Hey fren. So I went from 212 to 175. The one thing I learned is that it is 100% what you put in your body. Working out will help but it is only 20% of the battle. My recommend is to learn about intermittent fasting. I eat once a day, normally around 5. I eat meats and veggies. Two days a week I will have two eggs for breakfast. I also reduced my quantities as big meals are counter productive. After 3 weeks of I fasting you will see weight fall of then look at strength training just using dumbbells.

If you wanna loose weight, view exercise as supplemental.

Note 1: Try a Fast. If you cannot fast for more than 2 days (48 full hours), you lack the willpower to do anything else to reduce weight. Them's the facts. Once you know you can control your hunger, everything else comes easily. It's an easy win that means a lot. Your confidence after a successful 2-day fast will skyrocket.

Note 2: Remove bread and oil for a week. Look at all food you eat. If they have bread or oil in the ingredients, don't eat them for a week straight. You can count the first 2-day fast into that week. Bread is the number 1 weight gainer in Western Culture.

Note 3: Everything you eat during this period, by volume, should consist of at least 50% water. Focus on soups. My go-to at the moment is a spiced cabbage soup, but the smell of slow-boiled cabbage isn't for everyone. The enzymes in cabbage are nothing short of miraculous. I can post a recipe if you want. Other than that, just eat fresh vegetables and the juiciest meats you can find. Once you cut out bread, meeting the water concentration is easy.

Note 4: Introduce Exercise slowly. Once you get rid of carb-brain, your motor skills are gonna be sharp. Effectively, when you eat carbs and sugar your brain goes into hibernation mode. When you deprive yourself, you go into survival mode, and your body starts putting resources towards foraging. If your goal is to lose weight, not build muscle, then the exercises you do should only focus on one thing -- Motion. Just keep moving. There is no need to get your heartrate up. Simply don't stop moving. Walking is easy, but it only works the legs. Instead, do a bit of climbing. Go find a hill or pile of rocks and climb them. Don't wear yourself out doing it. Just move and use muscles you otherwise wouldn't on a day-to-day basis. Do exercises that only utilize your own body weight. If you can't lift yourself, be it push-ups or pull-ups, you have no reason to lift weights. Lifting weights strengthens muscles you have while push-ups and pull-ups and anything else that moves your own body's weight "unlocks" muscles. Ask yourself this: why do body builders look ripped while weight lifters look pudgy? It's because muscle definition and muscle strength are different things. Ripped people's muscles are often lumps of scar tissue, and have little bearing on how much they can actually lift. That's why a tiny dude like Bruce Lee could kick a 700lb punching bag and hit the ceiling with it.

Note 5: Don't look at the scale unless you're fasting, and only to make sure you don't go below a safe weight because you're dehydrated. Most weight you lose when exercising is water weight, not fat. Seeing that you're up 2 lbs today or down 2 lbs yesterday means nothing. Muscle has weight, and the more you exercise the more you'll seem to be gaining rather than losing the pounds. The only way to carve off the pounds is through deprivation. Exercise often hits diminishing returns and only serves to make you more hungry.

Note 6: If your goal IS to build muscle and get swole, know that starting skinny actually makes that harder. Muscle builds on fat. If you don't have any body fat to start with, you won't have any place for scar tissue to form and lock into place. Once again, look at Bruce Lee. He's ripped, but not swole. You want swole? Then pack on some pounds first and THEN work those muscles with strength training.

In summary:

Fastest way to lose weight = Intermittent Fasting - The best procedure is fast 2 days, eat 2 days, while you cut out bread for a week at a time. Always aim for 50% water in food by volume.

How to get fit = Moving - Just keep moving in new ways and activate muscle groups that have gone dormant. You can't build muscles your nervous system can't activate. You don't need weights, you just gotta move your weight.

How to get swole = Fat is Future Muscle - You can't sculpt into clay if you don't have a lump of clay to sculpt. You gotta put on pounds if you wanna put on muscle. If your arms are skinny, they're gonna stay skinny even if you lift a ton of weights. Even if you do build that muscle up for volume, it's all just gonna be useless scar tissue that's built up upon itself and has gone rigid at the core -- all show and no blow.

Hope this helps.

Im doing Keto and walking 🤷🏼‍♀️ Down 20 pounds in a month and a half

P90X 3 - it's almost all body weight, you just need a mat

P90x - if you can get some weights, pullup bar, you're set. Plus it has a great diet guide. You can find these used all over, dvd's and manuals are fairly cheap used.. maybe $20-50 if you're lucky. it's worth it, and it's like bootcamp training.

You can check out calories-in / calories-out. There are many fitness people who make diets based on high volume, low calorie food so you're full, but not getting fat. Unless you are working out at a professional level with a body that can burn 4000 calories a day, one big step you can make is to adjust your diet by learning how many calories you are actually eating.

While I don't agree with everything Greg Ducette spouts (like chugging diet soda over water), you can check his videos about how to make low calorie dense food meals so you aren't starving while being in a calorie deficit. It should give you a good idea of what you can eat and how much of it so you aren't setting yourself up to fail.

For workouts, I'd recommend checking out Athlean-X videos and I think he also has some full body workout plans if you want to shell out some cash. His videos are also good for injury prevention and rehabilitation, but his diet plans are not based on calories, which is why I recommend combing the two and see if it's something that works for you.

So I am not a good writer but I feel that I have a story that everyone could learn from, this has helped me tremendously. About a2 years ago when I first realized what was happening, then soon after I was preparing my mins for what was coming. My mind naturally started drifting to my grandparents on both sides and how they survived the Great Depression. Planted a garden, canning, pickling. That sort of thing.. “The Old Ways” right. Then My mom moved and I move into mom a dads house. Old antiques everywhere hanging on the walls in the ceiling. Everywhere. So on the back porch are two stones. I had walked by them thousands of times but never stopped an looked real good. But then one day I did. I picked those things up into my lap, the larger one was shaped kinda like a brown and the smaller fit inside nicely. Then I flipped the large one over and to my surprise was another bowl shape. Now this got my attention big time. So then a few days later I was holding the smaller stone. It is a bit larger than my fist but it felt comfortable holding with one hand. I’m fiddling with it for hours. Then my thumb fell into an invention at the same time that my fingers fit into the correct spots on the other. Wow! A Image pops into my head real clear of an Indian woman on the ground grinding dried foods.. The next day I bought a large food dehydrator ever since I have been drying greens and vegetables and bringing it into powder with an electric blender.I I have been experimenting with this stuff and found that it can be generously sprinkled on top of most anything. It doesn’t have much flavor but is packed with nutrients…. But the most fascinating thing is that I started having large bowel moments.. like scary bowel movements at first. A few weeks went bye I noticed I felt lighter and more energetic. A few month go bye and my potbelly is gone. I am 55 and I work at a sawmill and I can outwork 8 out of 10 of the 25-30 year olds. It like all of that crap that was in me was poisining my body and now it is gone. I thank Jesus for putting that image into my head! He has deffinatly shown me a better way and at the same time a way out of this mess.. Bye the way I eat the most healthy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the planet!

I’m a personal trainer.

Diet is 70-80% of your battle. Focus on that.
Get some lower body stuff in (large muscle groups burn more calories) but ABSOLUTELY DO NOT do any running or quick bodyweight movements with your legs - you will annihilate your knees. Even walking a significant distance isn’t great until you lose a bit of weight first.

Do SLOW wall sits/squats and don’t worry about hitting 90 degrees yet. Just find a way to get the thighs and hamstrings burning without straining your joints. If you feel any pressure in your knees, then skip the wall sits for now too. Glute bridges, seated leg extensions (just raise your leg while flexing/engaging your quads as hard as you can. You can simulate deep muscle activation just by flexing hard enough. Make sure to breathe though…an aneurism isn’t helpful haha). No need to use any weight for these yet.

I forget the exact ratio, but it’s something like every 1-3 pounds of extra body weight adds 5 pounds of pressure for your knees.

Start walking. This is so key. So effective. For mind and body. Try to increase your distance a little bit each week. Waking a mile per day, consistently, can change your life. Incredibly worthwhile. And faster isn't better, but a little farther and farther, is!

There will always be a reason to say, "Nah, not today."

Ignore it and get exercising. I fail at this a lot, but don't let a "bad day/week/month/year" prevent you from getting back on it. What you're attempting to do is mostly mental.

Baby steps are important, which is why I keep weight-loss goals to one week at a time. If I go too far into the future, I become pessimistic. Also, telling others you're trying to lose weight will help keep you accountable when you feel like taking a day off.

When I was in tip-top shape, I would do a set of crunches (3x30) and pushups (3x15) in the morning and before bed (outside of my normal workout routine). For me, it wasn't about doing the most possible, but just enough to feel a good burn in the muscles. Do what feels right to you and for your body type.

Right now, I'm attempting intermittent fasting.

Good luck!

Once upon a time I spent 8 weeks eating nothing but popcorn (no bs), rice cakes, pb samiches and granola bars while drinking only water and Naked fruit juices. This was all while exercising at home (and work at the time was a strenuous workout).

I just did what you mentioned. Pushups at home. Pull ups out in the garage. Jogged daily for 30 min to an hour. And instead of buying weights, I filled milk jugs with water and used those, later upgrading to cat litter jugs filled with water. Usually did two sessions daily. An hour in the mornings and an hour after my work shift.

The effect was as desired. Slimmed and toned up while building my endurance up in a very short time. Plus I saved money on food and gym fees/splurging on equipment.

The only cons I can recall were the expected diarrhea that came with the sudden diet change and towards the end of the regimen I was really craving whatever other people were talking about eating.

It's all about will power and self control. You can do it anon!

For learning, I recommend youtuber Athleanx (Jeff Cavalier) because he teaches how to fix pain areas and how to do things properly/what's most efficient, etc. Great free info.

I started doing push-ups, sit-ups, and squats a few weeks back. I started with three sets of 10, however, starting I typically couldn't complete the third set. But you will get to where you can, then after that's done with ease, you can increase rep count to 15 or add another set.

I also started jumping rope as well, excellent exercise with minimal equipment needed although you do need a high ceiling if doing it inside.

Diet is a huge part as well, especially in trying to lose weight. I've done a variety of diets over the past several years and even switch back and forth but over all have found low to zero carb the best such as keto and carnivore.

Every public library has a video section, where you can check out DVD's for 2-weeks at a time. They have home workout videos. There are also plenty of home workout videos on YouTube.

Do whatever makes you move. If you want to learn dance moves, then jazzercise. You can work out to aerobics videos. Anything that makes you move and work up a sweat. No special equipment required.

This is a great thread, full of informative advice. Gives me motivation to get back to the basics.

I used the Engine 2 Diet. It is plant-based because I had high triglycerides at the time, by Rip Esselstyn:

https://www.amazon.com/Engine-Diet-Firefighters-Save-Your-Life-Cholesterol/dp/0446506699

https://plantstrong.com/books-by-rip-esselstyn/

Most effective clean eating plan I've done, and I am looking good at the pool and beach. I lift in a home free weight gym in the basement, ride a stationary bike and a road bike or hybrid, and swim in the local pools and ocean.

.....the best early exercise is the kind that you don't know you are doing.....so gardening, kayaking, hiking....which I guess is not really "in home".....but yeah that is my advice.

The fundamental principle of losing weight is calorie deficit. There are about 3500 calories in a pound. You can go online and use a calculator to figure out your maintenance calories. If you’re eating say 500 calories below maintenance, then you will be down 1 pound in 1 week. A 500 calorie deficit is slightly aggressive, but your level of maintenance will go up with increased levels of physical activity.

A good way to stay lean and give yourself some extra breathing room with your diet is walking 7-10,000 steps per day. This is an easy activity on the joints and won’t fatigue you for a serious workout later in the day. It’s also very good for mental clarity as well if you can find a nice place.

I would also recommend cutting out any seed/vegetable oils. These are very calorie dense. A teaspoon or so may pack hundreds of calories and will affect your total calorie consumption without you realizing it. There is also the added fact that the amount of processing they go through make them very toxic to the human body, and I believe they are at the root of many diseases that plague modern society.

Extra virgin/cold pressed olive oil and coconut oil are okay though. Don’t be afraid of animal fats either. I’m willing to elaborate in another comment if you’d like.

Diet will be first and foremost for trimming down. If you want to put on some lean muscle mass while you’re at it, you can look up some beginner variations of push ups that you can do 8-10 of and do 4 sets of those every day in addition to walking.

Also be sure to consume ~0.8-1 gram of protein per pound of lean muscle mass, or your goal weight.

I’ll be happy to elaborate on any of these points further in another comment if you ask in the comments. :)

Happy training patriot

Steak / Eggs / Fruit / Milk

Make these items the bulk of your diet and weight will fall off of you and you'll enjoy every second of it.

Intermittent fasting and for me OMAD, one meal a day. These were the things that that broke a 25 year weight gain journey for me. Nothing else gave me results or were sustainable.

Get rid of bad oils too. No palm oil, corn oil, vegetable oil, soybean oil, peanut oil, safflower oil or sunflower oil. Good oils are extra virgin olive oil (real, not the $10 tainted crap), coconut oil, avocado oil (find good stuff like chosen brand), animal fats.

Most important thing to remember is that you can't outrun a bad diet. A jumprope is good cardio/coordination training. You can go hard or soft with advanced techniques like crossover, double jumps etc. Take up shuffle-dancing. It's like doing the Charleston lol.

Les Mills on demand is only about $15/month and they have lots of different workouts. My DH was an instructor for a while at some YMCA'S and other places, but we now get on demand with Roku.

Jump rope & shadow boxing.. start with (3) 3 min rounds of each with 30 seconds of rest in-between rounds. 3x's a week.

Youtube: Dr. Eric Berg and Dr. Sten Ekberg. Both these guys talk about how to do a Keto diet. Lots and lots of videos with indepth analysis. Only remember that it takes time to shed the weight, not a few days and magically its gone, but a few months. You will notice the inches reduce way before you see the pounds drop off. But do not get discouraged because the fat in your belly takes a while to melt away. Ease into a Keto diet, do not go whole hog or you will end up starving and begin to cheat. Three meals a day with 50 carbs TOTAL for all three meals combined. Try to stay under 2000 calories per day for all three meals combined. After a week or two then drop down to two meals a day. One meal every twelve hours. Then try to go for one meal at 10am and another meal at 3pm. Takes a while for your body to adjust but it will. The greatest thing about the Keto diet is that when you've been on it for a while you don't crave sugar. You will want to nibble on something while watching TV but you will be satisfied with some carrots or celery. Watch Berg and Ekberg their channels are great information centers. One of the best things about Keto is you do not work out with weights or do any kind of strenuous exercises. Just go for a walk every day and that's all the exercise you will need. Ekberg has a vid about this. He explains why its important not to get your heart rate up for lengths of time.

Random, less-known pieces of advice.:

• Diversify your nutrients - There are many many tiny steps between you eating food, and that food becoming muscle, bones, or whatever tissue. Every single tiny step requires a nutrient that people tend to neglect. EG: the nutrients that you eat need to physically absorb into your body, hence why we need to eat healthy fats. This is why you need to eat a bit of everything.

• When you eat matters - If you eat the wrong time, then it could decrease melatonin production, which disrupts REM sleep.

There is a lot of good advice in these comments. Diet is definitely 90% of losing weight..working out is supplemental. The best way you can eat is to only have meat, eggs, raw dairy, fruit and honey. Aim for 1lb of meat for every 100lbs of target body weight per day. - so if goal weight is 175lbs then eat 1.75 lbs of meat per day. Beef is ideal (for many reasons) Saturated fat is your friend. You want to remove sugar, flour, and all seed oils from your diet. These foods are toxic. If you focus on having that much meat per day, you'll find that you're never hungry and somehow the lbs are still melting away. Your body will eventually stabilize at its optimal weight, and because of all the protein you eat you'll put on muscle mass without even having to work out (seriously). My breakfast every day is 1lb of ground beef with 5 eggs over it..then in the afternoon I eat some beef liver and will have a steak or do up some taco meat and have no shells with it. I've eaten this way for a couple years now. The initial transition can be a bit tough, but you'll end up feeling the best you've ever felt. Because of how nutritious the food you're eating is you'll find you don't have cravings anymore. It's hard to explain until you experience it for yourself. I hope this helps. Good luck in your efforts fren. We're here for you and know you will succeed.

I've been a regular gym goer for many years now, and before talking about form, weights, sets, etc. there is one major (MAJOR) thing I have to emphasize, and it is summarized in a single word: DISCIPLINE!

The best workout routines in the world, the best diets and the best lifestyle choices are meaningless without the discipline to actually do these things, even when you're bored, when you're not feeling 100%, when it's a rainy day or a cold day or a hot day.... ignore all that shit and show up. Discipline.

Now having made my main point, there are many good routines you can do. For my age and fitness level, I hit the gym 5 days a week, M to F. Sat and Sun are days off to let my body rest and recuperate. Don't do the same routines day after day, mix it up. I row 8 miles a week, spread over 5 days. On M-W-F I do core work (torso exercises with 50 crunches with 50 lbs, 50 back bends with 80 lbs., torso rotations with 40 lbs, 50 reps right, and 50 reps left; lat pulls (80 lbs, 45 reps), 200 shrugs for traps with 100 pounds; wrist curls w/ 45 lbs for 100 reps.

On T and Th I do my more "difficult" workout. 80 squats with 100lb; 80 benchpresses with 80 lbs; 100 lunges (50 ea. leg) while holding 30 lbs; 125 shoulder reps with 15 lb in each hand -- 25 butterflies, 25 rear delts, 25 reclining butterflies, 25 upright rows, and 25 overhead lifts. 80 bicep curls with 35 lbs; 80 tricep extensions w/ 55 lb.

These might not seem like a very challenging heavy lifting routine but it's MY routine and it works for me. Don't rush these things, take your time, get your form good so you don't hurt yourself, don't hyperextend muscles, and ....

....and ALWAYS work on your discipline. Without discipline, to show up, do the routines no matter how you feel, discipline to eat salads and protein foods, cut out sugar and go low sodium, to resist the urge to get an ice cream cone, to drink too much or smoke another cigarette.... without that kind of discipline people won't get very far.

I have people my age ask me all the time, how do I stay so slim and fit. And as I look at them, overweight and flabby, struggling for breath, and having just seen them eat a plate of biscuits and gravy.... I just don't have the heart to tell them that they lack the discipline it will take to reverse their years of inactivity.... and it's probably too late for most of them. So I just tell them, "I work on it" and leave it at that.

And what is my final word on this matter? Discipline... get discipline in your life.

Just eat meat. More filling and will keep you from getting hungry. Beef, chicken, bacon---just none that has a batter on it. Check out Shawn Baker and Ken Berry on Youtube.

Long post alert!!

Simple stuff you can do at home:

• burpees(full body/conditioning)
• push-ups(pecs, biceps)
• "back widows"/thumbs up push-ups (back)
• cobra push-ups (pecs, triceps)
• squats (quads, glutes)
• pike push-ups/hand stand push-ups (shoulders)

Here's a video from a great yt channel with a tone of pushup variations to target pretty much everything

Also remember to do a lil bit of warming up before your workout (just like a few mins of jumping jacks, high knees, jump rope), and doing some stretching at the end of the day, I usually do that right before I go to bed.

As for amounts of reps, that's the great thing about body-weight stuff, you always do them till failure, whatever that is for you, some people will fail at push-up #10, some at #50, but the important thing is that they reached failure.

3 sets for each exercise is usually enough, I usually do 3 days strength training, and 3 days conditioning, on the strength days I usually do full body, but you could do like bro-splits, I just feel like with body-weight you might as well just do full body.

Conditioning I keep it simple, I usually just do a fuck ton of burpees, 200-300 depending on my mood, takes around 25 to 35 minutes, doing sets of 20 and resting around 40 seconds to a minute in between, you obviously don't have to do that much to start with, figure out a number that challenges you, and then increase it as you get better.

Here's a YT channel mostly dedicated to burpees, he's really hardcore, but you can get some ideas of conditioning workouts from him, bringing it down a few notches so you can start.

Or sometimes I'll do like a HIIT of high knees, 5 minutes wamup(high kness at moderate pace, then 12 rounds HIIT, each round is a minute, and each minute split between high and low intensity, I do 30/30, but you can start with something like 15/45(15 seconds high, 45 seconds low), then 5 minutes cooldown

It's pretty effective, get's the sweat going.

I also do AB workouts every day, at a separate time in the day, quick stuff, like 5 to 10 minutes, very important to train your abs.

If you have some cash to spend I highly recommend the programs you can get here, it's from the same guy of the first YT channel I linked, there's a program called "Xero" there, plus "Xero 2", all bodyweight, 0 equipment stuff.

But you can just as easily build yourself a program from the ridiculous amount of workouts and stuff he has on his YT channel for free.

As for nutrition, I've seen some people already recommending intermittent fasting, which I consider to be a good thing, start small though, the important thing is to cut off snacking, have 2/3 meals in a day period, no snacking in between.

Say, breakfast at 8:00, lunch at 12:00, and dinner at 17:00, you eat at those times, and ONLY at those times, NO SNACKING!

After a while you can go a step further and cut one of those meals out, it's important to start slow because if you go all out when you are absolutely not used to it, you'll have a horrible time, and it will be much harder for you to stick with it, and the key here is consistency.

And of course try to stick with real foods, dump the overly processed stuff, give preference to home cooked if you can, and mind your macros, try to balance out starchy carbs, fibrous carbs and protein.

Easiest way is to imagine your plate divided in 3, each part would be a serving of each one of the macros, I suggest keeping the starchy carbs part the smallest, then fibrous carbs a bit larger, and the largest being protein.

And you eat enough to be satisfied.

Oh, and try to avoid caloric drinks, all you need is water, leave the caloric drinks for when the family gathers on commemorative occasions and whatnot, or for when you go out with friends to the bar, otherwise WATER!

And yes, I mean even fruit juice, eat an orange instead of drinking orange juice, much much better.