When I was living in the States 24 Hour Fitness was the best place to go. At 3am I would be able to use any machine I wanted for as long as I wanted. It gets a little more hectic during 6-8am and ofc 11-1 and 4-7 but if you go during odd hours you can have a really good workout without worrying about the machine time limits. They usually have so many machines from elliptical machines to spinning bikes. Weight loss and exercise are really easy when you have the choices and time to make them.

The best part about 24 hour Fitness is the TV/radio station box at each machine. You plug your headphones in and you can watch the TVs on the wall, whichever channel you want. It makes exercising so easy and you hardly notice you’re working out.

24 Hour Fitness is one of my few exceptions to the “free” rule, but I will give tips on cheaper gyms. You can exercise for free, and those will be towards my best recommendations, which of course will be towards the end of the month =D!

There is a lot of b.s. on the web, in books and on TV, and believe me when you’re fat, and want to not be fat, you’ll believe any of that crap. Eat as much as you want and lose weight? I want that book! Kaching!$ 20 Lose 10 pounds in 24 minutes! Hell yeah! Kaching! A Twinkie a day keeps my fat ass away?? Oh momma gimme! Kaching! You really want to believe those easy diets because damn it was so freaking easy to put this weight on it should be that freaking easy to take it off too! Well, my dears, welcome to the real world where Wall Street cheats you and gets repaid and you lose your job have to stand in line for your unemployment benefits. This is the world where you look at a Twinkie and your ass grows. It sucks!

The bottom line is, and I know this from experience, when you decide to diet it cannot be for just until you lose the weight. I know, I know you’re screaming right now “WHAT?”, but it is true. Don’t blame the messenger! *ducks*.

Some of you, that have some experience dieting, are reading my blog thinking “she’s been on that diet for 3 weeks how does she know?”. Its a valid question. I actually lost nearly 35 pounds, in about 5 months using spark. However, I developed back problems on my honeymoon and the doctors couldn’t diagnose it. So went my exercise, so went my eating habits and then the roller coaster of depression and eating. I won’t cop out, a lot of it was just laziness. I fight everyday against the lazy Alex sitting in my head. Its why I started this blog. That is my abbreviated history.

What I hope, with this blog, is to use all kinds of topics to motivate everyone to use http://sparkpeople.com or some form of calorie journal with exercise. Is this site a giant advertisement for Sparkpeople.com? Well kinda, but its more of a message about dieting and how to do it right. Sparkpeople.com just tends to have all the right answers, for me. Answers that I actually had found out before I joined them, but didn’t put into practice. For me Sparkpeople.com works, something else might work for you, but the principles are basically the same.

So the cold hard truth is this: If you are not genetically gifted, you cannot eat a Twinkie without sacrifice and hard work. And if you’re on a diet and/or yo-yo dieted all your life, you ain’t genetically gifted. You can resent the genetically gifted all you want, I do (cough my husband cough), but that won’t help you lose weight. You can keep trying the crappy diets, and you might lose weight. But if you’re reading this and you are not where you want to be, guess what, they don’t work.

Losing weight and keeping it off will require two things, FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, watching how many calories you take in and exercise. I’m gonna say it again: FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. A typical sedentary (inactive) woman who weights around 140 pounds will get to eat a whopping 1500 calories a day*. (doesn’t that sound about what you’re gonna eat on a diet?). Now the great thing is that if you add three days of exercise or you’re moderately active everyday, you can eat around 1800-2000 calories a day**. That is where you get to eat your Twinkie! Yay! (A regular Twinkie, btw, not the deep fried version that I spoke about above, which, btw, put 10 pounds on my ass just typing about!)

The great news is that any diet you start, which watches calories and incorporates exercise, will make the rest of your life a lot easier. At some point you won’t have to measure portions anymore, you’ll just know, visually, about how many calories you are eating. So Sparkpeople or no Sparkpeople, if you’re gonna lose weight, you’re gonna need to measure what you eat and count how many calories are on your plate.

And yes, you’re going to have to exercise, cardiovascular (aerobics, running, walking) exercise. I started out at 5 minutes a day. Yup 5 minutes. Twenty minutes a day three times a week is where you want to be, at the minimum. It may take 5 minutes a day until you can go 6 minutes then 10 minutes. etc. I workout about 40 minutes a day five days a week now. I work out with back problems. There are people that work out in wheelchairs. When the moment comes, and I know it will, where you start talking yourself out of working out, find some image somewhere that makes you at least put on your workout shoes, then your clothes, then your sports bra. Think of your kids. Think of your husband. Think of your gorgeous Anne Klein size 4 blazer!

I’m going to include strength training in its own paragraph because exercise has to include building muscle. No matter how many pounds you lose a week .5 or 2 a portion of that will be muscle. Muscle burns more calories than fat. You want to minimize those losses. So aside from the cardio you have to do strength training exercises (lifting weights, push ups , sit ups etc etc). I’ll put a link at the bottom of the page with some strength training exercises.

By the way, for breakfast this morning I had a rich chocolate brownie! And I’ll still lose weight! Not because I’m genetically gifted but because I’ll have a salad for lunch and run 500 stairs later today. Is it worth that brownie? For me it is. Maybe you just want that frosted chocolate-covered Twinkie cake… and not eat the whole day and run the width of the state of Michigan. )

Happy munching!

I will always try and link free sites:

Self.com: Hips n butt exercise video

Self.com: Abs video

Self:com Arms exercise video

Sparkpeople.com you tube connection: Youtube spark video page

Footnotes: * bmi indicator from http://www.caloriesperhour.com/index_burn.php. RMR, Resting Metabolic Rate, is the calories you burn at rest. For this rate I chose 140 pound woman, sedentary, age 38, height 5′4.

**RMR for same 140 pound woman at active levels (3 or more times a week exercising) 140 pound woman, sedentary, age 38, height 5′4 http://www.caloriesperhour.com/index_burn.php ]]> http://thiswomansview.com/the-diet-beast-within/feed/ 0