Why You Can't Lose Weight

At my heaviest, I weighed 231 pounds despite eating "healthy" and working out regularly. To give you an idea of my lifestyle: I can bench press well over 200 pounds, I can run a 5K, I teach Hapkido (a martial art similar to Judo) two times a week, and I spend at least an hour running and weight lifting three times a week. How the hell wasn't I losing weight?

I tried various diets, but they either didn't work or didn't seem healthy. One of my family members lost a bunch of weight using Atkins, but their cholesterol went through the ceiling. Another friend was using weight loss pills, but started having kidney troubles which cleared up after stopping use. There had to be a good way to lose weight without taking risks for other parts of your health. After all, having six-pack abs would be nice, but dying of a heart attack at the age of 45 sure doesn't seem like it's worth it.

I started dating this Korean girl and naturally I started eating lots of Korean food. After dating for about 4 months we decided to take a trip to Korea together and I stayed there for about a month. In the process of eating almost entirely Korean food and walking around all day seeing the sights, I got down to 199 pounds. That's a 32 pound drop! Unfortunately she ended up moving to New York and the relationship didn't work out.

My weight stayed down until I started intensely studying for my physics PhD qualifying exam. To give you a rough idea, the test was 8 hours long, 14 questions, and I wrote 54 pages of equations. I passed! But I gained a lot of the weight back during that time. I got back up over 220 pounds during the 3 months of stressful studying. So after I passed naturally I went back to trying to lose weight, but again nothing worked.

Now I can cook a few Korean dishes, but I certainly wasn't going to be able to go back on a diet of mostly Korean food. I started thinking about what was different about the Korean food that had helped me so much. It didn't make sense, it was high in carbs, and low in protein which is a recipe for gaining weight.

One morning I poured myself a bowl of cereal. I won't say which brand, but it is a bran based cereal, high in fiber and the box was loaded with info about how it can improve your cholesterol. This brand was certainly marketed as a "healthy" cereal. While I started eating it, I randomly looked at the nutrition info and noticed it had 15 grams of sugars. The serving size was 1/2 cup and the primary sweetener was high fructose corn syrup which is horrible for you. Well no 200 pound guy is going to only eat 1/2 cup of cereal for breakfast. I estimated that I had 1-1 1/2 cups of cereal. "Holy crap!" I thought, 1 1/2 cups of cereal is 45 grams of sugar and that's all high fructose corn syrup. That's the same as drinking a can of pop.

I immediately threw out the cereal, looked in my fridge and grabbed some low fat yogurt. Third ingredient on the list, high fructose corn syrup-16 grams of sugars. I looked around and everything I had that was marketed as "healthy" was loaded with high fructose corn syrup and trans fat.

I decided to just go for whole foods and decided to make a sandwich. Grabbed some honey mustard and checked the ingredients-check, only honey as a sweetener. Next I grabbed some smoked turkey breast-high fructose corn syrup, sodium nitrate. I looked at my bread with the "Health Challenge" and "Good Source of Fiber" sure enough, high fructose corn syrup!

The whole time I thought I was eating healthy I just assumed that foods that were marketed as "healthy" must actually be healthy. This certainly turned out not to be the case.

So I did a major turn around with my diet. I decided I was going to only eat truly whole foods. For breakfast eggs, bacon, milk, and plain rolled oats oatmeal (I add raisons, brown sugar, and cinnamon.) For lunch I typically make things like chili or stir fry in advance and take them with me. Sometimes I still just make sandwiches, but make sure to get bread and meat without high fructose corn syrup or other unnatural sweeteners or trans fat. For dinner, its always meat and veggies. One night steak, then chicken breast, maybe salmon filets the next, hamburgers another, etc. Accompanying my meat will usually be steamed veggies with seasonings.

Since then my weight has dropped down to 208 pounds and that is after only two months on this diet. I'll update this article later and let you know my progress.