After seeing Rachel Carpenter’s impressive and inspiring success in regaining a healthy lifestyle, and because I’m just naturally interested in the science and psychology of weight loss in general, I decided to spend some time at Leanness Lifestyle University (LLU). For those unaware, LLU is a program founded by David Greenwalt, and focuses on helping people learn proper ways to lose weight. The program has a free 5-day course they call Lifestyle 101 that consists of daily five-minute videos. Since I’m interested, and since I’m getting back into more activity on the whole, I figured “why not?” let’s see what this guy has to say. It should be fun!
Yes, I’m strange that way.
Since it’s five days I’ll take a moment each day to post my thoughts and feelings, and give you an idea of what it’s like. So, here it goes…
Day 1: Video
Here we get to see Davig G. talk about the basics of why weight loss programs don’t work so well. I can tell that overall I’m going to like this guy’s base message, but he commits what I continue to feel is a huge and annoying error by saying that “eat less and move more” (ELAMM) is “wrong” and then, of course, immediately describes ways the program is going to help you to do exactly that.
Ron’s aside: The problem with “ELAMM” is not that it is wrong, it’s that it’s not enough on it’s own for people to be able to go it alone, and it’s that it’s actually very hard for most people to enact unless they actually learn what it means. ELAMM, in fact, is really the only way to go when it comes to weight loss…but I digress…blah, blah, blah…
Anyway, the video describes three primary ways he thinks about weight control and basic health. These three legs are nutrition (eat less/right?), activity (move more/better?), and emotional health (feel good doing it?).
This is very good. My current thoughts are that this emotional side is very important because it’s the thing (I think) that eventually stops most people from being successful in ELAMM (which are essentially covered in his steps 1 and 2). I’m very interested in seeing how the free program teaches this, and it’s intersection to the both EL and MM.
DAY 1: The Rest
The program then asked me to log in, and in a little tutorial that’s pretty easy to follow had me set some goals and register activity. Since I haven’t had activity, yet this morning, I listed the things I plan to do this afternoon. I hope life doesn’t make me a liar.
As you enter your current weight, your activity commitments (Move More?), and your target weight five weeks from now, the program tells you what your calorie intake has to be (Eat Less?). For example, the system tells me that to hit my goal I need to limit myself to 1887 calories per day, given my commitment to 300 minutes of exercise per week, and it gives me a scoreboard of calories eaten vs. calories burned through exercise.
And that’s it for today.