You can have some chocolate, in fact it's good for you, as long as it is at least 75% cocoa.

Loosing weight is like PUA or anything else for that matter you practice it, get better and wander what all the fuss was about. Two simple concepts for loosing weight, hormonal balance, and calorie expenditure.

I'll keep hormonal balance simple and defined to one hormone that has probably the biggest impact on weight loss (or lack of) INSULIN. Insulin levels surge up from increased blood sugar levels by eating high sugar foods cut the candy, coke, cookies, chocolate and crap out and thats already enough for most people to loose weight. Some argue you should cut most carbs out your diet but truth be told this is completely unecessary I've put so money people on carb rich diets and they have had great success shedding 20+pounds just makesure they are good sources of carbs i.e. fibre rich keeping blood sugar levels constant throughout the day so foods like potatoes, brown bread pasta or rice are all good (mind pasta is surprisingly calorie dense)

Secondly and more importantly calorie expenditure. Basically everyone has a certain requirement of calories a day depending on multiple factors i.e. age, weight, height, body temperature, and activity level to name the main ones. This individual energy requirement is known as thw BMR (Basal metabolic rate) not to be confused with BMI which is Body Mass Index. Your BMR is basically the amount of calories your body needs a day to perform all its normal bodily functions i.e. working organs, a beating heart.

Find out what your BMR is (literally type BMR calculator on google, you'll find loads) This will give you a good indication of how many calories your body requires a day. To keep it simple either subtract 500 calories a day from this figure if you are sedentry and aim for this many calories a day (yes! this means looking on the back of packets all the time for the first week, but you soon learn to memorise these figures) Alternatively if you execise regularly and by that I mean atleest 5 times a week for half an hour per session stick to consuming the amount of calories the BMR calculator provides.

One excuse I hear way to often for not calorie counting is 'But this pack of *random food item* only gives the nutritional values per 100 grams, how do I measure how much to have?' Answer: Use scales?!?!?

Good luck.

Don't worry so much about gym. Gym does speed up weight loss a bit, but 90% of weight loss is your diet. Gym kicks in more when you want to gain muscle mass.

Diet is not too hard. Just count calories (it's annoying for the first week, then it's no brainer): you need 1800 kcal a day if you do office work. To lose weight, get less. You can easily make it with 1000-1200 a day.

To combat hunger eat calory-irrelevant snacks some times a day, eg: coffee,
tea (no packed ice tea, it contains lots of sugar), energy drinks etc.
Use coffee/energy drinks only to get over the wall, they shit you in the long run.

For example you can go:
* breakfast: 250ml cup of milk (no cookies), and one fruit if you want
* lunch: salad mix and a 500ml milkshake
* dinner: salad and some lean cheese or lean meat

Salad is cool because it's in the base block of the food pyramid, and it stuffs you without carrying too many cals.

Try to follow nutrition tips from competent sites rather than random beliefsm, e.g. see Drew Baye on Why Everything You Know About Nutrition And Exercise is Wrong for some more infos.

u have red that surely from weight watchers!!! coz that is bollocks.... ur tellin me that in a years training, cardio workout 5 days a week will only reduce ur weight by an added 10% to if u just eat properly

nonsense

Sorry but thats a complete pile of wank

If you diet and dont do any muscular conditioning you lose muscle mass, therfore reducing your resting BMR permanently--so in future you will actually find it easier to put weight on because the amount of calories you burn at rest is lower.

Dieting with no exercise is absolutly ridiculous and is the reason you see bitches day in and day out for years on this and that crappy fad diet trying to lose weight
exercise is not just about burning calories while exercising but actually carrying some muscle mass allows you to burn more calories while lieing in bed.

Calorie cutting is disproven, even mentioning cookies is banal, milkshakes are for children and full of sugar, cheese is fat not lean by definition, and the food pyramid has presided over decades of obesity proliferation. Either you mean well but didn't understand the video link you posted at all, or you're up to no good posting a link to daygame.com which I think Jaz et all, hate.

PS

I don't even know where to begin here! Props for coming out and saying all this man.

I'll preface what I say with the fact that I used to be 18-19 stones worth of lard and flab and I took it upon myself to change the bits of my life that I was unhappy with and the foremost of those was my diet and exercise regime. I'm now 15 stone and around 15% body fat which isn't too bad. Everything I say will have been from personal experience and I'll rank what I say in terms of importance to your goal.

1. Sort out your diet.

This doesn't necessarily mean giving up the things you like, but it may mean compromise. A bottle of Diet Coke has 3 calories in it. A bottle of regular Coke has 215 calories in it.

Look at food labels and learn how many calories are in things. Keep a food diary of how much you eat (foodfocus.co.uk is brilliant for this) and you'll soon get an idea of the things you need to cut out.

2. Calorific Deficits work

What worked for me was working out how many calories I needed to maintain weight and then eating less that that for a prolonged period of time. You can have days where you eat at maintenance or have a nice meal, but as long as on average, over the week, you have a deficit. You'll lose weight. I personally don't trust any diet which isn't based around that principle so for now my advice would be to keep it simple - Energy In vs Energy Out, if you want to subscribe to insulin, carb cycling etc. over and above that then fine, but don't lose sight of the fact that a calorific deficit is the basics, and carb cycling etc. is fine tuning.

Find some foods you like that can accomodate a calorie deficit. I'll give you some examples of things I like:

Stir fry: 200g chicken breast + Whatever vegetables you like + 80g Noodles + 1 pack of stir fry sauce = less than 600 calories.

Chicken Breast Sandwich: 2 x slices of medium sliced bread + 60g chicken breast = less than 300 calories.

3. Exercise

Do something you enjoy and will keep up. From the sounds of it, this isn't the gym and it doesn't have to be major sports etc. either. Something as simple as walking to work is a good start and you never know, as you become more active, you might fell like you have more energy for the gym.

One thing I would say however is to get some personal training sessions before you quit the gym. There are millions of ways to burn calories in a gym, over and above cardio machines. If you're sitting on an ellipictal machine for 20 minutues or longer and this is the crux of your workout, then chances are it's the fact that you're bored in the gym that's stopping you from going!

Anyways keep the faith. Don't try to do too much too soon, and remember that Rome wasn't built in a day! But at the same time don't lose sight of your goal bud!

Respectfully, I disagree! Where did youy read this?

The energy deficit theory is based on the first law of thermodynamics (I believe), however they conveniently forgot that a caveat on the law is that it requires a closed system. A human is obviously not a closed system.

It's not an accident that calorie counting as the method of weight loss has failed as the spread of obesity has trampled all over it..although there are myriad other factors of course.

Part of the problem is that it's too short sighted, it's not sustainable in most people, especially alongside exercise and a stressful career...etc. People tend to rebound against it and yo-yo diet, although healthier younger people can get away with it more easily perhaps. You definitely can lose weight with a caloric deficit, but that is not the same thing as whether you should, nor whether need a calorific deficit to lose weight, nor indeed whether it's good for you.

Charles Poliquin (arguably the worlds premier strength coach) has thoroughly disproven it, it's torn to bit's in a book called The Obesity Epidemic (author's name escapes me at the mo), there are quite a few well respected names who think it's specifically what you eat, not overeating itself.

You don't need to restrict your calories if you're not eating grains and other such crap, and lifting...etc, besides on natural food, satiety kicks in. It's one of those things that's ahead of it's time, and everyone will resist it because it's not what's been drummed into us for years.

Don't take my word for it, do your own research if you want and see what you come up with. I did, as well as taking the advice of one or two well placed specialists. I'm persuaded by the logic but have a look for yourself, you can get into all sorts around this to do with hormone regulation and whatnot, it's fascinating stuff.

PS

No, I didn't read that from weight watchers. No, I don't mean that cardio 5 times a week is useless. No, I don't mean that diet helps you keep or build mass.

I mean that danieljamie wants to lose weight, and that given the same amount of time and effort diet gets you results faster than exercise, so he better focus on that. A tough workout for unused people burns 600 kcal and takes 1-2 hours. With diet you can cut 1200 and save 1 hour of cooking.
Additionally, people often eat snacks and energy supplements after workouts for the "feel good" factor, which kills 50% of the set.

As to calories deficit, it's physics: a kilogram of fat is 7-8000 kcal, and your body works out of energy. You don't kick in enough, it will burn it from fat.

Bottom line: if you want to lose weight, diet is just simpler, faster and more trackable than exercise. If you have time and brains to implement well both, then welcome.