I do it two ways: peer pressure and through my sub-conscious.
Peer pressure: I point at a pot-bellied person and openly tell my friends that if my stomach will grow as large that I shall never be seen in public or that I might as well be dead. That way, I have people to witness for or against my assertions.
Through my sub-conscious: I feel myself out by pressing the palm of my hand against my face. If I feel a certain fullness, I am gaining weight. Otherwise, everything is ok. After that, for some uncanny reason, my mind controls my food intake.
I don’t know how this weird weight/food intake relationship developed. I guess this resulted from one of my youthful dreams. To be one of the best looking guys at 60.
I just turned 61, five feet and six-and-half inches tall, and a steady 145 to 150 pounds of muscle. Though I really don’t know if I look good in the eyes of others but I feel good about myself so I guess that is all that matters.
How should others control their weights?
Before you rush off to buy books to this effect, the very first thing to do is to decide, in fear of death, to lose weight, keep it at a level you are comfortable with and have a very good reason why you need to loose weight.
A friend of mine, as huge as a side of a barn, lost weight because he fell in love with a lithesome blond. However, the marriage didn’t work out and they split. He was so devastated and went on an eating rampage that brought him back to his pre-marital weight faster than losing it.
The moral of the story? Rather than deny himself the pleasure of his hugeness, he looked for a girl as huge as he is. Now they are happily married – up to this date.
Once the desire to lose weight is etched in granite and the reason tucked up solid in your sub-conscious, the HOW becomes easy as a whistle.
The easy way or the hard way:
You can lose weight the easy but long way or the hard but fast way.
The easy way does not require an increase in activity level, but will take longer because it is practically “controlled starvation.” Simply put, you just have to downsize your calorie intake.
It takes 3,500 calories to either lose or gain a pound. Losing a pound within a week or a month simply means minimizing your calorie intake by that amount, spread out through the week or the month.
But I guess this a fool man’s way of losing weight. I might as well watch drops of water scour a sheet of steel than see weight loss by idly minimizing calorie intake. It’s very much like regularly warming up a car without driving it around. The battery may stay charged but the bearings, the joints and all the other moving parts gets to rust. You know what I mean?
Exercise, you could never go wrong:
The hard and fast way is to raise your activity level like you have never done before.
I was a bookworm as a child but I did not deny myself the pleasures of the games children play. I grew up in a neighborhood that eats and sleeps basketball and when I went to college my friends were into karate and judo. Then I started working and had to play to my profession, so I took up tennis. Nowadays, if a week passes without my having worked up a good sweat even for a day, I get sick the following week.
Often, my friends of long ago would ask me if I am still into tennis. I would say, “are you kidding? When I was young, I did it for fun. Now I do it because I must”. Recently I added scuba-diving into my repertoire of physical activities.
As we age, we need to build muscles lost with aging to be able to take care of ourselves well into our later years in life. And by building up muscles we automatically rev up our calorie-burning metabolism, adding to those burned during exercise.
Exercise strengthens our cardiovascular system increasing the level of oxygen in our blood effectively regulating high or low blood pressure; exercise will replace body fat with muscle tissues automatically burning off 100 – 250 calories per day even while we are at rest.
One is never too old to exercise. In fact, it has been shown that seniors reverse aging-related muscle loss, increase stamina and improve balance and agility by exercising regularly.
Going physical:
Going to a gym is more psychological than anything else. The feeling of encouragement can spur one to pursue one’s goal of losing weight. But physical activity can also be derived from mowing the lawn, cleaning the care, walking instead of driving or climbing the stairs instead of using the elevator.
But these are not fun. Playing group games like basketball is great if one is tolerant to physical pain, tennis if jeers and catcalls do not affect you. Swimming is more complete as is biking; mountain climbing is great to be closer to nature.
The beauty in getting physical is the limitless options available to those really wanting to lose weight.
You want to gain weight?
I was a puny 110-pounder and very sickly in my early twenties. Then I took up tennis and started guzzling beer after a hard game. In less than I month, I started putting in more pounds.
