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Yes
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Add to FavoritesIt's really a simple answer to a simple question, as anyone who has successfully lost a lot of weight can tell you.
I lost 28 pounds in one month on a bet once, dropping from 238 to 208 off a 6 ft. frame, cutting 11.76% of my total body weight, and I didn't do it by just cutting fatty foods and laying around.
I produced a lot of sweat.
I joined Bally's for a free month tryout and hit the bikes, punching-in mountain trails on the programs to burn more fat than a grill full of raw hamburger meat. After that it was lots of light weight reps and the steam room, eating small meals every two hours and even wearing leg weights all day.
The problem is motivation.
I won over 600 dollars from low-life braggards I despised, but what are you gonna do to get America off its rear and into gear? What's going to propel a fat nation into motion when the worst foods imaginable are cheap, fast, and oh so tasty?
Not a supersizing thing.
Back in the ice age and beyond, you had to move, think, and work to get food, but that is obviously no longer the case. Unless you're hurting financially and sometimes even then, the only effort required for obtaining food is buy, order, or push a few buttons, and that doesn't require the rigors of scouting, hunting, or cultivating.
It requires chewing and swallowing, with a sugar-laced soda to wash it down.
And it tastes sooooo good.
"We gained 30 pounds in America, visiting up there one winter," some very thin Brazilian friends told me once. "Fast food is everywhere, sinfully good and cheap. Just drive through and order!"
No need to sweat there.
The other problem is our schedules.
You work hard all day. Do you really feel like working out before or after spending eight or more hours on the employer's clock, then denying yourself of all that tasty, cheap food? Or down time?
No way! You deserve the happiest meal you can find, loaded with salt and greasy meat and cheese and something that poses as bread! The chair and tube are waiting, with reality shows and sports and all kinds of entertainment, and if you have kids and finally get them to sleep, that exercycle is going to gather more dust than a vacuum in the Sahara.
Sure, being more active would cure America of its obesity problem, but what's the fun in being active, when it's fun being actively fat?
Genetics? Just another excuse in most cases. Show me someone who cries genetics, and then show me their diet and exercise.
If anyone out there FOLLOWS my game plan that won the contest, then they're gonna lose the weight, and I'll bet on it.
Money where your hungry mouth is? Any takers?
End of debate.
Learn more about this author, Daniel Mcginley.
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No
Being more active is only part of the puzzle to cure America of its obesity problem. Burning off calories is all well and good, but it can be awful tough to burn even one pound of fat.
To burn one pound of fat, it would take doing 3500 calories of exercise. To put this in perspective, that means seven hours of aerobics! And that is just one pound! No one in there right mind is going to do that, but you can burn more than you take in over the course of time. Will that cure the problem? I don't think so.
The reason why America is getting fatter by the day is two-fold. Technology has made our life easier is some respects. We don't have to spend days on the hunt for our food anymore, and all those calories that were burned doing so we have saved over the years. We don't have to walk miles to go to school or work, we have automobiles. Should I go on? I think we all get the point.
Let's combine this lack of activity with the barrage of advertising for the latest "gourmet hamburger" from the fast food chains. Or the obscene portions some restaurants now serve. What is the result of this deadly mixture? You got it, weight gain. The human body is like a bank, the more calories consumed, the more the excess is stored as fat. The more calories burned, the more fat is dropped off the body. It really is as simple as that. Or is it?
The x factor is behavior. We need to change our behavior to modify the way we eat, the way we exercise, and the way we think about food. Over time, it's the little things we do that will burn just a little more fat each day.
For the people who have tried dieting, we all know about the rebound effect. Okay, you start the diet and the first few days you drop a couple of pounds. This does wonders for the mind and spirit, but don't get so excited, because the odds are that is water weight coming off. After that, we all hit the "plateau", where even though we are dieting like crazy, nothing much is happening. The reason why is that we are now into the fat burning phase of the diet. What happens now? Usually, we get discouraged and go back eating even more because we are so damn hungry. The weight goes back on. That's why diets usually fail.
We need to incorporate a total life-style change to accomplish a healthier way of life, and to not put on any more weight. How? By having a healthy balance of exercise and eating. I hate to say it's as simple as that, but it really is. Over time we will begin to get down to our normal weight. The key is TIME. We are not going to spend seven straight hours in an aerobics class, our we? Of course not. But we can spend seven hours over the course of a couple of weeks. We still get to burn the calories, but we take the "time" to do it right.
Time seems to be the key word here. Do it right and give yourself the right amount of time. This way we don't get discouraged and upset. Time has a nice way of healing our lives.....
Learn more about this author, Anthony Megna.
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