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I'm a 26 year old male living in San Francisco who went from 242 lbs, 32.8 BMI to 168 lbs, 22.8 BMI over the past ~12 months by bringing together weightlifting, running, and the slow-carb diet. And I did this while working on and building my startup. Top lessons that I learnt during the past year: 1. Pick a ridiculously easy workout routine: Losing weight is a confluence of a lot of habit changes. You have to realize that although your entire lifestyle has to change, you cannot do it all in one go. It may take many months of experimentation for you to find your rhythm and get settled into your new lifestyle. But it all starts with picking up a ridiculously easy workout routine. As soon as you start exercising, you automatically want to eat better, sleep better, and in general take care of yourself. It helps if the routine you pick up is so ridiculously easy that it’s almost too hard to come up with an excuse to not follow through. For me, this was the Stronglifts’ 5x5 weight training workout (https://stronglifts.com/5x5/). 2. Pick an audacious fitness goal: I hate doing any cardio in the gym since it usually gets too hot and stuffy for me. Around this time I came across this NYTimes post: How To Start Running (https://www.nytimes.com/well/guides/how-to-start-running), and I cannot thank the author enough for effectively introducing me to a form of cardio that I actually love. In April 2016, I gave myself 4 months to train for the San Francisco Half Marathon held near the end of July. That’s, couch to 13 miles in 4 months. It’s good to have an audacious goal, and it’s absolutely necessary for you to put down that non-refundable fee and make a concrete mental commitment to go through the distance. I like “finishing a long distance race” as a goal since whether you finish or not is very binary and very public. You can’t make excuses, unlike other metrics. Of course, the best cardio workout for you is the one that you actually end up doing. Running outside is the only cardio that I happily look forward to. 3. Compliance, Discipline, Patience: Another thing that I started in parallel in March 2016 was the Slow Carb Diet that a lot of you may have read about somewhere on the web. Tim Ferriss introduced it in his book The 4-Hour Body, and although it’s not radically new, I think Tim’s genius lies in realizing that it is the easiest diet regime to stick to compared to any other low-carb plan. There are a bunch of summaries around the web, but when I read the book a long time ago, I made some notes and put them up here:
(https://www.commonlounge.com/discussion/62384879d50b4a8b80bf...). Go read it, and follow it to the letter. This is important. You have to go all in for 6 days a week and make no excuses, or this won’t work. You’ll be tempted to abandon this diet, or abandon getting fit altogether. You’ll hit plateaus every few months, but despite that, I saw a consistent 1.5 lbs per week loss for a whole year. If you have any questions, I now also run the Fitness community on Commonlounge (https://www.commonlounge.com/community/bf228e76c54c479c92ff0...) (I'm one of the cofounders). If you like this, come say hi and jump in the discussions there. |