Greg's Running Blog

I watched the New York City Marathon on the big screen at my local running store with some fellow runners and it was an awesome experience. I ran an easy 5 mile run before the race started and I was feeling pretty good sitting down and enjoying the show.

The race started and we saw the elite women running at a blistering pace. Well it was a blistering pace for us, lowly amateur runners but in reality the pace at the NYC Marathon was pretty slow this year. There were no course records broken despite ideal running conditions and there was a huge lead pack in both men’s and women’s races at the half way point which is a clear indicator of a slow starting pace.

What I noticed during the race was just how much the camera angle would affect the perceived pace of the runners. When they showed them from the front they all looked like they were jogging at an easy pace. And honestly it is not far from the truth. To those guys/ladies, running 5 minute per mile pace probably feels pretty easy. But as soon as the camera showed them from the side you could see the tremendous length of their strides and just how long their reach was. They looked like gazelles, a truly amazing sight for anyone to see. Their form just seemed truly incredible and effortless. I could not get enough of it. Made me feel like a total slow poke, which is the truth when I compare myself to these elites.

The race didn’t really get interesting until the second half when tactics and surges started to develop and the lead pack started to fall apart. I greatly enjoyed the women’s battle for first where US marathon debutante Shalane Flanagan ended up with the shorter end of the stick and finished second. I was watching the race in the company of former marathoner and Olympian Kyle Heffner who qualified for the 1980 Olympic Marathon team with a 2:10:55. It was a true shame he could not go to the Olympics as the US boycotted the 1980 Moscow games. He shared some great insight about marathon racing strategy and how had Shalane had some more experience with the distance she very well could have won the race.

The men’s race’s big event was when Haile Gebrselassi, arguably the worlds best long distance runner, dropped out of the race at mile 16 on the Queensboro Bridge. He stopped running and he was out of the race. At that point we did not know that this would be the last time to see him run in a race as an hour after the marathon finish he announced his retirement from running. Haile was such a nice and genuine guy, it broke my heart to see him fighting back the tears as he announced his retirement.

The two other men that most people were following were Jared the Subway guy who allegedly ran over 550 miles to train for the NYC Marathon and Edison Pena, the Chilean miner who ran a daily dose of 6 miles in in the mine while trapped underground and decided to run New York City Marathon as a publicity stunt.

As Dennis Miller would say, now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but.. well, here is my brutally honest as usual take on Pena and Jared:

Jared never wanted to run a marathon. He is not a runner. He did it because of his binding contract to Subway and because the corporate monkeys told him to. I an interview in March this is what he said:

Any plans for doing other races?
I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out what this whole runner’s high is all about. Maybe next I’ll train for the national ping-pong tournament. I might have a shot at winning that one. I’m joking, of course.

Just a week before New York this is what he said:

Do you think you’ll do more marathons?
Jared: I love to run but I don’t see myself doing more marathons. I will continue to run, doing 5 or 6 mile runs because they don’t leave me so exhausted {as the long training runs} where the day is shot. Before this year, I had never run a mile in my life. I am excited to do this once, but I’m not sure if I like the long distance.

These words are obviously not a runner’s sentiments. These are words someone who’s forced into doing something against their will would say. Now mind you that it’s not a sub 4 hour marathon or a marathon at any pace that makes you a runner. It’s the constant pursuit of getting better and striving for improvement and running with that in mind. I think Jared absolutely lacks that commitment and hence he’s not a runner.

As for his training, he and the corporate PR engine behind him, they half assed it. He ran 3 times a week, one easy run, one “tempo” and one long run. That’s it. He never built up the endurance for a marathon. Not on that schedule. He is a Subway ambassador and this was his job for the last 5 months; to get ready to run New York and promote Subway along the way. He had no 40 hour work week outside of it. He had all the resources he wanted. Hell, he met Meb Keflezighi and got pointers, whatever good it did for someone like Jared.

So Jared put in a half assed training effort and got a half assed marathon result. I think it was to be totally expected. Last year almost half a million people completed a marathon. Out of that, about 278 thousand were men. Of those 278 thousand, 78.1% of them ran the marathon under 5 hours. That puts Jared smack in the bottom 20% of marathon finishers times. If that’s not abysmal I don’t know what is. But quite honestly for the people who are inspired by Jared it does not matter whether he ran a 5:13 or a 3:40. It would have been all the same. Jared is a marathoner and that is all that matters to them. Never mind that the average 32 year old guy who finishes a marathon does so under 4:18.

As for the Chilean runner, I’m not at all surprised that he finished with both knees iced and barely hobbling it in for a 5:40. Running 6 miles a day every day, if it’s true, is not a bad mileage base. It’s 42 miles a week which is right about the same weekly mileage I averaged for my marathon cycle. But the lack of any kind of run longer than 6 miles will only get you so far. A 6 mile run does not prepare you for a 26.2 mile run. His publicity stunt was probably just as stupid as Jared’s but at least he has the excuse of not getting the training and support that Jared received.

I guess I’m a glass half empty guy and all I see is two pathetically failed publicity stunts but in the case of Pena, as someone told me today, he should just be happy to have a glass, regardless of where the water level lies. He survived that terrible ordeal living under ground and barely escaping death. Running a marathon somehow does not come into my mind when I think trapped miners.

Feel free to agree or disagree with my assessment of these two celebrity runners, as Dennis Miller would say: of course that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.

It is hard to believe that it has been a year already since I have started my transformation and decided to change my life forever. It has been an exciting and successful journey full of new challenges and new experiences. I’m not at a destination, today is just another day of the journey.

I have achieved a lot in the last year and I’m feeling better than ever before. I have a year’s worth of data that shows my progress numerically.

I started out at 237 lbs and 38% body fat. I’m currently 165 lbs and 12.2% body fat according to a 7 point caliper measurement from last Saturday. I have lost over 70 lbs of pure fat and maintained pretty much my entire muscle mass.

I worked out tremendous amounts over the last year. I walked four times for a total of 4 and a half hours. I used the elliptical machine at work and at home 93 times for a total of 74 hours. I have burned over 46,000 calories with walking and the elliptical machine. But these numbers are nothing compared to what I did with running.

Since January I ran 250 times for a total of 1,426 miles in just shy of 189 hours. I have burned 168,000 calories. I have completed numerous races, I even ran a marathon with a Boston Qualifying time no less.

I counted calories and tracked my caloric intake for 6 straight months where I wrote down every single food item I ate. I put myself on a 1,800 calorie diet and stuck with it until I was happy with my weight.

But none of these numbers compare to the improvement in how I feel about myself and how I feel about my life. I’m feeling better than ever in my entire adult life. I’m happy, full of energy and I can’t wait to get up tomorrow at 5:30AM to go out and run again. My wife is happy that I no longer say that “I don’t want to go to the zoo ’cause my feet will hurt from all the walking”. My kids are happy that I can run around the yard with them and I can throw them around with joy.

My transformation was not a stunt. It was not a diet fad. It was not a “I want to run a marathon in my life just so I can say I did it”. It was a lifestyle change. And I have the bitter reminders in my family photo album to make me remember just how miserable I looked a mere year ago. There is absolutely no way that I will ever go back to being that guy. Ever!

So I would say that at this point I’m at 1 year down, another 50+ to go…

I’m not sure if any of you noticed but today I have changed my blog title. What used to read “Greg’s Weight Loss Blog – My Transformation From Fat To Fit In 9 Months” now reads “Greg’s Running Blog – My Transformation from fat to fit and running”. Yup, it’s official; my blog is no longer about weight loss. It’s about running.

I hope I won’t loses many readers over it, I’ll still blog about diet and exercise and personal fitness, the title change is really an indication as to where I am in my life now and how I feel. I no longer feel that my main concern is weight loss, I’m more into running now. The fact that I’m maintaining my weight is just a side effect not the cause any more. And with that I think it’s time to open a new chapter in my life. That is all for today, short and sweet.

As you know by now, the 115th Boston Marathon registration opened at 9:00AM on November 18th and promptly closed at 5:03PM on November 18th, a mere 8 hours after it opened. This unprecedented pace of registration, last year it took 8 weeks to fill the 20,000 spots, took the whole running community by surprise and opened up a can of worms, uproars, discussions about qualifying standards and questions about charity running and sponsor spots that require no qualifications to be met. Today BAA Executive Director Guy Morse gave a statement about the registration situation in a video newscast.

If you watch the video, it pretty much states the obvious facts and offers no consolation for the people who were left out and it provides no resolution for future races. It does promise a review of the qualifying and registration process for 2012 but it certainly makes no promises as to what would improve, if anything.

Since I ran a Boston Qualifying time and managed to register as 127th registrant by being glued to the computer yesterday morning and clicking the buttons in prompt order I’m one of the fortunate ones who will get a chance at running Boston in 2011. But what could be, and more importantly what should be, done to make the qualification and registration more equal and make everyone else happy. The biggest contention seem to have been around charity/corporate entries without qualifications.

The Boston Marathon field is limited to 25,000 runners. Of the 25,000 runners approximately 20,000 are what I would call legitimate qualifiers who met the qualifying time requirements and registered through the BAA open registration on November 18th. The remaining 5,000 consist about 1,500 charity slots and 3,500 corporate sponsor slots.

The sponsor entries are distributed amongst companies that foot the bill for the event, towns that the course runs through and other similar entities. These entrants require no qualification but they still need to pay for their entry fee of $130. The charity entries consist of entries given to non-profit organizations which provide entries into the Boston Marathon for a donation pledge in return. Chicago, NYC, London and other marathons do the same thing as well to help charities raise money. Runners who enter through the program are not held to a qualifying standard.

Things have gotten pretty heated on message boards, facebook and blogs between runners who qualified for Boston and runners who did not but would run it via one of the above two programs. Legitimate qualifiers who got shot out feel that the charity runners are taking their well deserved spots and there should be no “charity cases” at Boston.

My opinion is that people have to look at it from a different perspective. Instead of thinking of Boston being open to 25,000 entrants 5,000 of which get “stolen” from legitimate qualifiers, I’d rather look at it as Boston field is limited to 20,000 legitimate entrants and there are 5,000 extra spots awarded to corporate sponsors and charities. So the spots that are used by charities are not taken from qualifying runners, they were never there for the taking to begin with. They were always meant to be for charities/corporations. I think looking at it in such light makes it a lot more reasonable.

I think there is a legitimate need to have corporate sponsor spots at Boston. Companies forking over hundreds of thousands of dollars to make the Boston Marathon happen deserve something. If anything we should thank them that they enable such a great event to happen instead of dissing them. It’s not unlike people flying in first class on an airplane. I appreciate that there are people on first class, they allow me to buy a cheap ticket on coach.

I also think that charity sponsorship falls well within the realm of Boston. Most races I ran so far, big or small, were for some sort of cause. Making Boston a partially charity event allows it to be for lots of causes. And people who enter through a charity have to raise several thousand dollars for their charities to be able to run Boston. It is a win-win situation for everyone. Boston gets a couple extra runners and those extra runners collect tremendous amounts of money for some great causes.

I happened to talk with several people tonight at my local running store’s fall fashion evening about running, heart rate based training and marathon training in general. One girl said her goal is to finish a marathon in December and she will never run the distance ever again after that. She is training with our training group and she just wants to run the marathon distance once so she can have it under her belt and call herself a marathoner. Her A goal is a sub 5hr finish, B goal is to finish with no walking and C goal is just to finish. After that she will turn back into a recreational fitness runner who will run three times a week for general fitness and an occasional 5K but she will not train specifically for a race. I find nothing wrong with it but I would certainly not think of her as a Boston marathoner if she decided to run Boston on a charity entry.

Another person I talked with was the regional Adidas rep. She was carrying an Adidas BAA Marathon bag and we talked about Boston a bit. I asked her if she gets a Boston entry from Adidas. She said she did but she has to pay the $130 entry fee just like everyone else. And then she promptly added that she does have a Boston Qualifying time of 3:2x so she could run it as a regular entrant as well as long as she was quick enough on the trigger to register. To me there is no difference in my perception of her whether she runs Boston as a corporate sponsored entrant or a regular entrant or actually whether she runs it at all. To me she’s a 3:20 marathoner which is impressive all by itself regardless.

Having said all this, I would not want to run Boston on a corporate or charity sponsorship. Why? Because I personally think it would take away from the accomplishment tremendously. I think it’s a lot different to say “I qualified for Boston and I ran it” than “I completed Boston even though I didn’t really qualify for it”. I think the Boston prestige and allure comes from the fact that you have to qualify to get in. The Boston Marathon is just as much about the journey to Boston as it is about the destination. Completing Boston a non-qualified way might impress your average cubicle dweller just like completing a 5-6hr marathon would. But other runners, I for sure, would think that maybe those people should stick with 5K and 10K fun runs instead. Boston, or any marathon for that matter, is not for everyone and certainly no one is entitled to running it. It is a prestigious race and it should be treated as such. Buying your way in, regardless of how great of a cause you collected the money for, is not something that sits well with me. But if someone wants to run it like that, who am I to stop them if the rules allow it?

I actually admire people who feel no shame in hitting up their friends and family for money to be able to run a race. I would feel uncomfortable putting out a fundraiser sheet at my workplace for my son’s school. But that is just how I feel about fund raising in general.

A week ago I ran Tyler Rose Marathon and finished with a 3:07:26 which was fast enough to qualify me to enter the 2011 and 2012 Boston Marathon. To run Boston, one of the most if not the most prestigious, Marathon you have to qualify which means I had to run a marathon under 3 hours and 10 minutes. Technically it’s 3:10:59 since they give you 59 seconds “extra”. The older you get the slower your qualifying time gets. Women also get an extra 30 minutes over men in their corresponding age group.

Boston registration opened at 9:00AM Eastern Time today and it promptly closed by 5:03PM reaching the field limit of 25,000 entrants. Last year it took about 6 weeks for Boston to sell out, today it went in a bit over 6 hours. In 2009 it didn’t sell out until February of 2009. Today’s sudden shutout has raised a lot of questions and concerns over the internet. Some said that “Boston Marathon is the new Justin Bieber”. This morning certainly felt more like I was trying to get front row seats to see Michael Jackson on Ticketmaster than trying to register for a race.

I got in front of my computer around 8:55AM when the Boston Athletics Association website was redirecting all their traffic to the marathon registration page that showed registration would open at 9:00AM. At 9:01 I refreshed the page and I was prompted to enter all my information, name, age, gender, qualifying time, address and credit card information. Things went smooth until the last page at which point I got an error message. I was told that I should go back and try to resend my information as the server returned an error. I had to try hitting the back button and refresh over a dozen times with no success. I went to the BAA home page again only to find it reporting that “Server Busy”. It looked like the BAA site was under a DOS attack when in reality it was just under the incredible load of Boston hopefuls trying to snag one of the roughly 22,000 entries.

I went back to my form again and tried refreshing a couple more times. Finally, at 9:09AM I got a confirmation about my successful registration with a submission ID number of #127. I was the 127th successful registrant for the 2011 Boston Marathon! Unbeknown to me I was also $2,080 lighter. When I refreshed the final confirmation page my credit card got pre-authorized for $130 every time and now my credit card account shows 16x$130 temporary authorizations from “BAA – Hopkinton” I know it’s only temporary but it sure makes me happy to have enough limit on my card to handle such a demand.

Once I registered for the race I had to find some flights and lodging for my family. I snagged some half decent airline tickets for $1,300 for my family of four and after some scrimmage and search I finally found a hotel that wasn’t terribly far from the finish and was “reasonably” priced at $254/night for four nights. So I’m $2,500+ in the hole so far and I haven’t even left my house let alone did anything in Boston. I guess when they say that the Boston Marathon has over $120M effect on the Boston economy they aren’t kidding!

Fortunately my co-worker, who qualified with a 3:26 a couple months ago, also registered at lunch as the 15,xxx registrant. I’m super excited about heading to Boston next April to run a marathon and enjoy some great times with my family.

I’m also very happy that I didn’t change my plan early summer when BAA announced that they were moving the registration date from September to 10/18/10. At first I thought that it would give me some extra time and I should attempt a BQ in November at the Fort Worth Marathon on my home turf and ultra flat and fast course instead of trying in Tyler, TX on a hilly and tough course. Had I done that I would not be going to Boston in 2011 for the 115th Boston Marathon.

It’s almost over! My marathon training plan is coming to an end and I will get a chance to test my endurance abilities. For the past 17+ weeks I have been following Hal Higdon’s Advanced Marathon training plan and in 4 days I’ll be running the inaugural Tyler Rose Marathon in Tyler, Texas on 10/10/10. It is the same day most people will travel to Chicago to run the same distance.

I chose a “local”, if you consider driving 3 hours and staying in a hotel overnight local, race as I wanted something that didn’t cost an arm and a leg to fly to and I was also looking for a marathon that was not too crowded as I will be running to finish with a Boston Qualifying time or better. Boston Qualifying time for me means running a marathon under 3:10:59 which means running it faster than 7:17 minutes/mile. If I look at my recent training runs I would say I have this in the bag and running a 7:17 would mean I’m sandbagging it. Given my recent race results I should be shooting for something closer to the 3 hour mark, a 6:52/mile pace. But I don’t think there is anything sandbagging about running a marathon.

During the last couple of weeks of taper my mind was going 100 miles an hour to decide on a marathon pace. “Should I play it safe and run 7:15 pace? Should I go balls to the wall and attempt a sub 3 marathon that I’m theoretically capable of? Should I go with something in between?” This is what they call taper madness. Not only I’m running less and less but I have all this time to keep thinking and playing different, both realistic and unrealistic scenarios in my head about how to run the marathon. I have also been checking the weather information for Tyler and it’s not looking all that great.

Right now it looks like the race will start in the mid 50s and temperatures will rise to closer to mid 70s by the end of the race. I also finally came to my senses and asked the most important question from myself: “What’s my goal with this race?”. And the answer to that question is that I want to qualify for Boston. It takes 7:15 to qualify so there is really no point in me attempting to pull off a sub 3 marathon at this point. I will have plenty other times to achieve that goal. So I finally decided that I will play it safe and I will run 7:10 pace up until the 20 mile mark at which point I will re-evaluate how I feel and whether I should attempt to run anything faster than that for the last 6 miles. If I can pick up the pace great if I can’t I still have a BQ finish in my sight as long as I keep my pace above 7:30 for the last 6.2 miles.

The only other thing that kept my mind preoccupied for the last two weeks was nutrition and weight gain. I cut back on my breakfast, I’m only eating 200 calories instead of my usual 400 calories. I also try to cut back on the snacks and eat only 100 calorie snacks instead of the 200 calorie ones. As of today I’m also starting my carb-up plan. I’m going easier on the protein and fats and trying to consume more carbohydrates. So far I think I have my weight under control but it is definitely a balancing act to get things right. Don’t eat too much but eat enough to fuel my body just right and keep my glycogen stores full.

So that’s pretty much what taper madness feels like. If you think this post was just a jumble of thoughts, it is not much different from the actual state of my mind where ideas and scenarios just keep going in full circle. I’m really looking forward Sunday morning when I can finally put and end to this madness and just go out and run.

When you’re writing a weight loss blog being a loser is a good thing. It’s actually a great thing. But when you’re writing about entering an on-line video challenge being a loser is not a good thing. If you followed my blog for any length of time you’d know that I have completed quite a drastic transformation in the past year and I have lost over 70 lbs, started running and got pretty good at it. Just as I was finishing up my transformation and calling my initial project complete Polar USA has opened up a video challenge where all you had to do was send in an inspirational video showing how Polar has made a difference in your life. I felt I was in a perfect position to show off my hard work and let everyone know how far I came 9 months. I put together a video for the challenge and submitted it to Polar.

My video got picked as one of the finalists by Polar but then they did something that I didn’t expect; they put the videos up for public vote on Facebook and may the video with the most votes win. I never had a Facebook account. I never thought I would want one. I thought it was a total waste of time. But because of the Polar challenge I made an account and tried to gather friends so they would vote for me. I also promoted my video on message boards I visited frequently and on Twitter where I became quite active over the past couple of months.

By the time the public voting was open I had a whopping 18 friends on Facebook, most of whom was family. I asked every one of them to vote for me, multiple times so I could win this challenge. My other problem was that while this voting part of the challenge was happening I was overseas in Europe and at our resort in the Mediterranean there was absolutely no internet connection. While it was nice to unplug and enjoy the family it seriously hurt my chances of promoting my video and asking others to vote for me.

Bottom line is that I did not win the challenge. Some guy washing his bicycle was deemed better by the public. I’m a loser. I still think that based on merit I had a lot better video but he probably had 400+ Facebook friends voting for him. I guess I better start hoarding Facebook friends so the next time I enter such a challenge I can win it based on popularity. If you think I’m bitter I’m really not, I still got runner up which meant I have received a Polar FT7 Heart Rate Monitor Watch. Plus the winner of the challenge offered to donate the $1,000 prize money for Haiti relief which is certainly not what I would have done with it. I don’t know what I will do with it as my RS800cx is a lot more sophisticated and does a phenomenal job at tracking my workouts.

Wow, it has been a really really long time since I last posted anything on my blog. No, I haven’t died and gone to heaven, I just simply didn’t have time to do updates even though a lot has been going on with me lately. I went to Europe for 2+ weeks which took up the larger part of August and there was just no way I was going to even attempt to do blog posts while abroad. Never mind the fact that the hotel I have stayed at in Mallorca, Spain had no internet connection at all which made it extremely difficult to keep in touch with anyone let alone blog.

But I am back in town, I actually have been back in town for over a week now, and I’m ready to bring some long awaited blog posts your way if you care to hang around. I’m still very tired from the trip and all the running but I will try to posts a couple of interesting and neat updates in the following weeks.

I’m not much of a rebel but today I did something naughty. I drew graffiti all over my neighborhood. Well don’t think for a second that I suddenly turned into a right brain artist overnight because I didn’t! I just simply had enough of the inconsistent distance measurements and estimating paces that could be off by 7-10 seconds per mile because of GPS and/or footpod discrepancies. So I went and bought a totally basic bike speedometer and some orange spray paint.

The speedometer is basic but it does everything I needed which is to measure distance accurately. I set it up initially so one revolution was 1 meter and set it in metric mode this way every 0.001 km was one revolution exactly. This way I could use it as a simple revolution counter. I rolled on my bike 50 revolutions then took a 100 ft tape measure and measured the distance. It was 329.5 ft. So I knew that each revolution of the wheel was actually 2.008 meter which is more accurate than the 2.030 meter the manual of the speedometer indicated for my wheel size. This method is actually very similar to the method that is used to certify running courses. Once I calibrated my speedometer I rode to the hardware store to pick up some bright orange paint.

With the paint in hand, helmet on head, speedometer calibrated and reset I took off from my house and marked every quarter mile on my running route. My route generally involves 1 mile running out then do a mile loop around another neighborhood then do a 0.5 mile out and 0.5 mile back leg and keep repeating the 1 mile loop and the 0.5 mile out and back until I rack up enough miles to finish off with the last mile to run home. The problem was that the 1 mile out segment wasn’t quite 1 mile and the loop was only 0.95 miles so I never knew just how much I had to lengthen my run on the 0.5 mile out and back segment to make up for the shortage.

Now I know since I measured everything out down to the thousandth of mile and my new route marking is just perfect. I can run any distance with 0.5 mile resolution from the house and get perfect mile splits. I already ran 3 miles on my new measured route tonight and ironically my footpod measured 2.998 miles with the calibration value loaded in it and my GPS measured 3.01 miles. I might have went a bit OCD and should have just used my trusty tools instead of spending an hour and a half in the scorching sun painting numbers on the road.

I forgot to put on sunscreen so my arms and neck are pretty burned right now and I rode a total of 11 miles for all the painting and verifying of the distances. I still think it was time well spent .

During my transformation I’ve been getting a lot of comments and a lot of questions. One of the most annoying one has been “So when are you going to be done with your diet?”. But nothing really tops the ultimate question that I get more times than I could care to count: “What’s your secret?”. This question is probably the most annoying of them all. Don’t misunderstand me, I love to get compliments and I certainly don’t mind questions and I’m eager to help anyone who’s in need of help with their transformation to a better and healthier life. But when I get this question, the most amazing thing usually happens. The person asking the question already knows the answer to it:

Eat Less Move More

There is no secret! It really comes down to one very simple thing: to lose weight you have to generate a caloric deficit. There are two ways of generating that caloric deficit.

1. Eat Less
   By reducing your caloric intake yet maintaining caloric demand your body will be in a caloric deficit and it will have to come up with the energy from some other source besides food. And most of us have plenty of storage to rely on. Our fat cells are excellent energy stores, they store about 3,500 calories of energy per lbs of body fat. So by eating less your body will start to burn off all the excess fat and slowly but surely your waistline will start to dwindle.
2. Move More
   The other way of generating a caloric deficit is by increasing the caloric demand of your body. Caloric demand of your body depends on age, sex, weight and activity level. The older you get the lower the caloric demand so the sooner you start the better off you are. It is pretty tough to change your sex, I’m not really sure it’s worth it, and the lower your weight the less energy you use so that really leaves us with one option to increase caloric demand which is increasing your activity level. Unless you quit your desk job and start loading trains or stocking warehouse shelves you really have no other option but start an exercise regime. It can be as little as 30 minutes of walking in the evenings after dinner or as much as a full fledged marathon training running 35+ miles a week. As long as you increase your activity level slowly but surely your waistline will start to dwindle.

And that’s all there is to it! As long as you do either one, or for optimal results both, you will lose weight. And the person who just asked the question while gets a bit disappointed that there was no secret involved, no pixie dust, no gastric bypass surgery, no magic drugs, no quick fix deep down inside they already knew that the only way to shed the fat and keep it off is by eating less and moving more.