Sites for Weight Plan Do-It-Yourselfers

This entry identifies sites that have been influential in helping me integrate calorie planning, nutrition, and exercise into a complete weight loss and maintenance strategy.


Diet Plans

The Mayo Clinic Diet: a weight loss program for life. I have been remiss in not posting this site earlier. The Mayo Clinic has an excellent lifestyle/weight loss section - just don't get sucked in by their very low calorie diet (VLC), I just don't see how anyone of size could sustain this program. If you have never been to the Mayo site, there is a wealth of information there, take time to look around.

SoYouWanna Lose Weight is typical of the diet plan genre:

• calculate how many calories you are eating now (or keep a calorie log for a few days)
• eat 500 calories a day less (how you will know that is vague)
• exercise enough to burn an additional 500 calories/day (ditto above)
• and voila! you save/burn 1000 calories a day and lose 2 pounds a week
  

Not my cup of tea, but as I say, it's typical, and fairly blunt and straightforward.

About.com has a comprehensive exercise and weight loss section, although the structure and layout of their site sometimes leads you to confuse the ads for the articles. Their ADAM Weight Loss Guide takes you through a complete survey of the "road to reduction" and covers all the bases: nutrition, calories and exercise...


Four Effective Weight Loss Plans - A UK study comparing Atkins, Weight Watchers, Slim-Fast and Rosemary Conley's plans. To me, the results after 12 months are discouraging - less than 25% of participants were still in the programs... but the article is upbeat about the 6 month results...hence the title.


Nutrition

the dietdetective.com - a comprehensive site covering diet, nutrition and exercise - highly recommended for a day or two of surfing

the Westerly Sun - a hometown newspaper with an excellent archive of short, wide ranging articles on dieting and nutrition.

Micronutrients - the vitamins, essential minerals and other compounds required in small amounts for normal metabolism. Although this article was originally written for cancer research, don't let that put you off. It is an excellent discussion of the vitamins and minerals you need for good metabolism, and importantly, it identifies those elements where supplemenation may be required. This article at the same site recommends that all adults take a daily vitamin supplement.


Heinz Handbook of Nutrition, 9th Edition, 2003, distributed by the Heinz Corporate Research Center is a 250 page handbook (PDF format) packed with all kinds of nutritional information - plenty of discussion on vitamins, minerals, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. And, no, it is not some sort of advertising vehicle for Heinz ketchup! Some good stuff for dieters too: for example, it clearly supports the idea that the best time for cardio is in the morning BEFORE breakfast. (Metabolism/Lipolysis and Beta oxidation, page 56.)


Eating to Lose Weight - no this is not some quack diet, this is actually a fairly intelligent, though basic, article written by a nutritionist at a site that specializes in back pain. It addresses the need to maintain muscle mass (that darned exercise, again!), how much fat to have in your diet, and a few practical ideas on extracting the most satusfaction out of the food you eat.

Exercise

Want to Lose Weight? Exercise! is an excellent overview article on all facets of exercise and weight loss, much easier to follow and understand than the University of Texas papers. In particular it discusses your metabolic rate and how to prevent your body from going into starvation mode. I noticed that the article recommended a calorie intake for weight loss equal to 10 calories a pound at your current weight. I was quite surprised because just by chance that is exactly the upper limit of my calorie intake right now, and I am quite comfortable with it...

The Gator Aide Sports Science Institute has [apparently] funded two studies at the University of Texas at Austin which are most relevant in understanding the role of exercise in weight loss.

FAT METABOLISM DURING EXERCISE. There are a number of articles I will eventually put up for this subject - this is one of the more complex ones. Keep in mind a couple of things: "VO2Max" is the maximum amount of oxygen you can supply your body during exercise - the actual value increases as your exercise progresses. "25% VO2Max" is the oxygen level assoicated with a "comfortable walk" (see The Science of Fat Loss) - this is the minimum level for burning fat during exercise.

Also Energy Balance and Body Weight Regulation . More than you probably ever want to know about what it takes to get your body to lose weight! Nevertheless, if you can wade through it a couple of times, it provides some interesting insights.


The Only Diet Book You'll Ever Need

The Hacker's Diet by John Walker

The chapters "Eat Watch" and "The Rubber Bag" are essential reading for anyone undertaking the construction of a diet plan. My plan was already underway for over a month before I came across this book - these two chapters in particular put a lot of things in perspective for me. The book is online and free.