Original Cosmo Girl - Laura Dion Jones

Dear Laura:

OMG, I went on that elliptical machine at the Y and it was awesome. For the first time, I could only handle 13 minutes but I thought it was pretty good for a beginner. I finished my cardio day on the treadmill with another 25 minutes, so I thought that was pretty good for a first day working out at the Y.

As far as diet goes, I will be combining my own form of Weight Watchers and Atkins – a slower way to lose weight, but I’d like to keep it off for good. I did really well with Atkins last time I went on it, adding fruits mostly because I am a big fruit lover and prefer that over breads and sweets, actually.

Looking forward to exercise more, though.

See you on Wednesday for our 1st weigh in at the Y.

L

Dear L:

Congratulations on your first real cardio workout day at the Y. I’d caution you about doing too much right off the bat since you're not used to it yet. The idea is to first develop the daily cardio habit. If you begin with too big a bite, you risk losing interest because on the second or third or forth day you could decide, "heck with it, this is just too hard."

There is no true and everlasting weight loss without daily cardio. Trust me on this.

Wherever you begin, make sure it’s something you can live with on a daily basis and then build on, add to, as you get into the swing of practicing cardio every day.

And I’m glad you have a diet plan. A few of the other new EBls do not – they just say they want to “eat healthier.”

What I need to know from everyone, including the politicians on the anti-obesity bandwagon is: What exactly does “healthy eating” mean to you?

Without an actual plan, a real road map, you will get nowhere. It’s very easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re “eating healthy” with all the misinformation in the media.

You have to pick a diet that works for you from the minute you start. We’ll monitor your progress and reassess in a few weeks.

And as far as adding fruits into your diet plan, if I were you, I'd stick with LOW glycemic fruits like cantaloupe, honey dew and strawberries - read the glycemic index of watermellon and you'll never tough the stuff again - no matter how much you love it. I eat a little every summer, just to remind myself of how wonderful it tastes, but how detrimental it is to my low carb diet.

One of the EBL 1's fessed up she was eating watermellon and pineapple and once we discovered this, it was apparent why she wasn't losing any weight! I made the same mistake at the beginning of my weight loss, too - and promptly cut out all but the lower glycemic fruits. See the low carb legal food list I gave you in your EBL intro packet and use that as your guide.

Great going. Keep up the good work.

I look forward to hearing more . . .

BEST,

Laura