Everyone wants to know, what is the healthy way to lose weight. I’ve always been curious with the obsession over losing weight. I don’t mean the concept of being a healthy weight. I mean the obsession with seeing a certain number or less on the bathroom scale.
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I know we’ve been told virtually since birth that when you’re a certain height you should be under a certain weight.
But in truth in almost every case, the little number on that scale means nothing. What’s much more important is your level of fitness and the dimensions of your body. These are a much better indicator of the state of your body than how hard Earth’s gravity is pulling on you! That would be what your weight means by the way.
Plus, these figures are regularly revised by the US Government. The BMI scale was revised a while back. The BMI rating for overweight went from 28 to 25. By the BMI calculations, I’m overweight. I wonder who would benefit from more people considered obese and overweight? Not to toot my own horn, but I haven’t know anyone who would consider me overweight.
The BMI scale is complete junk. All it does is give you a healthy weight range for your height. It doesn’t account for any differences in muscle mass or frame size. Even the extremely simple hip-to-waist ratio is better.
The Healthy Way To Lose Weight
So, what is the healthy way to lose weight? The truth is, you should forget about weight altogether. What you should pay attention to is inches, or for those of you on the metric system, centimeters.
There isn’t such a thing as a healthy weight. It’s also not a very good way to track your progress. As you get into better shape you’ll gain muscle mass. You may lose quite a few inches, but end up weighing more. It’s insanity, but people look better but end up more depressed because they’re heavier!
If you really want to see how your “weight loss” progress is coming, take regular measurements in the same places and track how many inches you’re losing in those places. This will give you a better indication of how your fitness dreams are coming along.
Next, stop focusing on exercising more to lose weight. I have huge issues with the counting calorie paradigm that I’ve gone into before here. Without rehashing things focus on cleaning up your diet if you want to lose weight. Good fats, quality proteins, limit sugar.
The more active you are the more sugars you will be able to utilize and the less they will make you gain weight. If you’re not very active, you should really largely avoid sugars.
Also, avoid most commercially processed foods. Processed food has become a dirty word, but in reality, pretty much all food we eat is processed in some way. Processing it yourself is the best option, next best is getting the product from a source you trust.
Try and eat local food whenever possible. It will almost always be fresher than the general stuff at the grocery store so it will have more nutrition. It will also have the nutrition that is needed for the local environment.
It’s actually really simple, but it’s not easy to execute. In our fast-paced, grocery store culture, you have to make a very conscious effort to design a life where getting quality food is a priority is really challenging. The rest pretty much takes care of itself.
