EXTENDED: You've got another week to add your travel & holiday deals questions for expert MSE Oli as part of the latest Ask An Expert event.
Wanting to lose a beer gut
This discussion has been closed.
Latest MSE News and Guides
MoneySavingExpert
Chair, Martin Lewis · Editor, Marcus Herbert
Replies
What it does is give you a daily target of calories and then you just record everything that you eat. Its quite cool in that you can scan the barcode of the food that you eat and put in the portion size and it calculates it all for you. Its a pain in the backside doing it all initially, but once you've done it for a week or two, then most of the meals that you eat are already on there and its quite quick. You can also record your exercise. The thing that it has done for me is to change how I eat (mainly cutting out beer and crisps / snacks / jaffa cakes etc) and hopefully it will be a permanent change. I've lost 1 1/2 stone so far and it hasn't been to tough.
What surprised me (although it probably shouldn't have) was the amount of calories in nice things. Once you realise that a couple of beers, half a bottle of wine and a big pile of crisps is about 1,000 calories then its quite straighforward to cut the really damaging things out and you can take it from there.
And in lots of things that you wouldn't expect to find sugar.
It's not just in the sweet things that you say you don't eat.
Try looking at the labels on food.
This is the absolute truth.
As other have said spot reducing your fat stores can't be done only reducing the overall fat content of your entire body.
Weight loss is nothing more than simple physics and anyone who claims to have the 'perfect method' is over complicating those physics.
All you have to do is burn more calories than your body needs to sustain itself and you will lose weight. How you choose to achieve that is entirely up to you. Either eat/drink less or move more, or a combination of the two.
Personally when I started my 9 stone weight loss cutting out the alcohol was the easiest step to reducing the calorie intake. Second was MyFitnessPal as others have suggested, and thirdly was the addition of some cheap digital scales so I could properly count the calories. Once the weight started shifting I got out on my bike more, I started jogging a bit as best as I could and quite simply I made sure I was forever in a calorie deficit.
I still ate doughnuts, pizza, chocolate, etc etc but I couldn't end it all and just moved more if I needed to to keep those net calorie numbers negative.
Good luck to you both :T
The thing that surprised me was the calorie content of seemingly 'healthy meals or foods.
Things like fresh orange juice at 200 odd calories a glass
Calories in vs calories out.
Healthy and good for weight loss aren't always the same thing.
Avacados and nuts are dense in vitamins & minerals and may have some good health benefits but they aren't great for people who want to lose weight because they're dense in calories.
I do them knees bent, hands touching my ears.
Start slowly, do them everyday. In my opinion people who say they don't work are WRONG.
I started with 20 and now can do many, many more. After 5 months the sticking out belly has gone but I still have a thick waist as I have not done any dieting.
Also get a step counter on your phone. I use Google Fit on my Samsung.
Good luck