Hello My Body Is A Temple! Part 1

You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” – Zig Ziglar

Nothing can be truer when we talk about transforming our self, especially when it comes to weight-loss. When I started, I was far from great. I weighed in at 288lbs. I’m 6’1” and I was obese. I was on two different kinds of blood pressure medicine and I was tired all the time. I remember the day well, January 15, 2011. I was sitting at my mother-in-laws table and she was pushing a third plate of Cocido (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cozido) my way. Each plate contained this wonderful mixture of ham, sausage, chicken, potatoes and cabbage. I estimate each plate to have about 1500 calories – and I already downed two of them. I was feeling pretty crappy to be honest.

So, I pushed it away from me; much to the horror of my mother-in-law and declared – I AM GOING TO LOSE WEIGHT! Well, you can imagine that everyone stood and applauded and the support was inspiring. Not exactly. They had heard it all before. Heck, I even once on one of those low carb diets got down from 265lbs to 206lbs in a few months. Of course, the minute I stopped I ballooned up past my 265lb previous record to new highs.

This time I knew I had to do something different. I started with my own thoughts. I started to think that I wouldn’t be around much longer if I didn’t start to take care of myself. I remembered back to a time when I was an athlete, yes, I was an athlete and not a bad one at that. What happened? I stopped caring what I looked like. I wasn’t happy about a lot of things in my life and I turned to food. Some people turn to drinking, drugs, women, men, other things…me I turned to food. I ate until I was happy. Then, I looked at myself in the mirror and I wasn’t happy with what I saw and so, I ate some more. I was slowly killing myself.

I was an emotional eater. First thing I had to do was get my mind straight. I’ve always been a goal-oriented person. I set a goal. I wanted to get under 250lbs. That goal was difficult but not impossible. It was achievable but not too easy.

I knew I had to do it differently than a diet. Diets just do not work. Period. Why don’t they work? Mainly because they force us into eating foods we wouldn’t normally eat and they don’t teach us anything about what is really going on in our body. Oh and the food typically sucks. Some of the low-carb ones let you eat bacon as much as you want but not fruit? Come on, that doesn’t even make sense. I understand the chemistry behind it – basically you are starving your body of fuel so that it uses its reserves and you lose weight. But bacon over fruit? No, sorry.

BalCalories2

The wonderful thing is that your body is DESIGNED to optimize and to repair itself. If you overfeed it, it stores it up for a rainy day. If you underfeed, it takes from the storage and then starts to take from the non-critical areas, etc.

Transforming your body is therefore a pretty basic math problem. Calories In vs Calories Burned = weight maintenance. So basically if you take in MORE than you USE your body weight will increase (Storage). If you take in LESS than you USE your body weight will decrease (utilize fat for energy) and if you take in what you use, well you will maintain your weight.

It took me a year and I lost 100lbs and transformed my life completely. In my next article, I will tell you how I did it and how you can too!

 

JR Fuller

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Hello My Body Is A Temple!

 

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