I don’t really feel that the Internet needs another weight loss guide, however, so I’m just going to detail my own experiences in the hopes of confirming and reinforcing the non-dreck side of things.

I’m about 5′11”, and at the end of high school I weighed around 220 pounds. According to the NIH, I was beyond overweight; I was mildly obese. This was the result of a variety of factors, not getting much physical activity chief among them. My mother is a dietitian, so I’ve always had a pretty good sense of what I should be eating, but I didn’t really follow these guidelines well, perhaps feeling that it wasn’t really my responsibility to watch out for my health while I lived with my parents. So when I moved out and went to college, I probably should have (statistically speaking) become even less healthy.

For reasons I’m not quite sure of, though, I made up my mind at the same time I went off to school that I was going to pull my act together and slim down. A few months into college I decided to become a vegetarian, and this certainly kept me eating less, if only because there was very little food in our servery that was both appetizing and meat-free. I tried to get off my butt and get some exercise, often by playing racquetball. By the end of my first year, I’d was at around 205 pounds. I was quite proud of my reverse freshman 15.

Then during the summer, I started working harder. I began to run 3 or more times each week. I watched what I ate carefully, sticking to my vegetarian diet and taking small portions. By the end of the summer, I was at about 175 pounds. Then when school started last year, I was more or less used to the changes I had made to my lifestyle. I kept up the running, played a lot of racquetball, and spent a fair amount of time in the gym this past year. Now I’m at the upper 160s and still slowly going down. This means that I have lost about 50 pounds since my peak about two years ago. According to the above chart, I’m at an acceptable weight for my height.

If that sounded easy, good. Weight loss is often made out to be a very challenging endeavor, but in reality the actual doing is not hard. It only takes about half an hour to go for a good run, and all you need are a decent pair of shoes. There’s nothing all that life-changing about forgoing a slice of pie with ice cream at dessert. It’s easy to think of something you could do outside instead of watching television. What it comes down to is that losing weight, like any conscious lifestyle change, is almost entirely a psychological game. Once I realized this, I wasn’t about to lose to my own laziness. It really was that simple.

Two specific points:

The Importance of Diet

It’s a well-known and thoroughly documented fact that not only are the keys to staying in shape are diet and exercise, but that they rank in that order. If you want to lose weight, you need to either eat a little less or exercise a lot more. (Ideally, of course, you should be doing both and in moderation.) To really lose weight at a steady pace, though, I just made sure to watch the raw number of calories I consumed. Of course, there is a lot more to a healthy diet than that, but if the number of calories you eat in a day drops by, say, 20%, you will lose weight. This is basically common sense.

A Running Routine

I only started seriously keeping track of my running in about October of last year, or nine months ago. While at school, I run on the outer loop around campus. This is a little short of 3 miles, at about 4.7km. I started by jogging until I needed to walk, and then picking it up again when I felt ready. I couldn’t keep jogging for more than maybe half a mile when I started. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be able to keep jogging around the whole track without ever slowing down. I knew that I wanted to be able to do that, though, so I just concentrated on jogging a bit more and walking a bit less each time. I started loosely keeping track of my starting and ending times, and saw the difference drop from about 45 minutes to under 30 by second semester. It took about three months total before I was able to jog the whole thing straight. Now this summer I have started to take an stopwatch with me to keep more accurate time along the way, and I have found this to be a great addition. Only about two weeks ago I found that at my normal pace it took about 27 minutes to get around the loop. Competing against my own times I have driven this down significantly; yesterday morning my time was around 23 minutes. I hope to be under 20 minutes by the end of July. I really like having the stopwatch because at each corner I can see how my time compares to my previous best. This $5 watch and my $40 running shoes are the only purchases I have made to help me lose weight.