I have been working out regularly since around a year but despite gains in my lifts nothing seemed to help my original goal of losing weight.
I stopped looking at the weighing scale since I heard that it's not the scale but the body dimensions that matter. And I stopped doing cardio because I read that it is less important that weights.
And in early June I happened to check my weight only to find out that my weight actually shot up from 190 to 200 pounds! And I got a few comments from my friends on my recent weight gain.
This deeply saddened me. It's one thing to not put efforts and see your weight increasing, but I was putting in everything, and eating clean and still not losing weight.
Eventually I had to analyze what I am doing wrong. The above advice on weighing scale and cardio is not exactly wrong, but it's only right when interpreted under the correct context. What I learnt is that there is a lot of fitness advice out there but all of it may not be applicable to everyone. Different people have different goals and the advice for someone to lose weight may be wrongly followed by someone intending to gain weight to see disastrous results.
Coming back to my story, I realized what I was doing was actually 'gaining' . My intake was clean but I was not watching over my calorie intake for a deficit. Clean food meant unlimited portion sizes for me. Similarly, I realized that the advice on weighing scale is meant to motivate people to achieve non scale victories, and if I am 40 pounds overweight the scale matters: a lot. All I had to do was maintain the same thing as I was doing but reduce my portion sizes. And add daily walks in my schedule to burn more active calories: not in the form of cardio but to fulfill my NEAT quota.
And pretty soon I started losing weight at a very good rate. I have been losing 2 pounds a week and am finally under 180 pounds now, for the first time in five years. And I am just halfway down to my goal of 160 pounds.
Also, shoutout to aadam from physiqonomics.com. It took me some time to follow everything he suggests, but he provides a very scientific explanation to each health advice out there. And the context is what drives me to decide whether or not and in what capacity I should include a health advice in my routine.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/p1kkws/context_is_everything/
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