for my birthday this year (last week actually), I joined the local gym and took up the offer of some 1-1 personal training.
I've had my consultation and body composition done and will have the nutrition stuff sorted this Friday. Next week we hit the gym. I've already learnt so much about how my body works, my weak areas, where my muscles are too strong in places versus too weak in others. He's given me some tips about diet already and have learnt so much. Being an IT guy, having a spreadsheet with numbers on is amazing! Seeing my diet plan with everything listed out such as calories, protein, carbs etc etc and knowing what I need to eat versus the energy my body is burning is really amazing. For the price I'm paying, it's a no brainer.
Basically, for losing weight you need to know how many calories your body is burning each day. There's a calculation for that somewhere. I'll find it if anyones intersted. Once you know that, you either carry on doing the same each day but eating less, or eat the same and do more exercise. Just work out what you like to eat, find the nutritional information, stick it in a spreadsheet to work out the daily totals and see where it falls. Burning 500 calories a day over what you eat is doable and will see a decent amount of weight loss.
I stopped eating junk 3 months ago and have dropped to 18.88% bodyfat. That's just with cutting out chocolate, crisps, bread and making sure evening meals aren't rubbish like pizza or chips. No takeaways or eating out either. Once you go all in, it's really quite fun. I've also added in a few walks in the week just to hit 400-500 calories burnt off for good measure. My belt has had to have two extra holes punched into it so definatlely dropping the fat.
My next stage it to increase muscle mass, as bigger muscles burns more fat so it's a win, win. My bodyfat will increase through whilst I do this.
at the end of the day, if someone REALLY wants to lose weight they will.