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To react to the title, I don't think so.
We all have to have our own will to get in shape. It's our health that wil help us in the long run. Not just personally, but financially, morally, and physically of course. It is a total 'workout' if one would take precautions to be overweight. Taking it slow is one of the surest process. Do not crash-diet. Believe me, not good.
I am not sure if this is really the right forum for this question. If it is, Mods please move it to the appropriate forum.
I have been overweight for the most of my life. Right now I am 5'5 and 250lbs. Most of the members of my family are overweight, on both my mothers and fathers side. Even my parents and older sibling is overweight. As a result, our metabolism is very, very low. My mother has worked out for years now and has lost very little weight. At least not to much to be noticeable. I myself have worked out and have lost very little weight if any at all. I felt slightly slimmer, but overall there was no noticeable change. Currently I have been getting back on my treadmill for 60 minutes daily and still have not lost weight. I absolutely HATE exercise so all in all, doing this everyday is really frustrating especially when I am not getting any good results. I have been doing this since January of 2010. I changed my diet, including going vegan, low calorie and cutting out my favorite junk foods. I still have no noticeable results.
So my question is, is this really genetic factors that explain why I am not losing weight? Should I just quit all together? I am really starting to lose motivation and have just decided to accept and embrace my body the way it is. Are there any faster, easier ways to lose weight?
Don't quit.
People try to make weight loss more complicated than it is.
It really is as simple as eat less and move more.
But the devil is in the details! People (i notice) will tend to quit because they lack persistence, patience and knowledge.
I will give you a few quick tips:
- You have to be persistent with proper choices. Your body is not a machine and will let weight go here and there sometimes stalling. When you are at a very high body fat percentage it can go slower than someone elses or stall.
- You have to eat healthy and the proper amount. When you eat less you have to make sure you are covering healthy basics of getting a balanced diet and enough calories. Basic nutrition works for most all to get to a healthy weight. It may take some people longer than others but you will get there. If not, you should see a doctor to check to see if there could be a health condition holding you back
-If everyone is fat in the family its from a couple things: copied habits, copied meal plans and a bit of genetics. Some people are just suppose to be on a heavier side but not necessarily overweight. Just on the heavier side of the healthy weight range spectrum. Also if your family takes a long time to lose a few pounds, good chances you will too. Just accept it. In the long run you have to make these diet and exercise changes permanent. But everyone who is lean does the same thing too. They are just already at the weight they want to be at.
-You have to combine watching what you eat and what you do. Have patience with both of those things. You can exercise all day long and still make it a "no loss" day if you eat too much. Everyone can eat much faster than they can burn with exercise.
- don't quit. No problem gets better by ignoring it. You can do it.
Just have patience and arm yourself with knowledge of nutritional basics.
If you don't like working out intensely find a workout you do like and stick with it. Adjust your food intake accordingly. But basically its just eating light if you exercise light. And eating more if you exercise (cardio) more.
Good luck on finding your personal formula for success!
A 3 week session of hiit will have a lot of that fat melting off like butter. regardless what you're on, any fat, sedimentary person will lose a good bit in the start if they're doing an exercise that requires a lot of effort(like hiit) since their body isn't used to the exercise.
My daughter suffers from PCOS. Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. We watched her put on weight without eating in huge amounts, and we saw her exercising daily yet the weight did not move. The doctor took one look @ her and and knew what was wrong. He had seen many cases of it but not in early teenagers, as many parents ignore the weight gain or label the child as been lazy and greedy. With PCOS the body produces too much of the hormone testosterone, causing that person to become large. Blood test and ultra sounds confirmed this. Added to that, she had a massive ovarian cyst that had to be removed immediately. If it wasnt for the weight gain which made her obese I never would have taken her to the doctor. Today she like many other PCOS women sufferers with weight issues amongst other concerns. Sometimes obesity can be a sign of a medical condition and the person may not be aware.
I've got PCOS too but luckily for me I'm one of the 10% that has "thin PCOS" and I don't have insulin resistance from it. A lot of women have this problem and they do gain weight from hormonal imbalance.
Also those that think genetics play a low part in all this -- we haven't quite identified all the genes and their functions yet and their effects are usually a combination of multiple genes acting synchronously. So while there might only rarely be a "fat gene" identified (i.e. mutations that causes lots of effects including hyperphagia, as in Prader-Willi) there are plenty of gene variants that determine metabolism within a network of biochemical reactions.
Is it fair that people like me can eat a lot and never work out, whereas other people (same age) have to work out 2 hours everyday while eating the same calories? No, and I would say that this is *all* due to genetic variation. But I agree that they can put in more effort and lose some of the weight. But just because they can put in a lot of effort doesn't mean that genes have nothing to do with it.
I'm not sure if the OP is still reading this thread, but here's some very good advice. I think you're eating more calories than you burn, no matter how you look at it.
I'd suggest checking out fitnesspal.com or fitday.com. Use it to track your food intake every day. Measure what you eat (like how many cups, etc). Read the labels to see how many calories you are consuming. I'd recommend trying to eat 1600-1700 calories a day and exercising 3-4x a week (try to burn at least 300 calories per workout session). If you track your calories on this site (account for EVERY SINGLE THING YOU PUT IN YOUR MOUTH) portion control with naturally happen because you'll realize how little food 1700 calories is compared to what you are eating.
What I do is try to have this calorie breakdown when I'm trying to lose weight:
- Breakfast 350-400 calories (usually a packet of oatmeal, some fruit, yogurt, toast with peanut butter, etc...)
- Lunch 500 calories (salads with lean meat and low-cal dressing, light wraps, canned soups, veggies, fruit)
- Dinner 700 calories (some lean protein such as fish/chicken, vegetables, grains like rice, fruits)
- Snacks 100 calories (I really like the Eddy's strawberry frozen fruit bars! 80 calories and so tasty!, a piece of fruit, diet yogurt, granola bars, etc)
Unless you have a thyroid disorder there is no reason you should be that heavy forever. No reason at all! Obesity can run in your family but based on what you say you prepare for yourself you are eating too much food. You can still eat "bad" foods as long as you don't surpass your 1600-1700 calories a day.
You WILL lose weight this way. It sucks. It's not super fun, but eventually you will and your body will get used to making due with less food. I've found that if I'm not hungry at some point during the day while on my diet I don't lose weight. I'm not starving, but I do get hungry and get stomach growling noises, but it works. I lose between 1-1.5lbs a week this way!
I am not sure if this is really the right forum for this question. If it is, Mods please move it to the appropriate forum.
I have been overweight for the most of my life. Right now I am 5'5 and 250lbs. Most of the members of my family are overweight, on both my mothers and fathers side. Even my parents and older sibling is overweight. As a result, our metabolism is very, very low. My mother has worked out for years now and has lost very little weight. At least not to much to be noticeable. I myself have worked out and have lost very little weight if any at all. I felt slightly slimmer, but overall there was no noticeable change. Currently I have been getting back on my treadmill for 60 minutes daily and still have not lost weight. I absolutely HATE exercise so all in all, doing this everyday is really frustrating especially when I am not getting any good results. I have been doing this since January of 2010. I changed my diet, including going vegan, low calorie and cutting out my favorite junk foods. I still have no noticeable results.
So my question is, is this really genetic factors that explain why I am not losing weight? Should I just quit all together? I am really starting to lose motivation and have just decided to accept and embrace my body the way it is. Are there any faster, easier ways to lose weight?
If you're not losing weight, you're doing something wrong. Blaming it on genetics is just an escape.
My entire family is overweight. I lost a ton of weight by exercising and eating right, yup, the old-fashioned way. I walk 8 miles a day. You have to work hard @ it to see the results you want otherwise you will get nowhere. 60mins on a treadmill isn't going to cut it.
A note about tracking calorie intake on the websites designed for it...
It can feel obsessive and time-consuming (especially on some sites, where you have to enter in all the nutritional information manually, and if you don't have a label to go off for non-whole food items, you're gonna be doing some guessing). But my experience is that you don't have to do it for long, before you start to get a feel for WHAT a, say, 1500-calorie day looks and feels like. Once you start to pay attention to the energy value of the foods you regularly eat, you find that you don't have to track so obsessively in order to keep a mental checklist of where you are in the day.
I think a lot of people get turned off of calorie tracking because they feel shackled by it, but in my experience, it's helpful for limited periods to get you really thinking about what you're eating, and how much energy it gives you, and what the caloric value of your commonly eaten foods is in the portion sizes in which you eat them. Once you get that in your head and get a feel for it, it's not necessarily crucial to track obsessively. In the beginning, the more closely you count, the better, though.
I am not sure if this is really the right forum for this question. If it is, Mods please move it to the appropriate forum.
I have been overweight for the most of my life. Right now I am 5'5 and 250lbs. Most of the members of my family are overweight, on both my mothers and fathers side. Even my parents and older sibling is overweight. As a result, our metabolism is very, very low. My mother has worked out for years now and has lost very little weight. At least not to much to be noticeable. I myself have worked out and have lost very little weight if any at all. I felt slightly slimmer, but overall there was no noticeable change. Currently I have been getting back on my treadmill for 60 minutes daily and still have not lost weight. I absolutely HATE exercise so all in all, doing this everyday is really frustrating especially when I am not getting any good results. I have been doing this since January of 2010. I changed my diet, including going vegan, low calorie and cutting out my favorite junk foods. I still have no noticeable results.
So my question is, is this really genetic factors that explain why I am not losing weight? Should I just quit all together? I am really starting to lose motivation and have just decided to accept and embrace my body the way it is. Are there any faster, easier ways to lose weight?
None of this is rocket science - but the issues involved with obesity are serious enough that over half the planet now has them. I can give you all the answers that others will but the truth is that most people who hear them don't change their lifestyles because they don't have enough self-control. Here's the truth and a direct answer to your question: yes you can change your body dramatically through diet and exercise. If you're really far gone in terms of a pear-shape and expanded fat cells... then it'll take a lot of time and effort, and perhaps at the end some surgery for extra-skin removal... but absolutely great results can/will be in store for you with the willpower to make a major lifestyle change.
Your family all looks the way they do because of behavioral patterns of:
1) over-eating
2) eating the wrong foods
3) a well-developed aversion to exercise
4) making and believing excuses for not meeting/reaching goals
All that is changeable for you if you want to change yourself. Some simple lifestyle changes to make right now:
1) only eat until you are 80% full at any sitting
2) cut out of your diet completely all breads and pastas and anything with corn syrup (high fructose or not - both as they are basically the same).
3) get good walking shoes and start walking everywhere... park far from store entrances and walk... walk after every meal and try to maintain a faster-than-comfortable pace.
4) cut out of diet sugar-snacks/candy and anything that is essentially empty carbs (pretzels, chips, candy-bars, etc)
There are a lot of other things to begin doing, but that would be an awesome start.
I've read through this entire thread. It's interesting because it's indicative of what happens to someone who wants to lose weight. The OP is obviously very ignorant about nutrition. She has one idea in her mental tool kit for losing weight: eat less. She then got the general idea that this was wrong and was leading to starvation from the feedback she was getting, so she ate more. The problem, of course, is not so much the amounts she eats but what she eats. Eating one portion of bacon with cheese on it is not really that much better than eating five portions of bacon with cheese. So she'll only have one roll of fat on her flabby body instead of three... she'll still feel terrible and die younger than she should.
She doesn't eat healthy food because it's bland. Well, true. If one's palette is used to bacon, cheese, grease, fried food, etc., then whole grains, steamed vegetables and lean protiens aren't going to excite it. For all of the good advice she was given, I didn't see any one really focus on this. Instead, people who already have a taste for healthy foods are trying to convince her she can "spice" it up or truly enjoy this or that. She probably won't. Food for her at this point isn't about enjoyment. She needs to realize that food is fuel, not entertainment.
She needs to retrain her taste buds and body's cravings. Rather than focusing on trying to make healthy food taste good (it doesn't and won't to her jaded mouth), she just needs to choke them down in the right amounts at the appropriate times of day for 60 days or so. After that time period, I'm sure her body will be craving them. Her body wants whole grains and steamed spinach. It's the medicine it never knew it needed. Once she can develop a taste for healthy foods, she's well over half way toward winning the war on fat.
I am not sure if this is really the right forum for this question. If it is, Mods please move it to the appropriate forum.
I have been overweight for the most of my life. Right now I am 5'5 and 250lbs. Most of the members of my family are overweight, on both my mothers and fathers side. Even my parents and older sibling is overweight. As a result, our metabolism is very, very low. My mother has worked out for years now and has lost very little weight. At least not to much to be noticeable. I myself have worked out and have lost very little weight if any at all. I felt slightly slimmer, but overall there was no noticeable change. Currently I have been getting back on my treadmill for 60 minutes daily and still have not lost weight. I absolutely HATE exercise so all in all, doing this everyday is really frustrating especially when I am not getting any good results. I have been doing this since January of 2010. I changed my diet, including going vegan, low calorie and cutting out my favorite junk foods. I still have no noticeable results.
So my question is, is this really genetic factors that explain why I am not losing weight? Should I just quit all together? I am really starting to lose motivation and have just decided to accept and embrace my body the way it is. Are there any faster, easier ways to lose weight?
I suffer the same problem, always struggling to lose weight but keep in reasonable shape due to exercising regulary- don't listen to these naturally thin types who never put on weight, or just tell you to keep exercising they are wrong. There people out there who have never exercised a day in their life and still remain thin.
I worked 8 -9 hours a day hard laboring, shovelling, lifting things for 6 days a week - burning way more calories than any 1 hr gym workout - and at the end of yes - I managed to lose some weight, but still slightly overweight and you pile it back on once you stop. Exercise is for weight maintence - its just not feasible at your weight to exercise for two hours plus a day - this what you would need to lose weight. - and then your tired and will eat more.
Exercise is only an assistance to losing weight - continue what your doing in the gym and reduce your calories to 1500 a day, or you might need to go to 1200 per day, its hard but it the only thing that works. You will need to keep this up for months, not easy.
You will probably find that these thin types who recommend lots of exercise all the time - don't actually eat that much food, they might not eat breakfast, or an evening meal - but will tell you they eat what they like all the time.
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