A Weight Loss Story: How I Lost 20 Pounds In Just Under A Year

Over my last few years of college as an engineering major, I found my courses to be so time consuming and exhausting that I began to make poor health decisions. I ate out often to save time and chose to use any free time I had to hang out with friends rather than exercise. Prior to this time, I never had an issue with weight gain and always had a stick figure type torso from all the time I spent playing soccer. That all quickly changed. When I started my third year of college I was approximately 165 pounds and finished my fourth year at 188 pounds. After graduation in the spring of 2008, I started my first job and decided to devote my free evenings to getting back into the shape I was once in. This was very hard for me at first being that all my exercise used to come from mandatory practices and workouts, but now I had to motivate myself to change my lifestyle. I am not a health or weight loss expert by any means, but hopefully some of things that worked for me can help some of you.

One major issue I faced at the beginning was the daunting task of trying to begin exercising as well as change my eating habits. Being that this was such an extreme change for me, I decided to take on just one to begin with. For me, that was exercise. I started going to the gym every week day for about 30 minutes and simply ran as much as I could during that time period. The only change I made to my diet was no more fast food, but I still ate out and not very much of it was good for me. The key here is to develop a pattern and achieve a consistent exercise routine no matter how little success you see in the beginning.

Now that you have developed a pattern over the past month or two of exercising, start to think about your diet. Up to this point, you may not have lost much weight, but trust me, you have been increasing your metabolism over this period and when mixing this with a healthy diet you will see some real improvement.

When I looked to change my diet, I read countless articles on foods to eat to lose weight and basically all it really tells you is that vegetables, fruits, and nuts are the way to go. For me, I couldn't just throw everything out and eat only healthy foods. I decided that I would tackle snack food first. I still bought the same typical meals and ate out at times, but now I bought vegetables and fruit to eat as snacks instead of crackers, cookies, or chips. If I got hungry between meals, the only food I had at home to snack on were either carrots, bananas, strawberries, or watermelon. Without snack food, I started to see the pounds drop. After a month of a better diet and two months of exercise, I had lost 5 pounds. This may not seem like much, but this is because I was losing weight the healthy way. Starving yourself or overexerting yourself at the gym is not the way to go.

The other thing you can do at this point is portion control. Your meals may not be the healthiest, but be sure to control how much you eat. Put less on your plate and fill the rest up with the fruits and vegetables you bought.

After the first three or four months of consistent exercise and healthy diet, try to increase your time at the gym or buy healthier meals to eat at home. Remember, only make one change to your lifestyle at a time. This way you do not become overwhelmed or burnt out from the process. Remember, no matter how discouraged you get, continue to go to the gym even if it is for just a half hour a day. Even if the weight is slow to fall off, at least you are contributing to a healthy heart.

Now, I have almost reached my original weight of 165 and I am currently 168 pounds. Over the past year, I have slowly built up my exercise to an hour a day and just recently joined an actual gym instead of using the tiny one at my apartment complex. After about six months into my efforts, I started to change my workouts from simple cardio to involve weights and various types of aerobics. I also invested in a Wii Fit so that I could not only exercise from home when I didn't feel like going to the gym, but to track my progress as well. I am actually in some of the best shape of my life and I only work out 5 hours a week (1 hour each weekday) and just watch what I eat as much as I can.

I know this is a pretty general approach to weight loss, so if you have any specific questions for me on specifics just let me know. I hope this is somewhat helpful.