It's the rooftop secrets I'm more interested in today. I remember thinking back to even just last year and realizing that I felt ignorant to the secrets of losing weight and eating and exercise.
January 2009, I hired myself a nutritionist because I was sure that I wasn't losing weight because of some magical problem with my diet. I wondered if the nutritionist was the only one who could tell me what I was doing wrong. The nutrtionist I hired, I found through a friend of mine. She (the nutrtionist) had all the right education, all the right experience, all the right stuff to make me believe that she could answer all my questions. So I followed her advice and paid her handsomly for it I might add.
A month later, and I saw no change. Then I got my metabolism tested. You know? The tests where they put you on a treadmill and hook tubes up to you? Yes, that's the one. I did it. I had my resting metabolic rate tested and max heart rate calculated. Did I mention that it cost me an addition couple hundred bucks? Oh and it wasn't the nutritionist that did my RMR test. I got it done elsewhere.
After 3 months of working with this magical nutritionist, do you want to know what I got from it? Squat! I got nothin' from her! I tracked my diet and exercise for her for 3 months and she "analyzed" it for 3 months. You know what she told me? The $600 advice she gave me was to 1. Drink More Water, and 2. Take Vitamin D supplements. Now let me be clear here, I don't think she's uninteligent. I don't think she's incompetent. In fact, I'm pretty sure she's damn good at her job---for people who eat crappy food and sit on their ass all day. But for people like me, who eat a mostly clean diet, she had nothing to offer me.
The biggest thing I learned from her was that I am just as knowledgable as any nutrtionist about how to manage my diet. Now, it didn't come natural. No way! I have read a ton of books and websites and talked to a bunch of people to learn what I know about how to structure a diet. The big answer for me was in the RMR test.
After getting my RMR tested, I found out that I had a severely depressed metabolism. If I was abused the way I abused my metabolism, I'd be severely depressed too. I learned that I had a resting metabolism that consumed 1,381 calories per day when women of my same age, height, size, and activity level typically burn something closer to 1,800-2,000 calories per day in a resting state. My metabolism was operating at roughly 75% of normal comparable women.
No wonder I wasn't losing any weight. I was operating on averages to track my calories and exercise. In doing so, I unknowingly took in too many calories and burned too few. But wait, there's more. The other thing the RMR test told me was that I was exercising all wrong. I needed to be focusing on managing my heart rate at a particular level to target the fat burning rather than just doing the exercise for the sake of exercising.
That was the piece of information I needed. That was the rooftop secret for me. I think now that losing weight is simple. It definitely requires hard work and dedication but understanding it is not difficult if we just seek to educate ourselves a bit in the process.
*What is your rooftop secret?
*What do you want everyone to know about your success?
