Hello again,

I’ve been hard at work exercising and watching what I eat, I am glad to say another two kilo’s (about 4 1/2 pounds) have walked out the door, and they are never going to return! It’s very heartening for me to see the weight coming off, because I have been working very hard and (for me anyway) not seeing a regular result makes it harder to want to continue.

I am now working very hard on cardio exercise seven days a week at the gym. My schedule consists of 25 minutes on the cross trainer (around 900 Cal’s in “cross trainer” calorie usage), and then a further 10-15 minutes on the treadmill, averaging around 7 Km’s/Hour (approx 4 1/2 miles). This leaves me very tired after i have finished, but I am trying to ramp up the intensity on a regular basis, because I find it easy to get comfortable if I don’t continually push myself.

The next step is to get stuck into some serious weights, but I am concentrating on cardio exercise initially to drop some weight. If you read up on this, you will find lots of different methods the “experts” recommend for someone in my situation.

Some will say to only train 3-4 times a week. Otherwise will say maybe 5 times a week, and still others recommend the full seven day a week training.

I actually found that if I don’t do the exercise seven days a week, I just don’t lose the weight. About a year and a half ago, when I first started exercising, my local gym set me up a program than also included weights, and you know what? I went for weeks at a time not losing any weight. Yes I understand that muscle weighs more than fat, and that I was probably gaining muscle, but I found it extremely disheartening because I wanted to lose the weight.

Since I changed over to my method of cardio only, and continue to work very hard on it, I’ve found I seem to be losing a consistent 1-2 kilograms (2-4 pounds) per week. So I will stick with this program while it is working.

Once of the things I have found from reading up on this is, if you do find something that works for you, keep doing that, even if it goes against what all the experts are saying.

For me, the combination of the exercise I am doing, and keeping my daily intake to around 2000 calories is working well, so I will keep it up. Just out of interest, when I first started seriously looking to lose weight, I restricted myself to around 1400 calories a day and found that after the initial week where I lost some “water weight” I was losing very little weight (not to mention being extremely hungry).

Turns out that it is likely my body was in “survival mode”, when I increased eating I lost weight, how it that for an interesting fact. Again I am talking personal experience here, it just goes to show that you need to test these things out.

Would love to hear from you if you have any comments, drop me a line.

Cheers

Tim