein:    10-35%
Fat:          20-35%
Carbs:      49%

Fats:  There is a lot to learn here.  As you probably already know, there are good fats and bad fats.  Trans fats are the nasties that you want to avoid at all costs.  Saturated fats are fats you don't want to overdose on but some of the foods that contain them (meat and dairy for example) have other vital nutrients for your health.  Polyunsaturated and Monounsaturated fats are the good fats that may actually help to lower cholesterol.  The American Heart Association actually recommends that you eat moderate intakes of all types of fats.  There is no better way for me to describe this than the actual page from the AHA on this.  Click here to read it.  It also answers the confusion over whether margarine or butter is a better choice.  I saw Dr. Oz on Oprah telling everyone to eat real butter instead of margarine if you must eat it.  The AHA recommends the opposite and explains why on the page.  Now, I love Dr. Oz just as much as the next person, but the American Heart Association is comprised of many doctors, not just one so I'm trusting the AHA.  When pressed for butter, stick margarine, or tub margarine, always choose the tub margarine (more watery) that has 0 grams trans-fat on the label.  I'm relieved they explained this because I've been drowning in confusion in the dairy aisle wondering about this.  Tub margarine is less hydrogenated and has less potential for clogging your arteries.  Of course the best option is not to eat it at all, but who's perfect?  Those of us raised on southern cooking can't imagine life without it.

Carbs:  Not all carbs are bad.  I repeat.  Not all carbs are bad.  Just like fats that can actually help you.  Some people know this.  Some don't.  Oatmeal is a great source of quality carbohydrates and not all that bad.  The Body-For-Life program isn't one of those stupid diets that cuts you off all carbs, anything white, or blah-blah-blah.  The program does stress eating healthy carbs with a serving of protein, which many sports nutrionists are now finding actually helps absorbtion of both the protein and the carb.  There are even a lot of protein/carb supplements available these days to take after workouts.  Body-for-Life recommends not eating for an hour after a workout to maximize fat loss, but some bodybuilding experts disagree because they believe taking a protein/carb immediately following exercise boosts muscle results.  It may all come down to which is more important to you - burning fat or building muscle?  Sometimes there isn't an easy answer.  However, back on topic, there are many carbohydrate-rich food that are very good for you.  On BFL, you can even eat whole-grain pastas, whole-wheat bread, etc.  There is an element of caution, though - It's key that you get just enough carbs and not too much.  Carbs are the easiest thing to overdose on.

Protein:  Everyone has heard protein called "the building blocks of life".  It's true.  There is no getting around the fact that protein is necessarily to facilitate muscle growth.  Protein is comprised of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen and is essential for building and repairing muscle fiber.  Eating protein also makes you feel fuller, longer, because the body is slower to digest protein.  I've heard people say, "It's too HARD on your digestive system!" but that's a silly argument.  That's like saying you're just going to go on a liquid diet because it's easier to digest.  Your muscles don't get stronger by not moving them because "it's too hard".  Digesting nothing but liquids and fibers is also not doing much for your digestive system.  It's harder to digest because it's more complex to break down, but the benefits of it are worth it.  I like to think of protein as ingesting little mini-first aid kits.  You know, like the ones you see in video games?  These little mini first-aid kits containing valuable amino acids go to work on your muscle fibers, repairing them and making you stronger.  That's just what I like to visualize.  The real goings-on are this: when you ingest protein, it is harder for your body to digest so you expend more calories simply digesting which boosts your metabolism.  Now you see why people drink protein shakes like it's cool?

When you see your pie chart, it might become pretty clear to you that you eat a lot of fat and carbs, if you have a poor diet like I did.  This will show you daily where you need to improve.  What I like doing is entering in things BEFORE I eat it and seeing how it will affect me for the day.  In the early weeks of my program, I would add McDonald's fries and things in just for the sheer shock factor of how much that stuff was killing me.  When you do this, the answer as to why you're overweight will probably become very apparent.  For most people, it is our diets that are making us fat.

Adding Custom Foods

I've got to hand it to whoever created this site, they did put a lot of foods onto their drop-down menu...but what if you're really picky like me?  I want to know EXACTLY what is in whatever I'm eating.  If I'm eating a processed food, I almost always enter the food in as a 'custom food'.  Sometimes I'll even enter whole foods into FitDay as a 'custom food'.  What the hell am I talking about?  A 'custom food' is a food that you can enter in all the nutritional value for and it is saved in your own, specialized menu.  If there is something you eat a lot, all you have to do is add it to your custom foods and it's easily added to your daily list of foods that you have consumed.

Did you eat something and throw the wrapper away?  No probs.  Go to www.calorie-count.com and do a search...you can find an awful lot of foods on there.  Then you can simply copy the important data to FitDay.  Calorie-Count.com also grades the foods you eat so it's kind of cool to see what grade they give your favorite foods.

Tracking Your Activities, Weight, and Generating Reports

Second to tracking what I eat, I also track just what the heck I do every day.  Just like the list of foods, Fitday includes all kinds of activities that many people participate in on a daily basis.  They have all kinds of things...even playing guitar, which I do a lot.  I'll admit I got a good giggle that they even have 'sexual activity' listed.  I almost never use that option (lol).  Select your activities that you do every day.  Put down everything you did and you can even say how long you did it.  In this way, Fitday not only becomes one hell of a weight loss tool...it also becomes a great daily life calendar. 

Why in hell would you want to track everything you do though?  There is a very cool reason why.  Take a look:

This is a report you can generate that will show you your calories eaten vs. calories burned.  This is my actual chart.  Can you tell when my free days were? 

Pretty kick ass, isn't it?  Well, I think so anyway.  I use this constantly.  I have also started noticing patterns in my eating habits.  If you're a nerd, like me, you are totally in love with FitDay by now, but wait...you can watch your weight over time, too:

Wicked, right?  Okay, maybe I'm the only one that loves this feature.  You can track your weight by clicking on the tab that says 'Weight' and entering in your weight daily and clicking 'save'.  That's all there is to it.  (If you're wondering why it starts off at about 123 lbs....that's what I was at the last time I used Fitday and it automatically defaults to your last entered weight unless you tell it otherwise.  I've lost a good deal of weight though!  )

At first, I will admit, it is VERY tedious to use.  You have to enter in all this info every day and it just plain sucks.  Who wants to do that every single frickin' day?  Well, I have been doing it every single day since I started my program on March 9th.  I track activities and calories every day and I have learned SO much about how to eat right just by studying my own eating habits.  You know that saying, "Know thyself"?  Well, just look at this experience as another way to get to know thyself.  Look at what you're fueling your body with.  If you were your body (and scary thing is...you ARE), would you be very happy with yourself, right now?

You have to look at your mind as a spoiled child sometimes.  Your mind tells you it wants a certain food...because it tastes good.  It has good memories attached to it.  It makes you feel good.  It looks good.  It smells good.  All those things are natural instincts - a now-useless genetic memory imprinted within us for thousands of years that was originally so we could find rations without getting ourselves poisoned or starving to death.  That genetic memory isn't quite aware that some of the stuff that smells and looks good to us, these days, can be processed foods with chemicals and other elements that can harm us over time. 

Our minds act as seductresses to our stomachs.  For me, I'd see the golden arches and salivate like Pavlov's dog.  However, I have learned that loving myself also means loving my body.  We're always so present in our minds that we forget about our bodies.  We don't take care of them.  We neglect them.  We feed them crap.  We don't see to it that our bodies are healthy, fit, and strong.  We constantly stress getting educations and taking care of our minds...and we neglect the most important part of our existence...and even make taking care of our bodies out to be a vain, selfish act.  What's wrong with us?!  It's no wonder why people are so extraordinarily depressed these days.  Exercise even releases Serotonin naturally.  We really weren't meant to become the indoor creatures we have evolved into, hopped up on antidepressants and chocolate and wondering why life has to be so hard.

That's why I'm stressing this so highly - loving yourself means loving your body, too.  You can't get angry at your body for being fat.  Chances are, it's your mind's fault that your body is fat.  It becomes some big, vicious circle that can completely be reversed into a wonderful, not-so-vicious cycle.  You can retrain your mind by feeding your body the right foods...and after a while, your mind will start feeling better, and will drop its' stubborness and not reject the healthy food you feed your body.  Your mind and body can be at peace, but we all tend to favor our mind's rights more than our body's rights.  It's kind of unfair, isn't it?

I'll leave you with that and will follow up with more on exercising, diet, and why I decided to try Body-for-Life versus other programs in the next blog.