Eat Less, Move More, Don't Diet: Natural Weight Loss and Fitness Tips for the Whole Family

ABOUT THE BOOK

Amy and Randy are a 40ish, middle class American couple living in Florida with five children, one daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren. Randy works as a Network Security Admin and Web Developer, so Amy can stay at home.

Amy comes from a strong Northern Wisconsin-Polish background and was raised to show love with food-more butter, more sugar, sausage, Pierogies, etc. It didn't take long for Amy to start showering Randy with three full meals a day plus desserts and treats.

Over the course of four years, Amy fattened him up to well over 300 pounds! Then Randy started having chest pains, so he went to the doctor. He was a young man in his thirties with somewhat high LDL (bad) cholesterol and EXTREMELY low (good) HDL cholesterol, which put him at high risk for a heart attack. It was scary, especially with four children in the house.

Amy was literally loving her husband to death, so they had to make a change. She had to cook healthier foods. But Randy was spoiled with treats, and there was no way he was going to eat salad and drink diet soda. With that in mind, they took it slowly-really, really slowly.

It took about two years. Randy lost over 120 pounds, and his cholesterol is healthy. He runs 5 to 10K four times a week and hits the weights pretty hard.

There are no tricks to it, no special diets to follow or some voodoo gimmick that will make the pounds disappear. As Amy and Randy learned more about healthy living, the sneaky people started to stand out. There were so many of them preying on others with promises to make you thin and beautiful if you just pay their price.

Thus, the creation of Health-Actually.com. Amy and Randy share products they tried, exercise that worked, and recipes that fit it into their family. Their goal: to make your life better by offering you the long version of how they did it.

EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK

Starting Out

Our method for natural weight loss is pretty darn effective. It's not sexy or glamorous, and it's not a miracle breakthrough. What we prescribe is a collection of common sense and time-tested ideas that you can mold to fit your shape.

It's a set of simple ideas that help change your life for the better and keep the weight off for good. There are no sudden changes, just a slow and steady easy steps.

Start Slow

Sometimes drastic changes are necessary, but we firmly believe that a steady course reduces the risk of failure.

Amy had the harder part of our natural weight loss adventure. She had to learn how to feed a large family on a small budget in a way that would keep me from eating myself into an early grave. A lot of our familiar dishes were familiar because they were affordable. She had to do a lot of experimenting to find stuff that we could afford while preventing a gastronomic rebellion.

She did a hell of a job, and together, we kept making small changes, applying consistent and focused effort to move the whole house in a healthier direction.

Get Moving

Now that you've started to chip away at your bad eating habits, it's time to add in a bit of exercise. Same idea here-slow and steady wins the race. We won't run a marathon by the end of the week or do one-handed donkey-kick ass crunchers in front of the TV. We just want simple ways to be more active throughout the day and start getting in the habit of exercising.

Find something that you already need or want to do on a regular basis and do it to get up and moving.

Get in the habit of doing an exercise routine every day. Nothing crazy, just simple exercises that you can do that will start to wake your body back up, like push-ups, crunches, lunges, squats, light dumbbells, jumping jacks, or running in place.

Buy the book to read more!

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Introduction

+ Health, Actually

Randy's Story: My Natural Weight Loss and How I Got Big in the First Place

+ How It All Began

+ Making A Change

...and much more