Weight Loss, Fat Loss, Lose Body Fat

Why am I fat?

You're looking for weight loss tips, fat loss advice, ways to trim the excess body fat. Cool.

You are fat because you take in more food than you can use, and the extra has to go somewhere.

I've heard that. I want the real reason.

That is the real reason.

If you want to lie to yourself, you probably don't want to be here. Go someplace where they'll happily tell you that you have "a glandular problem" (you do, you're stuffing in more calories than your glands can handle, but that's not what you meant), and they'll also happily sell you a magic pill to:

• make the extra calories just go away or,
• trick your body to not absorb all the extra you eat and drink

Yeah! One of those!

Sorry. No magic here. No pills. Weight loss stops when you either cut your intake or increase your output ... and we don't mean how much you crap. We mean how much you exert.

Exert? EXERT? You mean, like... (gasp) Exercise?

Yup. Like exercise.

But wait. It gets worse.

Worse?

Yeah.

Sorry.

We don't like it any better than you do. Weight loss, fat loss, body fat reduction, whatever you want to call it, is not much fun.

There's no good news

Sure there is. The good news is that it can be done. You can rearrange things slightly, in your life, and in a few months you'll weigh considerably less than you do now. A pound of fat is 3500 calories. If you take in 3500 calories more than you expend - over any period of time - you gain a pound of fat.

If you take in 3500 calories less than you expend - over any period of time, then you lose a pound of fat.

If the difference occurs over a week, then you gain or lose that pound in a week. If the difference between intake and output takes a month to happen, then you gain or lose that pound in a month.

If you are attempting to reduce the intake by that much, then it's a small sacrifice every day, that adds up over a month.

If you are keeping the intake the same, but attempting to use an extra 3500 calories in a month, then that's barely more than 100 additional calories that you burn in a day. For somebody working in a multi-story office building, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, several times per day, can make that difference - depends on the number of floors. Obviously, if your building is 60 floors, you don't walk 60 flights of stairs. You take the elevator to within a few floors of your destination and then walk the rest.

If you are trying to combine a reduction of intake with an increase of expenditure, then both become easier. OR, you can do as much reduction and as much increase as you would have done alone, but get twice the result in the same amount of time or the same result (a pound lost) in half the time.

So there's hope, then?

There's always hope.

But not magic.

I really, really wanted some magic

Don't we all... but weight loss, especially the kind that doesn't rebound, is not magic. It takes a bit of work. You actually have to pay attention. You have to make some changes.

All I'm hearing is the downside

Um... you're living the downside. You'd hardly be here looking for Men's Health Tips on weight loss, fat loss, body fat reduction ... whatever... if you were slim, would you?

So it's a matter of which one(s) of many reasons actually brought you here.

Be honest with yourself - if you are a middle-aged guy and you are ... er... hefty, then chances are you've run into one or more of the usual reasons for being concerned about your weight:

• you join the guys for a weekly (-ish) game, and you can't keep up
• your wife has been making pointed remarks
• your doctor has been making pointed remarks
• your doctor has been getting test results that don't look so good
• your doctor has been making noises that sound like "pre-diabetic", "hypertension", "diet"
• you can't see your shoes when you look down
• your waist size is bigger than your inseam measurement
• when you buckle your belt, you have to go by feel to decide which belt hole is engaged
• there's a somewhat stretched hole in your belt that you don't use any more
• you've had to get a new belt and the old one wasn't worn out
• you got a new belt because you didn't like being constantly reminded by the old one, with the hole(s) that you can't use any more
• whenever you wear "loose" shorts and try to walk with them, they "black hole" (the legs of the shorts get sucked up into your crotch or your ass, like they were pulled into a black hole... nothing escapes the enormous pull of the black hole...)
• anywhere you go, your gut arrives before the rest of you
• your legs completely fill out your pants and are pressing your pocket contents through the fabric
• you've stopped wearing pleated-front pants, because the pleats don't pleat anymore - they're completely expanded out all the time
• you should have stopped wearing pleated-front pants, because the pleats don't pleat anymore...
• you haven't got the energy you used to have
• you snore like a like a nest of chainsaws (that's one of the things the wife has been saying, and you are starting to believe her)
• you have to get your clothes in the "Big and Tall" section of the store... and you aren't really that tall
• your buddies (or your siblings) have made jokes about your ass or your belly "blotting out the sun"
• you've got "man titties"
• you can't get out of an easy-chair without using your hands
• your feet, knees, hips, or lower back (or some combination of them) ache when you stand a lot, ache when you get out of a chair, ache when you get out of bed
• you're starting to experience "arch problems" with your feet, and orthotic shoes or inserts are recommended
• when you climb a flight of stairs, you're really glad there's not another flight to climb - if it's more than one floor, you always take the elevator
• after just a flight or two of stairs, you are huffing and your face is flushed
• you always leave the front of your suit/sports jacket open, 'cuz the button shows the strain if you close it (if you even can close it...)
• your pants wear out in the crotch long before any other part (except maybe the knees)
• you haven't been body-building, but you've still had to go up a neck size
• your wedding ring seems to have gotten smaller
• your arms are no shorter, but the steering wheel seems to be getting closer regardless
• you have to have a tilt steering wheel, just to fit your thighs under it
• . . .

It seems that you have good reason to inquire about weight loss. If you are experiencing even a few of the things in that list, your health is being compromised - not might be - IS .

If you experience many of those "symptoms" of being fat, then buddy you are in trouble, and your quality of life is suffering. Like most people, if something sneaks up on you over time, you get accustomed to it, you adapt. It might not be great, but you put up with it.

The good news is, it doesn't have to be that way. Weight loss will cure a lot of your health and quality-of-life problems. Fat loss will make you the man you once were. And it's not all that hard to do.

It's not?

The hard part is admitting it to yourself - not simply saying the words "I'm fat and I need to slim down", but actually taking those words seriously.

Well that's not so hard - I do have a mirror, you know, and a scale

That's a start. But the longer you procrastinate, make excuses, accommodate your "handicap", the harder it is to reverse.

Have you seen some of our other pages, on hypertension? On Snoring? On backache? You can suffer any of those without being fat, but it's far more likely that you are fat if you do suffer those afflictions. Or, said another way, if you are fat, then the chances that you suffer those afflictions (likely more than one) are very high.

It's also important where you keep it.

Keep what?

Your fat.

Well that should be pretty obvious...

Yes and no.

If you are like most guys, you carry the bulk (no pun intended) of your fat on your front. You might have heard or read that that's not a good place for it. Somebody with the same amount of excess fat, but spread more evenly over his body, is in less trouble with respect to heart disease and diabetes ... maybe stroke, too.

The real problem, apparently, is not what hangs out front, but what is inside among your organs. If you are carrying a lot of fat in there, then you are in line for many of those fat-guy problems. Organs don't like to be crowded and squished.

The MHT page	What the page is about
About all the magic weight-loss tricks	The bad news you didn't want
Belly Fat	What's extra bad about carrying fat on your belly
How to lose fat quickly	...just what it says
Weight-loss introduction	(This page)

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If this weight loss page wasn't where you wanted to be, then from this 'weight loss' page, go back to the home page.

PLEASE be aware that by using this site you agree to our Terms and Conditions. So listen up, tubby; you need a dose of strong medicine, perhaps an emetic like our Terms and Conditions It's part of your pennance - or at least it'll get your mind off of food for a while.