Good advice. Also don’t start doing this tomorrow. Do it today. I know at least three people now who have pushed off everything to next week for years and ended up with irreversible bad health outcomes.
Man I have to lose weight and get healthy. I'm young enough (28) where I probably have enough time for things to recover but I'm out of time and excuses to start doing something.
Need to halve my mass by the time I hit 30. Never had a healthy relationship with food. Parents were always stuck on yoyo diets :(. They're still here, thankfully.
I just, you know, don't want to die before them. My siblings would kill me. I'd also love to fit on rollercoasters again.
I will echo the replies to your comment. I made a decision to fix myself last August. I switched my diet to lower carb and more protein, drank more water, started getting up earlier, intermittent fasting, plus some other things. I've lost ~23kg (~50lb) since then, and my quality of life has improved. Don't set out to half your mass, just set out to lose a little, then a bit more, and keep going. Don't fail before you start. Drink lots of water, your brain and skin will thank you for it.
100% agree about water and about setting smaller goals that you can celebrate. This thought clicked for me.
If you can lose 10 lbs (4.5 kg), that’s like setting down a bowling ball you are carrying all the time. You will definitely experience a quality of life improvement when you do that. Good luck. Then, do it again.
At the end of the day, it's all "calories in / calories out", but the real trick is figuring out how to change your calorie balance in a way that works for you, long term.
Some people do really well on some sort of rigid "I will eat an exact, precise amount of food each day", be it something like Nutrisystem or Soylent or just very carefully counting calories each day; other people can't stick with it. Some people do better just adding a solid, regular block of exercise each day, be it the gym or just walking; other people have trouble carving out the regular time. Intermittent fasting, eating windows, changing the composition of your diet, eliminating snacks or liquid calories, taking up a sport, becoming a gym rat ... there are a lot of reasonable ways to change how many calories you're consuming or how many you're burning.
The hard part -- besides actually doing it, because that's rarely easy -- is finding one that you can commit to forever, so you aren't, as you say, just trying out yo-yo diets.
Exercise is great, but you can't out-exercise a bad/high calorie diet. Running a mile on a treadmill (if I believe the computer) burns about 135 calories. A typical Big Mac meal is about 1,100 calories.
If I don't pay attention to what I eat, and am fairly inactive, I tend to eat about 50-100 calories more per day than I burn, amounting to a 5-10 lb/year gain.
That is enough of a gain that it really adds up over time, and once it has added up it is quite daunting to deal with, but as far as maintaining goes, it's very reasonable to just add a small amount of light exercise on a daily basis.
Genuinely do it. It was the best improvement I made in my life. All I did was eat less crap and walk a lot. Turned out i liked walking so I now walk up mountains and stuff.
I started over 10 years after you so you’re good still :)
If you’ve got a smart phone get a calorie tracker app like Nutracheck and use it. Job done.
If you can afford it, I recommend hiring people to help. Seeing a personal trainer just once a week has been life changing for me. I just have to show up. Just being accountable to someone else has been huge.
Getting a healthy lifestyle I think is important and at any age is a great time to improve. I think of it more of a journey than an endpoint. It will have ups and downs but try to keep it heading generally in the right direction.
I’m much older but try to stay active (bike commuting, regular exercise, yoga, better diet) although not at my ideal weight it’s helped.
I have a coworker who lists exercise as a required “hobby”. I never thought about it like that, but it what helps her keep it up.
