|
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
| 09/20/06 15:35
What's it like to train at Pat Miletich's camp, the camp that trains UFC's top champions Matt Hughes, and Tim Sylvia? It's like no other martial arts gym you've ever experienced. No Katas. No ...
(More...) | 08/11/06 22:51
Looking for a convenient prepackaged meal program to control your hunger and help you loose weight? Nutrisystem could be for you. It's a great system that I continue to use every day, but also ...
(More...) | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
WorkItSmart.com is a fitness and weight loss community designed to keep you motivated, track your progress and measure the performance of
your fitness program. At WorkItSmart you can track as much or as little as you want to help you reach your goals:
- Track and blog your activities, your speed, distance, calories burned, weight lifted, etc, etc.
- Track and blog your meals as balanced by your activities to control your weight.
- Track and blog your weight over time to keep you on goal.
- Sign up with a friend and keep yourself motivated by keeping an eye on their fitness program!
To see exactly what you can do with WorkItSmart check out my WorkItSmart blog:
http://workitsmart.com/user/drachs/
To get started, just click "Create New Account" to the left. After you have an account, this dialog
will no longer appear. Also, if you're in to it, please check out my new website for the
Marine Reef Aquarium Community
If you have any questions, concerns, comments or suggestions please email me at:
David Hinkle
| |
|
| |
| |
I built the technology behind the WorkItSmart fitness community for myself, to help me reach my weight loss goals. I've had so much success, I felt I needed to share these tools with the rest of the world. There is nothing magical about my approach. Diet and exercise. It's a simple plan with a lot of potential pitfalls.
In this article I'll discuss basic weight loss strategy and how I use the site to reach my weight loss goals each week and avoid the pitfalls that cause thousands of people to abandon their weight loss plans every day. I'll also touch upon some of the tools I personally use to help track and monitor my progress. | |
| by David Hinkle - 07/30/06 15:26
|
A Simple Plan
So welcome to WorkItSmart.com. I'm David Hinkle, and as they say, I'm not just CEO, I'm a client. I wrote the tools that make up this site to help myself. I decided to share my hard work with all of you after I realized how lost people were when it comes to the tried and true method of weight loss: Diet and exercise.
You'd think with such a simple plan it would be hard to screw up. Eat less, workout more, problem solved. But it's not that easy. A body become accustom to carrying a certain amount of fat, and when we start to loose it, it's designed to put it back on. We find ourselves hungrier each day, and more lethargic. Too tired to get motivated to go to the gym.
At first weight loss is easy. A significantly overweight person can shed 5-15lbs in the first month no problem... but then the problems start to set in. Hunger gets harder control, we eat more without realizing it. Not to mention life is always swirling around us and distracting us from our goals.
For the first month or two any weight loss strategy will work. Some fad diet or some weird new exercise contraption. Those first half dozen pounds shed easy and they re-enforce the belief that you're doing the right thing.
But if you want to keep loosing weight, week after week. You need a long term plan that works. You need to be able to measure your performance and keep track of your goals, and that's where WorkItSmart.com comes in.
A Healthy Goal
So we need a healthy goal. But to understand what our goal should be and why, we first need to talk a little bit about metabolism. Contrary to popular belief, even in an athlete, the body burns more calories at rest than it does during exercise. Each organ, and every pound of muscle burns calories "in idle" even while you sleep. My body burns about 2400 calories a day if I do nothing. Even after a year of working out I can't burn more than 4000-5000 calories in a week with exercise.
Your body knows this. Whenever you're loosing weight your body burns not just fat for energy, but also muscle. It does this because the body always tries to reach an equilibrium with the amount of calories going out and the amount of calories coming in. For every pound of muscle your body burns off you need 50 calories a day less than before. The faster you loose weight, the more muscle your body burns rather than fat in attempt to reach equilibrium. If you loose weight too fast, you'll burn so much muscle that your body will stop loosing weight, and actually start to gain weight on the same amount of calories per day!
Many of you that have tried to sustain weight loss with diet alone have probably experienced the gradual slowing and then inexplicable reversing of your weight loss. I personally know how discouraging this can be. Remember, anything works for the short term. But if you want to keep it up in the long term, you must use both diet and exercise. Either alone just won't do it.
But if exercise doesn't really burn all that many calories why is it so important? The answer is because it stimulates our muscles to grow rather than be burned away by our bodies as we diet. If you work all the muscles in your body at least once a week they will actually grow instead of shrink. This means your weight loss will be concentrated on fat instead of muscle. Each month as you gain muscle your body will burn more and more calories by itself making your diet easier to maintain! One of the primary functions of WorkItSmart.com's body metrics is to estimate how many calories a day you should eat to continue burning two pounds of fat a week at your current weight, body fat percentage and activity level.
Two pounds a week? Yep. That's our goal. In the field of weight loss I've never seen anything agreed upon more universally. Everybody will tell you the same thing. Focus on loosing 2 lbs of fat a week. There are 3500 calories in a pound of fat. So our goal is to consume 7000 calories a week less than we burn.
Even at 2lbs a week, without exercise our bodies will still burn about 75% fat and 25% muscle.
Achieving Our Goal - How much should we eat?
So we have our goal. But how do we go about it? Everybody's body is different. Everybody needs a different amount of calories per day. Everybody burns a different amount of calories on a run. The first thing you must become comfortable with is that everything in regards to calorie counting is just an estimate.
But with the proper tools we can estimate it pretty well. First you need to know how many calories a day you need to eat. This is the most fundamental number. I personally track this number on a weekly basis. I log everything I eat into the website and keep an eye on my "Last 7 Days" "Daily Calorie Average". My goal is currently 1800. So I keep this number at 1800. Sometimes I splurge and eat 2500 calories in a day... so then I eat 1700 calories for a while to make up for it. Using this method an occasional splurge is not a problem. Just remember... Not every special occasion is special enough to break your diet for.
So how do you know how many calories a day you need? We estimate it based on your weight, and if available, your body fat percentage. After you enter these measurements on the "Post Body Metric" page your daily calorie targets will appear on "Body Metrics" page of your profile. How many calories a day you need to eat to maintain your weight is your BMR. Short for basal metabolic rate. The page will also list your weight loss targets with and without exercise. But remember, if you choose to try and loose weight without exercise your gains simply won't last.
The BMR is calculated among several different methods depending on what information is available. It can be calculated on just weight, on weight and body fat or on weight and body fat derived from neck, waist and hip circumference.
A major problem with calculating your BMR based on just your weight is that the system has no way of knowing how much of your weight is fat and how much of it is muscle. As I've said before, each pound of muscle burns about 50 calories a night, so this can make a huge difference. If you are obese, and you only put in your weight, the formula overestimates how many calories a day you need and instructs you to eat too much!
To solve this problem you must obtain your body fat percentage. I use a bathroom scale by Tanita to update my weight and body fat percentage once or twice a week. But be careful of cheap knockoffs. I used a $30 body fat scale from Walmart for almost a year and it always read 38.5% even though I had dropped half a dozen pant sizes!
You can also often get a trainer at your local gym to do a body fat estimate using the caliper method which is more accurate than the scales if done by a qualified individual.
If neither of these two options is open to you, you can measure the circumference of your neck, waist, and hips (Hips only if female) and the site will use the department of defense method for estimation of body fat. (Not super accurate, but better than relying on just weight alone for BMR)
Achieving Our Goal - What should we eat?
The short answer is that it doesn't matter. A calorie is a calorie, it doesn't matter if it comes from a Steak and Shake Frisco Melt (1117 Calories) or an Asian Star Fruit (40 Calories). But the long answer is what we eat can have a huge impact on how hungry we feel and how well we deal with our cravings.
See my new article:
WorkItSmart.com: Achieving Our Goal - Eating for Weight Loss
Achieving Our Goal - How should we exercise?
Again, a wonderful topic for a separate article, but the most important thing about exercise is the simplest. You must have fun. You must enjoy yourself. Remember... you're going to be doing this for the rest of your life. Exercise doesn't have to be painful. As a matter of fact, despite popular misconception pain doesn't really have a place in a weight loss program.
Your body needs oxygen to burn fat. Exercise only becomes painful when your body runs out of oxygen and starts using a process that produces lactic acid instead. Therefor, if you're exercising so hard it hurts you're body is not burning fat.
The best way to track how hard you're working is to monitor your heart rate. You want to be somewhere in the vicinity of 145 bpm on the low end to 155 on the high end. I use a polar heart monitor watch to keep an eye on mine and try to focus myself myself on the 150bpm target.
A heart rate monitor is great because it can tell you when you're not working hard enough and when you're working too hard. Until you get a heart rate monitor, you can use a simple rule of thumb to determine if you're not working hard enough or working too hard. When you're working out, you should be able to talk comfortably but not sing. Words should come out without too much trouble but singing should be uncomfortable.
Just remember to take it easy. Have a good time. Tell yourself how much fun your having. Don't run yourself out of breath, you need that air to burn body fat. When you start off shedding pounds will be easy anyways so save your ambition for the future when things start to get tough.
Do workout every other day. This keeps your metabolism high. Even a 2 day gap can produce a noticeable decrease in metabolism. Don't work out every day. Your muscles need at least a day to recover between workouts and build themselves up unless you're an elite athlete.
Start off walking and doing some aerobics. Add more advanced things as your body gets used to them. Experiment with a lot of different things. Take your time. Your eventual goal is to burn about 3500 calories a week from exercise but don't try to pull it off in the first month or two.
Post Comment
|
|
|
|