Firstly, congratulations. You are living up to the noblest of virtues.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Secondly, I would like to address a few things in your post that are possibly misleading or incorrect when it comes to successful weight loss strategies. I do understand it is all well meaning and that there is no singular path to success; however, a few points you have put in your post are contentious.
Eat less, move more, have success
" I joined a gym, hit the bike at my house, and radically changed my diet. You'll never guess what happened. I started to lose weight. "It is a simple equation most people tend to forget, and has been very well illustrated by Alton Brown from an episode of Good Eats. Brown uses the car as a metaphor for the human body and gasoline as food. You fill the tank, you drive around until it's empty, and top up again. Nothing strange about that as that is most of our lives. However, if the tank is already full and we go to get more gas then we're going to need additional storage for that gasoline. For some of us, it doesn't take long before we're hauling around tankers of additional gas.
Many people struggle to connect the need of losing weight to a need to overhaul their entire approach to their personal health. If you start your day with a bowl of sugar--or worse, nothing at all--and then go get more sugar and caffeine for a snack within two hours, you're going to put on weight unless you're also running a marathon in that time. What's more, starting your day with bad food only to head off to a sedentary job or day of limited caloric expenditure will lead to your body storing those excess calories from the morning's breakfast and overpriced sugar coffee.
Eating less/moving more comes down to awareness of your lifestyle. If you have a seated job, find a way to stand more during the day. It'll be better for your heart and your health. Instead of rushing off for a coffee at 2:30pm, get up and go for a brisk walk without your phone to clear your mind and get your blood flowing. Always start your morning with food, but more on that after the jump. Add more movement into your day, whether that is walking, biking, or taking transit to work, taking stairs over elevators, walking around at your job, and selecting evening activities that do not require a couch. You will move more and will have less time to eat because of it.
Food can kill you or save you
" The thing is, you can just change your diet and loss a shitload of weight, especially if you have a lot to lose. "Diet is the crucial element of weight loss and contributes between 70 to 90% of successful weight loss. Many people still believe--and wrongfully so--that working out more will mean they can continue to eat whatever they want. There is ignorance on two levels here: knowledge of how many calories are in certain foods and how quickly we gain access to those calories and how many calories we burn doing certain exercises.
The 'moving more' element here works more as a regulator to your diet than it does as a 'free food token'. Yes, if you are aiming to restrict calories, and you burn 500 calories while working out, you have a couple hundred additional calories you can consume for that day. The issue actually arises when food is used to reward calorie-burning behaviour; climbing a flight of stairs is maybe 12 calories, the 10 minute lunch walk is maybe 30 to 50, depending on terrain and pace. That isn't enough to have earned an additional sugar loaded cookie.
Let's break food down into a few categories: meals, nutrition, and caloric value. Success with food and weight loss can be as simple as planning ahead. Make a menu for the week, including food for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Have that entirely planned out. Get your shopping done on one day. Why? Attempting to decide what to eat at the end of the day when your are hungry and have already spent your day making decisions will ultimately lead to you taking the path of least resistance: pre-made, packed, or quick caloric food, which is often deprived of nutrition. By having your meals planned, including the recipes, instructions and ingredients on hand, you will avoid this decision issue at the end of the day. Breakfast and lunch are no different, either, with both being easily planned and prepared ahead of time--there's not dash at lunch for something quick from the local fast food joint!
Nutrition is vital to sustained weight loss. When we are hungry, our bodies are calling out for calories and nutrients. In today's food landscape, calories are extremely easy to come by. Nutrition, however, is not as readily available. Marrying the two used to be innate with our home cooking and vegetable-based diets. Now, we are able to get 1200 calories from a side of fries with our lunch that contain only a tiny amount of vitamin A. Food without nutrition is trouble; you will continue to be hungry as your body calls out for vital building blocks to its functioning and repair, even with 2500+ calories in your stomach. The nature of commercial food makes this an even more slicked slope, as manufactured food is specifically designed to hit salty, sweet, and fatty notes, which does have profound neurological implications--just look at the relationship between sugar addiction and dopamine.
There's another dimension to food, too--as if what we ate wasn't already complex enough. Glycemic index (GI; scale out of 100) is the determination of how quickly our body has access to the calories in the food. Our body runs on glucose, which cells turn into ATP, which fuels everything. All of our macros (i.e., carbohydrates, fats, and proteins) are turned into glucose for the body to use. Foods high on the GI scale are rapidly turned into glucose, and include foods such as bread, pop, and pastries (71, 63, and 42-78, respectively), while foods high in fats and proteins are extremely low, such as peanuts or streak (7 and 5, respectively). Glycemic load can be mediated by the amount of fiber we eat (both soluble and insoluble). The list of factors of how we process food goes on and on. The take away from and understanding of GI is how to approach certain foods during the day. If you are doing little for the next several hours, eat foods low in GI and glycemic load, such as meats, salads, nuts, and hummus. If you're about to go to the gym, where you're going to need glucose, eating a muffin or a bowl of wheat cereal is fine.
Where we fail is when we are eating too many carbohydrates which are processed too quickly for our bodies to burn off. This spikes our insulin levels, triggering the storage of the excess glucose. Our brain loves the additional calories for storage, thanks to the dopamenergic system associated with food, and we are 'rewarded' for this.
My day often starts with a big bowl of oatmeal, which has about 1 tablespoon of brown sugar and 1/4 cup of natural peanut butter in it, along with black coffee and a piece of fruit. I work out after breakfast and have a protein bar before lunch. Lunch is often leftovers from the previous night's dinner. Dinner is planned out ahead of time, and is very high in protein, fiber, fats, and nutrition. Water is my drink of choice (aside from scotch) and is safe to drink throughout the day.
This is a huge amount of information which I have collected over years of looking into health, fitness, nutrition, and food. It is all well founded in research, but its application and views on its importance as weighed against other factors is continually debated by experts on weight loss.
Exercise for fitness, not weight loss
There is much to be said about the header, but after my prolixity with the food section, I will focus on the important facets of fitness workouts over weight loss workouts.
The difference is easy to understand: weight loss workouts get your body moving in a manner that it wasn't doing before to help with burning off extra calories and inches. They massage egos and lull you into a false sense of success. The weight lost with these flimsy workouts is quickly gained back after one trip to the pompous--and utterly terrible for you--juice bar (GI for juice: 50 to 80).
Fitness exercises is about building your body up to do more with it. To stand longer, walk further, move more, and rest less. It's the difference between a spin class and HIIT workouts. You can burn calories sitting on a bike or you can burn calories and build your body by doing HIIT or power lifting. By building your whole body, you add functionality and endurance, while lowering the chance of being injured in the process. A natural consequence of building your body for greater fitness is the building of "calorie furnace" muscles. You will lose weight, just as long as you don't eat like utter shit.
I prefer mixing in compound power lifting (see 5x5x5) and high intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts. YouTube is a great place for examples of this. My personal go-to is (laugh as you will) BodyRock. HIIT workouts can take between 20 and 40 minutes, depending on how much you need to rest. You can select specific exercises which focus on particular parts of the body or general endurance. The end result will be a fitter, leaner body, buckets of calories burned, and the great feeling of being able to do more. Most of all, it is lasting success which can be built upon from little experience with working out. Making a work out schedule will make your daily workouts efficient and low stress.
Conclusion
Weight loss is something many people aim to do and too many fail. Expectations of outcomes based on limited effort destroys people's motivation. It's easy to become derailed without a clearly thought out plan. I strongly suggest to people to pick a day of the week where they do not work and do not have a long list of chores and errands to build a plan. Decision making takes a lot of mental effort and needs to be taken seriously. Spending several hours planning on a month of workouts, including scheduling time for them, along with meal plans and shopping lists will lead to success.
Another tough point to talk about is body fat. Fat cells do not go away (easily). They get large when you're big and merely shrink when you lose weight. Shrunken fat cells cry out for calories to store, which in turn leads to your brain asking for food amounts to fuel a 300 lbs you and not a 200 lbs you. With weeks of success, one bad weekend of pizza, beer, and cake can swell body fat back up to make it appear to have added inches back. For most people, that kills their motivation; all that work lost so easily. Understand now that isn't the case. It is an ebb and flow of a lifestyle change--not some 6 month project. If you want to lose weight, you need to think of it as a new lifestyle to live by from now on.
One more note before I end this ridiculously long missive: fuck motivation. That's right, forget it. It is worthless. Motivation is you lying to yourself. Motivation strokes your ego and doesn't give a shit about you. Discipline, on the other hand, is the groundwork for success. Set a routine and follow it with honed discipline. You will reap your rewards far quicker relying on a well set out plan for meals and workouts than you will waiting on motivation.
Alright, that's enough for now.
This has been an unedited rant. @nrokchi
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