Too good to be true?
Yes this sounds too good to be true, but I think I figured out a no-nonsense physical regimen to lose and maintain weight, based on my own experience and on the reoccurring, timely, and reliable results I’ve seen in my own Pilates clients. In addition, this may be the simplest form of activity to achieve what seems at times to be the most daunting task: losing weight and then maintaining it.
Eureka!
How, you ask? Well, I’ve been experimenting on myself for over a decade. I was also inspired by French culture and their philosophy that weight maintenance and self preservation is the most positive form of self-care. So, I changed the way I perceived fitness and threw all existing ideals on exercise out the window. I decided to test my theories out on myself.
I finally figured it out! It’s all about how you perceive health and physical fitness; it’s a science not a mindless act of moving. It’s about how you feel about yourself, and about creating a desire to treat yourself with love and respect every moment of the day. It’s about honoring your physical self - the body - every single day in everything that you do, which includes your thoughts. And, it’s about how you internally feel in your body rather than how you look or how you think you should look.
Without further delay... the secret. The rest is commentary...
If you don’t want to read the whole blog, then I’ll just tell you now. Walk 5 - 8 miles, 5 days a week and incorporate a strength training form of exercise such as Pilates. Healthy dietary changes are recommended for a complete and healthy operating system. Also take time for intellectual and spiritual development. Now the rest of the blog below is commentary.
My weight loss journey began when I needed to lose pregnancy pounds, and for over a decade I struggled to figure out how to lose weight and keep it off. Eventually, I lost the weight and got into shape, but the fear of gaining it back always loomed over my head since I didn’t know the secret recipe for maintaining a healthy body size. By carefully watching my diet and exercising, I kept the weight off for a few years. But during a particularly stressful phase of my life, I gained the weight back and I felt like I was losing control again, which in turn left me feeling like a failure somehow. It affected me negatively in all aspects of my life.
Fast forward 3 years and I’m a Pilates instructor at one of the world's most prestigious gyms. It’s here that I came to realize that losing weight is all about cardio, while keeping it off is all about healthy habits, such as maintaining your cardio and nutritious eating for the rest of your life.
My life as a professional fitness instructor: I had to figure it out.
The key to losing weight and keeping it off is to incorporate some sort of cardio vascular exercise (commonly shortened to "cardio") to your daily routine. Exercise has to be as normal as brushing your teeth. It must be done daily because it's a necessity for your everyday well-being! The secret to keeping it off is continuing to practice healthy cardio habits at least 5 days a week every week for the rest of your life. It will be hard at first (frankly, it will suck), but after a few weeks, you will start to crave it.
I had recently read an online article by a “celebrity” trainer in which he stated that you could burn 500 calories in a 1 hour spin class or you can burn the same amount of calories by walking 10k steps per day at your leisure. “What did I just read?!? Work smarter, not harder?!?! My philosophy to all things in life?! Let’s try it out!” I thought to myself.
Taking the first step.
For the next 5 months, I walked 10k steps 5 days a week. At first, it was painstakingly hard. I found myself walking the hallways of my apartment building a few times at the end of each day to reach my 10k step goal. I added a daily hour of cardio on the treadmill at the gym to assist, too. But after a few months, I had forgotten why I started walking to begin with and began to enjoy the stress relieving effects that it yielded. The body awareness and self-love that I developed for myself were euphoric.
The Frenchman.
The physical changes were subtle at first. I started to shrink physically, but the number on my scale didn’t change. I began to have more energy, and less stress and tension in my body. By May 2018, the physical changes stopped and I had plateaued. My body had changed dramatically. I was leaner and I felt as if I was carrying less dead weight in the body. And still at this point the number on the scale didn’t change much but there was a noticeable shift in body composition. This shift in body composition alleviated my overall bodily aches.
Now, 5 months into my step journey, I had gained stamina and I looked leaner and lighter, but I still hadn’t reached my ideal physique for my frame. Mind you I said “ideal physique for my frame”. I knew what felt good or unnatural for my skeletal frame. I wasn’t concerned with numbers on a scale or a dress size. I already knew what body type felt good to walk around in and what looked good in my clothes, and it was a sustainable body type that I believe was an appropriate amount of fat and muscle conducive to my skeletal frame and height to create an equilibrium within my body. Here in LA, we tend to obsess over the number on the scale as opposed to what actually matters: how we look and feel.
The Frenchman said that he did incorporate cardio into his routine and his preferred form of cardio was.. wait for it... walking!!! I told him that I had plateaued at 10k steps and that I was no longer seeing changes in my body like I previously had been seeing over the course of the first 5 months. He said that if I wanted to see fat-burning results that I should step it up to 15k steps per day. With that said, I began the month of June at 15k per day, 5 days per week. By July 2018, I had to scale my steps back because I couldn’t control the amount of weight that I was losing. My metabolism engine was running hot!
At 10, life was so reliable.
Within 30 days of increasing my step intake, I scaled back down to 10k-12k steps per day to maintain my weight. I was no longer consumed with the fear of regaining my old weight back. I just maintained my healthy lifestyle of walking 10k-12k steps per day and voila, I was at my ideal physique. Did I change my diet? Not really, but I also lost 2% of my muscle mass which wasn’t great since we lose muscle mass as we age and it becomes increasingly difficult to regain. In July, I incorporated Pilates back into my exercise routine to tone my flabby body that had deflated with my walking experiment.
The total change in my weight scale was 10 pounds, but it looked like I had lost 30 - 40 pounds. The loss of weight lightened the burden off of my skeletal system which was used to carrying unnecessary weight.
Experimenting.
By the Summer of 2019, I stopped walking altogether to see how long it would take for my body to acquire all of its plump, youthful weight back. It took approximately 2 months for me to regain my weight, but I had to stop all forms of exercise/movement and increase the amount of calories I was consuming. My metabolism sustained its fat burning effects for 2 months after I ceased all exercise.
My conclusion.
The secret to weight loss is figuring out the unique science of our own bodies. What I mean by this is that a person should know what to eat and what not to eat because you measure the way certain foods make you feel, make a mental memory of the experience and generate an opinion of how you feel about each food item. You will then decide whether or not to eat that food again based on the way that particular food made you feel. Did this particular item benefit your overall health physically and mentally? Or did it take away from the overall feeling of good health? As your mind and body age, and you enter into a new decade, you should expect to learn how to calibrate and adjust your habits and life style choices to accommodate your ever-changing and (thankfully) aging body. This will create a better experience for you as you travel through time and space in your body, your vessel, which you’ll carry around, for better or for worse, everyday for the rest of your life. So, let’s get started on unifying your mind, body, and soul.