Oatmeal is a healthy, warm and filling way to start your day. (CU Independent/Stephanie Davis)
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No matter where we go, we are constantly exposed to the skinny-minis, perfect-bodied celebrity bombshells. And no matter how much we try to lose weight, from toning our muscles at the gym to cutting carbohydrates, sweets and fats from our diets, attaining that which is deemed perfect is unlikely.
I am not a nutritionist, a dietitian or anything of the sort. I may not be qualified to give health advice. I can, however, as an ordinary young woman, offer my experience with weight loss and the tips I picked up along the way.
Be an avid exerciser. This does not mean pitching a tent at the recreation center and working off your butt for hours on end. Simply doing cardio and weight training five days a week, for 90 minutes, will certainly guarantee you results. Sure, you might be reading, asking yourself who has 90 minutes to spare when you are either in class and studying most of the day. If you cut the time spent on Facebook chatting, stalking or worst of all, farming, 90 minutes can easily be spared.
But getting to the gym is only the first step. You need to prepare yourself mentally before going there. Make sure you have a good, new mix of music that will keep rhythm with your heart. Condition yourself. Dilly-dallying on the treadmill rather than speed walking or running is not going to burn nearly as much fat. The way in which you lift weights is also important. Use weights that are comparable to your strength, otherwise you are likely to pull a muscle, which will only make the workout more difficult and/or discourage you from going back.
The next step, of course, is eating a balanced diet. Everyone’s metabolism rates differ; therefore, there is no one diet that can possibly be universal. But, I have come to realize, that it is the type of foods we crave that get the best of us. From sweets to salts to sodas to caffeine, each has a hidden agenda to pad your thighs, buns or bellies.
Cutting foods completely out of a diet is the number one mistake. Everything is OK in moderation. When you deprive your appetite of the one thing it yearns for, you are constantly trying to accommodate it with something related. Yet, in doing so, you continue to eat foods that your body really does not want and in turn you eat more than you should have in the first place. Though many diets advise supplementing, in my experience, by simply cutting back, the pounds slip off.
Also, the portions of food that we eat play a huge role in regulating our weight. Yet minimizing portions to only two meals a day does not help in the least. In the morning and afternoon, our bodies have much more energy than they do in the evenings.
I love Greek salads that are loaded with salt, olive oil and feta cheese. But, if I have it for lunch with a couple pieces of toast, and maybe even a cookie for desert, I will still be fairly full by the time dinner rolls around and can just keep it light.
Some diet regiments suggest that the fastest way to lose weight is to solely drink liquids, cutting food out completely. Juices, green tea and coffee are by no means worth the stomach churns. As a diet opportunist, constantly trying the newest diet trends, these particular ones teach you nothing more than to starve yourself silly, only to get repaid by the runs, a pale face and the loss of a few pounds. These pounds, unfortunately, are regained within a week since your body thinks it needs to retain as much food as possible before you think to torture it again.
Instead, fibrous foods generally do the trick. Eat lots and lots of prunes and oatmeal. Filling, regulating and delicious!
This is my fourth semester at CU. I have since lost 27 pounds by doing just this. I cannot guarantee your weight loss will be more, less or as much as mine. But give it a try. What’s one more diet? I know I’ll be testing out a new one next week.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Julia Blyumkin at Julia.blyumkin@colorado.edu.
