How To Lose Weight

Is permanent weight loss possible at all?

The idea of the name of permloss.com was to get to a formula or a state where your weight loss or my weight loss would be permanent. I remember that as a tennis player I could go back on court after an absence of say four weeks and still play a reasonable game. Everything was not lost during the period of the break from the tennis court. I took this thinking to my new found passion of running. It did not quite work out the same – four weeks of no running would not set you back four weeks, but much more. The fitness builds up over time and although I still knew how to run, the lungs and the legs quickly told me that the “base fitness” was not at the same level that I though it would be.

I have seen many people at the gym going to a trainer for years, then switching trainers and go to another trainer at the same gym, but the outer physique remained the same. They must have enjoyed the training because they still came regularly, but the weight or shape results did not quite come. In my thinking the ideal situation was that a certain day would arrive where you would need a trainer for weight loss anymore. The weight loss often not the number 1 priority of the fitness coach or the customer. It could be that it is just to get stronger or fitter or to make sure that your back handles the stress of day to day living better.

It may be better just to accept that we will never arrive at a place where weight loss (or weigh gain for a few of us) is a permanent place. It may be better to describe it as the waves in the Ocean running to the beach. From time to time it is low tide and at other times it is high tide, but it does not turn into an uncontrollable Sunami!

Our goal is for you to get results in the shortest time possible while maintaining a good balance and focusing on your health. For some people the first result that is crucial may just be a burst of energy, a sense that you are feeling better although the body is just starting on the road now.

Tested formulas and plans are the answer

There is so much information available and so many different opinions.

Running

Let us start with the formula for successful running. Some athletes would say that you must be fit enough never to walk on a marathon. You need to do enough training beforehand to run the whole distance with the formula roughly that you need to run quite a few weeks of double your race distance during the whole week before your race to have a good run with no walks in between. If you want to run a marathon it means that you should do more than 85 km per week as total distance for a period of 8 to ten weeks on average. Some of these runs may be 38 km or even 46 km. On the other hand, you get coaches advocating frequent walk breaks in your runs. They would then say that you should walk every 3 km or every 7 minutes. In this case there is no need or plan to run the whole time – you walk and if it is a nine hour race you may walk for about 75 minutes if you walk 1 minute after every 7 minutes of running.

The focus may also move from doing long slow runs to shorter faster runs combined with workouts at the gym to strengthen the calf muscles, the core and the back muscles. So now the distance only is not the focus, but speed and strength while you maintain a good pace on the road. If you refine this art, you will find that you spend less time exercising for a better result in the end.

The elite athletes will need highly skilled and experienced coaches to assist them and our purpose will never be to replace those. We will, however, question it if people do not renew the thinking on preparation tactics. Let me use this example: you intend to run your next 10-kilometre race in less than 60 minutes. You go out and you train 30 km every week, but the pace that you train at is 7 minutes per kilometre. You cannot train at a pace slower than what your race pace will be all the time. You need to run a few runs at a faster pace that your body can get used to this – so you may want to run 6 km at a pace of 5min30 per kilometre. You may also want to lose 3 kg instead and run a little bit less every week. If you want to run faster it will be much easier if you carry less weight on your body while at the same time you do retain your muscles as much as possible to do the hard work.

Weight Loss

If you go to ten different people you may get ten different approaches to weight loss. If you google the question about how to lose weight (926 million hits 23 April 2019) you will be able to spend hours going through the different plans and the different options available.

The “easy” weight loss plan is of course just to stop eating. This is a (good?) plan to start out with, but it is not possible to pursue this plan and still make a useful contribution to society at the same time. If you could go to a place where you could meditate and be relieved of any other duties and responsibilities, you would be able to stay without food for extended periods of time. You could then stay without food for a time and keep on drinking electrolytes during this period (not water only). According to certain formulas you will lose 1 kg for every 7000 kcal that you did not receive. According to your build and weight this may mean 1 kg every four days meaning that you would lose 7 kg or a bit more than that in a month. It seems that the formula is not that accurate for total fasting. You may drop 5% of your body weight in a week (and even more). The purpose of this explanation here is not to give an accurate scientific formula or blueprint but to share the idea that there are areas where we do not know the details of the outcomes of certain actions and that we and the doctors often make educated guesses while there is no research available yet (or not enough at least) to give us proper guidance. So we will test and challenge the accepted principles and guide you to possible solutions that would have been tested by others before you.

Holistic Approach

You may want to swallow a tablet to start losing weight. One or two tablets a day plus a change in your nutrition habits will help you to drop the weight. It is only focusing on one aspect though. There are so many other things to take into consideration. How much do you sleep, how much and how do you exercise, what do you eat and when do you eat? Are you stressed? What do you do with your stress? How are your relationships with others, with yourself, with your community? How do you connect spiritually? What do you want to achieve? Sometimes we are eating (or not eating) as the result of an emotional void that we need to be aware of. In many cases we will not be aware of that need or void and we will hide this from ourselves and others.

When you meet with a new coach or a new support team you would not always want to share some of these aspects with them as you do not (fully) trust them yet. That is understandable and the important thing is to build that level of trust between you and your coach. It may be that there are certain things that you will never share, but there needs to be someone that you will be able to share that with. When you do that, the whole plan for the new you will be easier to implement.