Tyler B. wrote:Thanks for the vote of confidence!
AND! WOW! You are a hero!
So, I assume you ate right, and exercised. Any plan you followed? We are about to have a bunch of fatties trying to find diet routines that works. Any advice you might have would be appreciated!
Tyler
The best advice I can offer is:
Eat real food. Mostly plants (by volume, not calories). Not too much(although if you're eating real food this tends to take care of itself).
Exercise kicks ass and you should definitely do it, but overall it doesn't have any effect on weight loss. Your body has some pretty sophisticated mechanisms in place that will match your intake with your output, so upping your output will just make you hungrier.
For weight loss, I highly recommend not eating anything at all with a label. If your great grandmother wasn't familiar with it, it probably isn't real food.
For general health, I would encourage you to go walking every day (on hills if you have any nearby and feel up to it.) A couple of times a week do some heavy lifting (I go for 5-8 reps max for each movement, only 1 set.) And once a week or so a good maximum heart rate exercise does great things for your body (I generally use my bike and the fucker of a hill just down the road from my apt.)
Personally, I'm in the low carb or the very low carb camp because that's what works well for me. Self experimentation is supremely important though, so don't take my advice as overly relevant for you.
My starting point for getting healthy was Mark Sisson's "The Primal Blueprint." From there, I've taken some time for experimentation and figured out the foods I have to avoid:
1) European grains. Wheat, Barley, Rye, and Oats all give me massive problems.
2) Sugar. I can handle dextrose and small amounts of fructose, but an apple is enough sugar to put me to sleep for several hours. If I start eating more than about 15% of my calories from starches and sugars I gain weight.
3) Vegetable oil. That shit is just evil, evil mislabeled trans fat. Canola oil, corn oil, and peanut oil irritate my body enough that it's worth it to me to stay the hell away from them, which keeps all fried foods out of my diet. (Please note that Olive Oil and Coconut Oil are both fruit oils, not vegetable oils.)
Anyway, that's the general advice that I can offer. If you want to discuss further I'm very much a nutrition/health geek these days so I'd welcome the conversation.