I recently researched how much exercise is needed to lose weight, and it turns out there is none. You should move to be healthier. The natural way to lose weight and keep your weight permanently is to change your diet for the long term. Exercise will help for a while, but then your body will get used to it and won’t burn extra calories by moving around as it initially did.

I assume you are a beginner and need help deciding how to start losing weight. You also want to have nice, firm muscles. How do you get started? Unfortunately, from my own experience, you can’t do both at the same time. Think about it logically: to build muscle, you’d need to put on extra weight and to lose weight, you’d need to lose fat. This is very difficult to do at the same time because you have to drastically change your diet and also incorporate a lot of (weight) training into your lifestyle.

Living in the prison of my own body - maybe that’s how I could describe what it was like to be fat. The bars of my prison were my excess weight. It kept me from doing what I wanted to do. Move the way I wanted to move. And in that prison, it was a pretty good life. Emotionally happy in a loving family but physically second-class. My prison guard was my appetite.

The current state of the science is that the key to weight loss is a calorie deficit. Period. There are no magical loopholes, no miracle cures. Eat less than the energy your body needs. However, there are some important things to consider. Supposedly, the primary reason for failure in weight loss diets is that the subjects don’t notice the small results, so they stop the diet prematurely. The solution to this is to systematically weigh yourself every morning after using the toilet and record your weight on a daily basis.

You Pay for Your Obesity with Your Happy Years Being fat has impacted my life. I’ve lost weight, but it’s also had an impact on my future – I hope only in the sense that I’ll be flabby for the rest of my life in my stretched skin. It bothers me, of course, but I try to think of it as a positive, hard-earned award. When I was fat, I was always the last one up the hill – if I didn’t turn back halfway up.

February is almost over, and you still haven’t started anything? I know the feeling. I put off any lifestyle changes for years. I mean, there were things I tried but didn’t have the patience to wait for the results, and there were things that worked, but then I didn’t incorporate them into my life. What makes it different now? Start with tiny changes. For example, use these steps and find a reason for yourself why you are doing it.

My highest weight ever was 127 kg, sometime in the mid-2000s. The picture on the left was taken in 2009; I’m the guy in the blue t-shirt. The photo on the right is of me in the summer of 2023. Of course, I tried a lot of things, but my weight yo-yoed up and down until in 2018, I got to the point where it became relevant to take a blood pressure medication regularly.

Unfortunately, I can’t do it without counting calories every day. I can maintain my weight by avoiding high carbohydrate intake and the calorie count I’ve experimented with. If I “go off track” because of a holiday, I don’t worry anymore because I know that as soon as I get back into the swing of things, I’ll pick up the pace again and adjust my weight again. Is this sustainable? I wonder if everyone wants to take the time.

Buy a heart rate monitor, a gym membership or a treadmill or an indoor bike and start moving slowly in your fat-burning range. Focus on getting your body to handle the load first, and get yourself to a point where you can move slowly for an hour: walking or cycling. If you have muscle soreness, you’ve overdone it. Take it easy. Be patient with yourself; just as the pounds didn’t come on overnight, they won’t come off overnight.