Hey guys! In this post I’m going to talk about my recent experience with weight loss, the basic weight loss principles that have helped me, and also tricks that I’ve been using to shed the pounds. First, I want to let you guys know that I’m not a weight loss expert. But I want to share some things with you guys that have helped me lose weight. This subject is something that I’m really interested in right now because for the last couple years I haven’t been really paying attention to what I was eating and how often I was exercising. I was focused on other areas of life and during this time, I gained some unwanted weight. I would say that I’ve been a fairly slender person most of my life. However, over the last couple years I’ve gotten a little pudgy, I would have considered myself skinny-fat. What I mean by skinny-fat is that I’ve never been someone who put on a lot of muscle mass. I’ve always been good at cardio type exercises and endurance training because it’s just the body type that I’ve had. Having this body type has helped me to “hide” body fat pretty easily because I haven’t really been a big bulky type of person. When I gain fat it’s usually around my mid-section. Recently, I noticed that I had gained more weight than I would like to admit. My wife who is a personal trainer and who has studied nutrition, measured my body fat percentage by the pinching method. This can be a pretty uncomfortable way to calculate your bodyfat percentage but in my opinion getting pinched can be one of the most accurate ways to measure body fat. I knew that I was the fattest that I’ve ever been and sure enough the fat pinch measurement proved it. I was over 21% body fat, which is very high for me. Just two years ago I was around 16%. Seeing that my body fat percentage was so high was an eye opener. It really woke me up and gave me the sense that I needed to do something about it.

Just last month, in January, the company that I work for put on a biggest loser challenge that started, from the time of this recording, about 6 and a half weeks ago. Knowing that I was the fattest that I have ever been I thought it would be a good idea to enter the challenge as a motivator to help me lose weight. So far, in the last 6 weeks or so, I’ve been able to lose about 15 pounds. I know that’s not a lot of weight to some people, but I’ve been able to really tell that I’ve lost weight, and it has felt like a significant amount to me.  I hope to lose even more before the challenge ends in about 5 weeks from now. At the end of the challenge I’ll have my wife do another body fat percentage measurement to see how much overall bodyfat that I lost.

So, lets jump into the things that I’ve learned over the last couple months that have helped me burn off the pounds. The biggest key to fat loss is regularly having a  calorie deficit. What this means is that you burn more calories during the day than you consume. One way of thinking about it is calories out versus calories in. The latest fad diet doesn’t really matter. The only way any weight loss/fat loss diet is going to work is if you have a calorie deficit. If you have more calories come in from consuming food than went out your body from expending energy, then it’s simple, your body is going to store those extra calories as fat. On the other hand, if your body burns more calories than you consumed, then your body will need to burn fat in order to make up for the lack of consumed calories.

Let’s consider for a moment the burning calories part of that equation for a second. Your body burns calories just being alive.