My Story (Part 3 of 4) - Getting Educated

The largest of life's mysteries is not discovering the meaning of life. It is figuring out how a multi-billion dollar industry could have arisen based upon the selling of knowledge that nearly every adult already has. Please raise your hand if you are unaware that to lose weight you have to consume fewer calories than you burn. No hands? Then why are all these jokers selling so many books, videos, seminars, etc.

Ok, I maybe it's not such a mystery.  We're all looking for the silver bullet, the magic plan that can make blood, sweat and tears feel like a pillow fight.  We all want that special chemical reaction that makes food hit your lips like pizza, but your stomach like steamed broccoli.  Oh, I get it now. I'd buy that book and probably have.  You just need to go to the fiction aisle, not the fitness aisle, of the bookstore to find it, assuming you can find the bookstore in the first place.

So if we can finally admit to ourselves that this equation is a natural law no different than gravity - I have seen any "how to" books on levitation recently - we can really start to get somewhere. The answer is to know how many calories you consume, know how many you are burning and keep the former less than the latter. This was a tough one for me initially because I had to get educated. I had no idea how portions related to calories or the relative differences between pizza and steamed broccoli. That led me to gorge on 2,000 calorie meals when I should have been living 2,000 calorie days. Getting educated changed everything.

I joined a free website called Sparkpeople.com and I logged EVERYTHING. Contrary to popular belief - at least in my household at the time - there are no calories that don't count and no times at which calories don't count. The calories count even if no one saw you eat them, if that piece of candy (or 4) was really small and even if you deserved them because that person on your job really pissed you off today and she is a real (fill-in-the-blank).  On SparkPeople, I found no exceptions for these things, or any others, so I had to do a legit count. And in the process, I became educated. And in the process, I lost 40+ pounds without even taking one step on a treadmill. That came later.

The point.  There is no way around the truth, so you need to get educated.  It's all hard. Losing weight is hard. Keeping the weight off is hard. Being fat is hard. 

Choose your hard.