How best to get in shape?

[renegade7]

Need your help, Escapist. I'm 17 and about 30 pounds overweight and want to lose it. In general I just want to get to a healthy weight be more physically fit and all-around healthier. The problem is that I'm really out of shape. I've tried jogging but find that I can't hold more than a quick walk for very long. I can barely do 10 pushups, and even just doing a few is so difficult I get discouraged and just want to get back to playing video games, which is kind of counter-productive. Finally I'm not sure what to do about my diet. It's fairly healthy as it stands but obviously as I'm overweight it's not helping much. Finally, there are no gyms near where I live.

I know that no matter what I do, results are not going to be immediate, but I just don't really know what to do.

 

[Wolf-AUS]

Need your help, Escapist. I'm 17 and about 30 pounds overweight and want to lose it. In general I just want to get to a healthy weight be more physically fit and all-around healthier. The problem is that I'm really out of shape. I've tried jogging but find that I can't hold more than a quick walk for very long. I can barely do 10 pushups, and even just doing a few is so difficult I get discouraged and just want to get back to playing video games, which is kind of counter-productive. Finally I'm not sure what to do about my diet. It's fairly healthy as it stands but obviously as I'm overweight it's not helping much. Finally, there are no gyms near where I live.

I know that no matter what I do, results are not going to be immediate, but I just don't really know what to do.

My friend, I can hopefully return the help you have shown me. You're right, results are definitely not going to be immediate, but the key is to find something you can sustain.

First of all, 30 lbs (13ish kg where I'm from) is not an unreasonable goal to want to achieve. Now, diet is one of the most important factors in your weight control. You'll obviously want to cut down on the crap food, specifically the high sugar ones, granted if you don't mind indulging in the odd sweet or two, this would be significantly hard, but let's face it, you're not trying to lose much weight, so you can just reduce your intake as much as possible, ween yourself off slowly. Reduce your potato and white bread intake because they're full of complex carbs which are a bit of a dick. Museli and yoghurt is a great breakfast which if you get in to can pretty much replace all other breakfasts, just change the yoghurt flavour and museli type, eggs are also good breakfast.

I personally eat a lot of roast chicken and salad for my lunch and breakfast, with red meat twice a week and some pasta strewn around the place, but only occasionally, fish I'm also a massive eater of, tuna and barra predominately, but all fish is good.

Ideally, you'd just drink water all day, but we know that is boring as all hell. so if you want, drink a lot of green tea, I'm a bit of a hypocrite here, because I drink a lot of peach iced tea, but it's they're massively high in sugar so I shouldn't drink so much of them. Non-carbonated mineral water is a good idea.

Exercise, don't worry if you can't do 10 pushups. I'll send you something in a bit to help with this, but essentially, do what you can normally and then drop to your knees, because you're still pushing up weight just not as much. Cardio seems to be something we could work on though.

Hope this helps a tad.

 

[Norendithas]

Emphasizing some of Wolf's points: diet is definitely one of the most important parts when you're trying to lose weight, and you definitely want to stay away from soda for one. Whenever I start getting into the active part of the year for me, I lose 5-10 pounds just by getting off the soda. As he suggested, tea is a great substitute from water, and there are many really good teas. Even sweet tea (not too sweet mind you) can show benefit. Also make sure to eat plenty of your different foods. I'm not too big into measuring things down to servings and counting everything out, etc as I am lazy as hell, but just keeping up with everything is good. Make sure you definitely eat up on your vegetables, fruits, grains, and especially meat. There are some really appetizing things in each you can cook, if you don't like one of those very much. Now off of diet, it is good to really accent the eating well with exercise, even if it's only a bit. You mentioned jogging wasn't really going your way, so I'd suggest starting out with just taking walks in the morning, or when convenient, to your limit. Then after working to what you believe is your limit for say a week or sooner, start adding a little extra to surpass your limit every week or so. Because there are no gyms, does your highschool have a weight or fitness room? If so, usually there are certain times where they are open to the public or students, and work with some leg exercises at the very least.

Not sure how much help this will be, but it's definitely worth a shot. After reading Wolf's post though, he's got some great things in there.

 

[renegade7]

Emphasizing some of Wolf's points: diet is definitely one of the most important parts when you're trying to lose weight, and you definitely want to stay away from soda for one. Whenever I start getting into the active part of the year for me, I lose 5-10 pounds just by getting off the soda. As he suggested, tea is a great substitute from water, and there are many really good teas. Even sweet tea (not too sweet mind you) can show benefit. Also make sure to eat plenty of your different foods. I'm not too big into measuring things down to servings and counting everything out, etc as I am lazy as hell, but just keeping up with everything is good. Make sure you definitely eat up on your vegetables, fruits, grains, and especially meat. There are some really appetizing things in each you can cook, if you don't like one of those very much. Now off of diet, it is good to really accent the eating well with exercise, even if it's only a bit. You mentioned jogging wasn't really going your way, so I'd suggest starting out with just taking walks in the morning, or when convenient, to your limit. Then after working to what you believe is your limit for say a week or sooner, start adding a little extra to surpass your limit every week or so. Because there are no gyms, does your highschool have a weight or fitness room? If so, usually there are certain times where they are open to the public or students, and work with some leg exercises at the very least.

Not sure how much help this will be, but it's definitely worth a shot. After reading Wolf's post though, he's got some great things in there.

Need your help, Escapist. I'm 17 and about 30 pounds overweight and want to lose it. In general I just want to get to a healthy weight be more physically fit and all-around healthier. The problem is that I'm really out of shape. I've tried jogging but find that I can't hold more than a quick walk for very long. I can barely do 10 pushups, and even just doing a few is so difficult I get discouraged and just want to get back to playing video games, which is kind of counter-productive. Finally I'm not sure what to do about my diet. It's fairly healthy as it stands but obviously as I'm overweight it's not helping much. Finally, there are no gyms near where I live.

I know that no matter what I do, results are not going to be immediate, but I just don't really know what to do.

My friend, I can hopefully return the help you have shown me. You're right, results are definitely not going to be immediate, but the key is to find something you can sustain.

First of all, 30 lbs (13ish kg where I'm from) is not an unreasonable goal to want to achieve. Now, diet is one of the most important factors in your weight control. You'll obviously want to cut down on the crap food, specifically the high sugar ones, granted if you don't mind indulging in the odd sweet or two, this would be significantly hard, but let's face it, you're not trying to lose much weight, so you can just reduce your intake as much as possible, ween yourself off slowly. Reduce your potato and white bread intake because they're full of complex carbs which are a bit of a dick. Museli and yoghurt is a great breakfast which if you get in to can pretty much replace all other breakfasts, just change the yoghurt flavour and museli type, eggs are also good breakfast.

I personally eat a lot of roast chicken and salad for my lunch and breakfast, with red meat twice a week and some pasta strewn around the place, but only occasionally, fish I'm also a massive eater of, tuna and barra predominately, but all fish is good.

Ideally, you'd just drink water all day, but we know that is boring as all hell. so if you want, drink a lot of green tea, I'm a bit of a hypocrite here, because I drink a lot of peach iced tea, but it's they're massively high in sugar so I shouldn't drink so much of them. Non-carbonated mineral water is a good idea.

Exercise, don't worry if you can't do 10 pushups. I'll send you something in a bit to help with this, but essentially, do what you can normally and then drop to your knees, because you're still pushing up weight just not as much. Cardio seems to be something we could work on though.

Hope this helps a tad.

Extremely helpful, and I did get your mail, glad to see a program that's within my ability

And as for norendithas, I actually hadn't thought of my school gym, I know during the summer months it's often reserved for my school's teams and such, but I'll have to look for a time when it's open to the public.

 

[Wolf-AUS]

Extremely helpful, and I did get your mail, glad to see a program that's within my ability

And as for norendithas, I actually hadn't thought of my school gym, I know during the summer months it's often reserved for my school's teams and such, but I'll have to look for a time when it's open to the public.

Norendithas had some valuable advice, just be careful and don't each too much red meat, but again, you can't ignore it either, because it contains some stuff that's pretty important to your body.

While the school gym is not a bad idea, I don't know about you, but I prefer working out by myself or with a partner to be honest, I think that's more to my being so self-conscious though, so if this doesn't phase you the gym could be a good idea as long as you know how to go about your exercises properly, if not, you can't really go wrong with body weight exercises, because as I said, they'll increase overall fitness, however a weight session in the mix could also help, but it really depends on your time constraints, talking from personal experience, I get enough time to work out twice a day and pretty much get paid to do it, so it's probably a bit easier for me to tell you to do a million different exercises than it is for you to execute actually doing them.

Good luck with life.