4. Education

When I was overweight, I really couldn't tell you why I was overweight. Generally I knew that I was eating too much and/or not exercising enough. But, I didn't know how to go about figuring out how much I should eat or how much I should exercise.

But, my lack of knowledge was even more basic than that. Before I educated myself, I had only a vague notion on what fat was and how it worked. I didn't know where that cut-off was between fat and thin. I didn't know exactly what a calorie was or how fat, protein and carbs worked. At one time, I actually thought that you got fat by eating fattening foods. I didn't know how body fat differed from fat in your diet. I didn't know how my body takes the food I eat everyday and breaks it down into the pieces that keep us humming.

After talking with many people, I realized that most people don't know these things either. It's a complicated subject matter, which pushes some to try to simplify it into an easily understandable system.

For me it was important to learn the fundamentals of how the body worked in order to be successful at controlling my weight. I didn't want to follow a dumbed-down system, but not understand why I was doing what I was doing.

As the answers came, I realized weight control touches on many different traditional subject matters. It spans physics, biology, chemistry, economics, psychology, statistics, finance, medicine, health with a heavy dose of math mixed in.

For the next several posts I'm going to deep dive into weight loss education. I'm going to step you through the process of how I came to understand weight - at it's base level - which helps me successfully control my weight.