Weight loss: By Trial and Error

I am a girl.
Oh man glad I got that off my chest. Surprise I know. But like many girls, I was forever concerned about my weight. I have tried a great good number of methods to slim down and keep it to a minimum while staying healthy.

Running for one. I have had a beautifully broken ankle in the past which to this day limits exercise options, largely due to the surgery it has since incurred. So I limited myself to gym exercise, primarily on the elliptical. I would go crazy with gym exercise for periods of time with mild success. Of course as a student it is difficult to keep a regular schedule with the onslaught of tests, papers, and projects all bombarding you for your space and time. Thus regularity with the schedule was difficult for time other than the summer. This clearly did not work out so well for me. I would only make progress for a short time and then regress. All in all I really only ever lost water weight doing this. I can say this however, I did lose a lot of fat during this time, but gained it back in muscle. So I was looking trimmer than before after I started doing this.

Another things I tried was weight loss pills. Oh I have tried many. And I was even met with success for one of them. However as the warnings say, you should not be doing them for a long time or it could cause some more serious health side effects. That aside, do you really know what you are ingesting when you take these? These have been no long term medical studies. How could there be? These have only cropped up in recent years. These puppies could very easily lead to organ failure or blood thinning. Therefore I cannot recommend this to anyone who wants to seriously permanently and healthily lose weight. I only took these for short periods of time during the bikini season, if you will. I additionally cannot recommend these because of the 4 or 5 variations I have tried, only one has worked. Perhaps you have to be very strict with the measures with which you take these ( the time of day and amount of exercise you get), but for the price they cost and the results I have had, it is just not worth it.

Dieting. Ohhh dieting. Everyone always telling you to eat right and eat less. Well they are right to a degree. Americans, which I am, eat a heaping lot more than they should. I think the best weight loss regime that I have had in my college years has been dieting. Granted it was also not so fun and a bit saddening. I mostly ate salads and ate very moderately to little. I probably lost a good 20 pounds doing this for perhaps 6 months. However then I regained a social life and the happiness that came with that, going out, eating nice meals, dessert parties... and much of it returned.

Now for what worked for me

Moving.

I moved to Korea a year and a half ago and then to Japan since then. Before I moved to Korea, I weighed in at 162 pounds ( HOLY CRAP)...ok not so much. I had a lot of muscle on me from my sporting days, of which I had many. I was a bit overweight but not terribly and I at this point I was comfortable with myself, as it was perhaps the largely the most consistent weight I have had since high school. Only I looked better and more trim since then, as I was eating better and had a bit more muscle on display than fat.
But FYI for Asian standards, this is very overweight. But they are also structurally very different with a lot less muscle ( I feel as though I could very easily take any Korean woman on).
Moving to Korea made a huge difference though. In both my dietary and exercise regimes. Of course I ate more rice, debunking any Atkins diet for me. I ate loads more vegetables and fish as well. In addition I was walking 4 kilometers a day. That is a little over 2 miles (for Americans). With this constant assuage of a constant healthy diet and physical exercise, as well as extremely active weekend activities I began to lose weight. I didn't notice at first. It wasn't until I was in a jimjilbang ( a Korean bathhouse) that I noticed my face was looking slimmer. After my year in Korea I weighed a grand total of 17 pounds less.
Feeling great I moved to Japan and gave up juices, ( do you have any idea how man sugars those have?!) and putting sugar in my coffee. As I was already accustomed to not drinking soda ( another American guilty pleasure), my sugar intake dived. Additionally my walk to work was farther, increasing my previous routine to about 8 kilometers a day. Thus, after living here for 5 months, I have lost another 5 pounds. Making my grand total thus far to be a loss of 22 pounds and I weigh in at 62 kilos (about 140ish pounds). I can definitely say that I look way better and because of that feel awesome.

Therefore my final advice on losing weight is to move to Asia.

And because everyone likes to see before and after pics (and bikini pics as well here is an after pic...now let me find a before one...)