New to dieting and exercising..HELP!? Knowledgable and Experienced people only please.?

Question

I want to lose 25 lbs. Let me break down my diet and exercise routine. I just started 8 days ago. My scale says that I'm 150 lbs. I'm 5 feet 5 inches tall. 33 years old. Had a c-section 3 yrs ago. My problem is losing belly weight. That's the only real problem. I have a small baby gut. Measurements 36-33-36, I think.
I walk 5 days out of the week for an hour from 8 p.m to 9 p.m. I try to run a little in between too. I also do taebo 3 days a week for 45 minutes.
For breakfast I eat a bowl of Kixx cereal with WHOLE milk and a sprinkle of sugar. I eat an apple and drink a bottle of water. I also take a One A Day weightsmart vitamin. For a snack I eat a few pretzels and drink water.
For lunch: salad, REGULAR dressing, apple, and water. Snack: cheese & saltine crackers, water.
For dinner: (6:00 p.m) grilled/baked lean meat, salad with REGULAR dressing, water. Snack: canned pinepple.
Should I add or subtract or change anything? Will I lose weight and how long should it take?

I've weighed myself on the scale again and I haven't lost a pound.I wear a size 11/12. Like I said I have a baby gut. I'd like to get down to a size 7/8 again. What are some ways to do that? Do I necessarily have to switch my milk and regular dressings? I like them better. As for my foods, I hate dairy stuff like yogurt, cottage cheese, and protein drinks too. I avoid fast food and junk food . Also, am I supposed to hold in my stomach doing taebo or push it out? He says to make it tight. I have 5 dvd's that I work out to. Two are for cardio. One is for lower body.What else in addition to my existing routine can I do to get on the right path to weightloss? And am I doing right by my diet an exercises? Answer ALL questions if possible. Please help, all intelligent answers are appreciated.

Answer 1

First, for all of the "quick and easy" weight loss diet pill suggestions, remember, if something sounds too good to be true... it probably is, particularly if you have to pay for it.


On Yahoo!Answers I find certain questions being asked repeatedly which is simply a reflection of new people participating. A couple of common questions amount to "How do I lose weight," or more specifically, "How do I lose abdominal fat?" I have gotten very positive responses from my answers when I paused to reply (and now beginning to get "It works!" emails that are very gratifying. I like helping people)... so have recently decided to put a good solid answer on my Yahoo!360 Blog (September 10) that I can point people to. These are my thoughts as a physician and athlete.

Don't target losing more than about 2 lbs per week. If you try to lose faster, your body will go into "starvation mode" and get very stingy about burning calories while at the same time very efficient about storing any calories that you do provide. And it will make you feel awful.

There is no site specific way of losing fat... the old myth about working your abs to burn belly fat isn't true. To get rid of love handles, you need to lose overall fat. That happens with exercise and watching your diet. More on that below.

The most effective way to lose fat is aerobic exercise in the "moderate" fat-burning range, ideally first thing in the morning before you eat. When you wake your body is ready to burn fat and your levels of growth hormone are highest at that time. Later in the day it can take up to 30 minutes just to put your body into a fat-burning mode.

Another overlooked way to burn fat is by lifting weights. Skeletal muscle has very high caloric needs... almost twice that of adipose (fat) tissue. Put on a little muscle and you will burn calories all day even at rest. Be aware that skeletal muscle weighs more, so with this approach you may see your weight increasing while your body fat is melting away. Not realizing this often stresses folks who think they should be losing weight as a measure of fitness. Forget the scale, look in the mirror and you will be happy.

To lose a pound of fat, you need to eliminate about 3500 calories. You can do this by burning more with exercise or by modifying your diet to reduce intake. If you do a Google search on say, "swimming calories" you will quickly find a website with tables of calories burned for a given exercise. You can use such lists to estimate how many calories you are burning up with your routine.

For diet, keep a diary for a couple of weeks counting calories, grams of protein, and grams of fat intake. It is easy with online sources of nutritional information (type the name of the food and calories into the Google search engine) and packaging labels. That will let you quickly figure out where the fat is coming from in your diet.

Fat gives you 9 calories per gram. So take the number of grams of fat, multiply by 9, then calculate what percentage the fat calories are of your total daily calories. Restricting the calories from fat to about 20% of your total intake is ideal for a maintenance diet... that isn't overly restrictive. Of note, you need some fat in your diet. For instance, the body uses fat to produce hormones. Once you have a picture of how to modify your diet, you can drop the diary and just go back to it occasionally if you are wanting to tweek things further.

There is a subset of questions that goes further and asks about "How to get a six-pack?" The answer is the same. Six-packs are 20% abdominal exercise and 80% diet. There is one caveat... abdominal muscles will form in the position that you work them, so be certain to pull them tightly toward your spine while doing crunches, etc. Also, during most lifting, the "core is active" which means that you should be stabilizing with contracted abs then too. Fail to do this and the abs will form, but bulging outward and the result is not attractive.

If you are trying to build muscle as a way to lose fat, then you may need to increase total calories and specifically your protein intake. I target about 0.8 g of protein per pound of body weight each day when actively building. That is far more protein than most people need in their diets.


Aloha

Answer 2

It has only been a week. Give it time. Your current diet and exercise program may actually be working. Unless you have a gym membership and hit the weights and the spinning classes and the cardio machines five times a week, look to lose a pound every one to two weeks. I also suggest not making drastic changes yet because the more you can eat the foods you like, the more likely you will stick with the diet for the long term. (Skim milk is nasty!)

And even then, you shouldn't start weighing yourself for about a month. Why? Your body makeup is changing and you are adding more muscle which weighs more than fat.

If after a month, you still aren't seeing results, start tweaking the plan then. Add a little more exercise or change your diet a little. The key is having a long term outlook. The more drastic and short term your outlook the more likely you will be to drop the diet and exercise plan and gain all the weight back and more.

Answer 3

it looks like you already know the answer to your question. The foods you need to change or limit are the ones in all caps. WHOLE MILK AND REGULAR DRESSING. Try skim, if you cannot try 1%, if you still cannot try 2% they all have less calories. Even light dressing has lots of calories but hald of what you use now. Fat free italian is the best. If you really wany to lose the weight youhave to make lifelong sacrifices so see what you can change forever and do it. The only way you lose weight is when you eat less calories than you use. You can eat tons of healthy food and low calorie food but i have to know the amounts as would anyone to tell you if you would lose weight. Cheese is high calorie look for fat free cheese even though it taste like poop or reduced fat/reduced calorie cheese. Also you cannot pick where they weight comes from so you may have extra weight in the tummy and your arms and legs get skinnier (very possible) no one can pick where the fat comes from and yes that sucks for everyone. The only way to lose weight is to know all the calories you put into your mouth. Fat does not matter it is calories however high fat things typically have high calories but not always. Never go under 1200 calories but if you want to lose weight fast you could start at 1200 calories to 1600 calories. I think if you eat 1600 and workout like you say you will lose weight. So start looking at food labels and remember to include serving sizes. If you eat 1 cup of sauce on your noodles that and the serving size on the food label is 60 calories for a 1/ 2 cup then you consumed 120 calories. A lot of people never lose weight because they underestimate the calories they consume. I can easily eat 500 calories in pretzels so count them and put the bag away. There are some more weight loss tips on my website below. Good luck

Answer 4

Looks pretty good. The excercise is perfect. But there are a few things you should change with the diet
1) Whole milk. you should switch to skim, whole milk does not have any extra nutrients, just fat. Dont like skim? Make the change gradual. Every week switch your milk to one that has slightly less fat then the week before. You wont even notice the difference
2) Sugar is not good. This will cause you blood sugar levels to spike. If you must sweeten your milk, add a tiny bit of honey.
3) try using olive oil or reduced fat dressing.
4)make sure their is no added sugar in the canned pinnapple.
5)skip the saltines and try fruits or veggies in its place with a glass of skim milk

It is hard to say how fast you lose weight because some people lose faster than other. Also keep in mind that you will gain muscle from all your excercise so you could lose 25 pounds of fat but not see a huge change on the scale. But you will lose inches and fat. (muscle is more compact and dense then fat) It is recomended you lose abou 1-2 pounds a week to make sure you dont lose muscle, though again, weight is not very accurate.

Answer 5

You are doing entirely too much cardio. Drop your running back to 2 may 3 days a week. You might want to drop taebo all together. Or drop running all together. Pick up some free weights.

Oh and stay off the scale. Weigh yourself NO MORE than once a week. Body weight fluctuates day to day. Will you lose weight? Probably. Will you feel better, definately.

But you aren't trying to lose weight. You're trying to lose FAT.

Answer 6

This is the way to go, but it is not easy:
-Eat 5-6 smaller meals a day.
-East less fat and sugar and drink more water.
-Do your Taebo before breakfast 6 days a week.
-Do various stomach exercises including stomach vacuums every other day (goodle the vacuums if you don't know).
-Work out with weights 3 times a week.
-Be consistent. Most people just don't have the time or self-control to really get into shape. Good luck!

Answer 7

You need to start eating a high fiber diet. Read the label on the back of that Kixx box, I can guarantee you that there is very little fiber in that.

Try to eat 8-10 grams of fiber at each meal. Read labels.

Also, you need to eat a diet which includes a variety of fruits and vegetables. Salads made with iceberg lettuce often lack vital nutrients, try making steamed broccoli or some other green vegetable.

You also need to eat whole grain products, saltines have little fiber. Try Wasa crackers, again, read labels. Whole wheat products, brown rice, barley etc are all helpful.

And drink plenty of water.

Changing your diet to include these things works wonders, trust me.

Answer 8

Drink a glass of warm water at morning and exercise- preferably aerobics or walking or jogging.
Have some sprouts for breakfast if you are really hungry, otherwise an apple is sufficient.
Lunch: Regular dressing + salads. If too hungry use sprouts.
Dinner: Regular dressing + salads.
Avoid fatty, stale, carbohydrates(sugar and rice especially), Milk and curds, cold drinks and alcohol.
Note: Exercise will increase hunger. Eat sprouts only when you are hungry otherwise not. Decrease the quantity of regular dressing and increase salsds if response is poor.

Answer 9

Skip the pretzels and Kix. Eat oatmeal or another non-grain cereal instead with non-fat milk or soy milk (it's really good!). Skip the saltines, too. Instead, add some raw vegetables. Your exercise routine looks very good, depending if your walk is a 'mosey' or fairly fast. Your weight might take as long to lose as it took you to gain it, but skip those non-nutritious carbs and you should be on your way. By the way, Hoodia works awesome to help with your appetite.

Answer 10

It appears that your diet is ok and that your energy level is ok. You might look into targeting your abs with squats, crunches, and situps.

Another thing that I notice is your vitamin. You might want to research food supplement multivitamins instead of chemically manufactured vitamins.

And one more thing: You may want to check into your water intake. The recommended amount is 1/2 of your body weight in ounces of water. Since you are 150 pounds, that equals 75 ounces or a little over 2 liters.

If I can be of further assistance, let me know.

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http://www.geocities.com/pktull

Answer 11

Your belly fat may be due to the excessive amount of carbs you have in your diet. You should be eating far fewer cereals, fruits, crackers and more protein. Protein like meat or cheese has zero carbs so you can eat a lot more of them without putting on weight. Reducing the carbs will reduce the belly.