Video and Weight Loss

Posted April 08, 2017

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I am on the 5:2 diet

That means, I eat regularly for five days a week, but for two days, I am limited to just 600 calories.

It may sound like something from the Battan Death March, but it works.

I am losing about 2 pounds a week.  So far, so good.

There was a time when this was not necessary. I always kept a pretty constant weight of around 144 (exactly!), but as I got older, I started to gain weight, and losing it became more and more difficutl.  

Now, for two days a week, I am reduced to a single egg, spinach and tomato for breakfast, a pear for lunch and broccoli and chicken bits for dinner.  Like I said, it isn't the Battan Death March and it does work.

In keeping with my relatively new exposure to dieting and weight loss (I highly recommend the 5:2), I have, as usual, spent hours googling weight loss stuff online.  I have learnt a lot.

According to the National Institution for Diabetes, an astonishing 68.5% of us are either overweight or obese.  For men, this is even worse, with a mind-boggling 74%!  So weight loss is important. 

One of the first things I learned was that weight loss is one of the few things that people are willing to pay for online (though I offer this free!).  One of the most intersting things I came across in my search was Instagram and Weight Loss (try Googling it!).  There are tons of articles about how you can use Instagram to lose weight.

Most of them involve taking pictures of yourself (and NOT messing with them!) and the things you are eating to create a record of your progress.  Pictures don't lie (so long as you stay away from photoshop and chocolate cake).  

About half the articles are about how you can use Instagram yourself to help lose weight - the other half are about Instagrammers who can help you lose weight through their inspirational photos.

Here's an inspirational article from Self Magazine about how one 27-year old mom lost 84 pounds by posting photos or herself on Instagram.  

"She says that many times when she was tempted to stray from her healthy-eating plan, she thought of her followers and cooked something nutritious instead. And it worked: Swift has lost 84 pounds in 19 months, she says."

If photos are good - video is better.

Video, after all, allows you to talk, to add commentary - (this really works... this tastes terrible... hooray, I lost another inch... ) and so on.

Video is fast becoming the lingua franca of the 21st Century, at least in the online world.  (I suppose I should be doing this as a video - maybe I will - as soon as I finish my half a tomato lunch).