Part 1: Decide on Your Ideal Weight

I recently started to try and lose a little extra weight that I had put on over the years. As I’m a scientist at heart I decided to try and do it scientifically. The first thing to do is decide what you want to weigh after you have finished your diet. In my case I want to weight about 80kg (180 pounds for our American friends). As I’m 180cm tall (5 feet 11 inches) that puts my target BMI at 24.69 which is right at the top of the acceptable range. I’m a pretty heavy set guy though so I’m happy to be in this area of the graph – I was in the low 70kg range for many years and felt far to thin. Currently I’m weighing in at a nice round 90kg which gives me a BMI of 27.78 and thus marks me as fairly overweight. I, personally, feel overweight at this point which is why I’m going to lose some of the excess.

Part 2: Decide on Your Weight Loss Regime

After coming up with a target weight it is then necessary to come up with a plan for how you are going to lose the excess. I have only ever tried one diet before and decided to try the Atkins diet. Initially I lost a huge amount of weight but that soon stopped and my body simply didn’t agree with the food it was being fed. It was clear to me that humans were not designed to eat only fat and protein. This time round I decided to approach the problem more scientifically. At the end of the day if you use more energy than you put in your body you will lose weight. This is a scientific fact that can not be disputed. The problem with this approach is that it requires substantial amounts of will power if you have become used to over eating.

Despite being hard, calorie restriction is a very sure-fire way of losing weight and one that is easy to measure. Measuring things is what a scientist does for a living so this seemed ideal. The first two parts of the plan at now in place. Time to move on…