Well I've learned some things since my last post. First, you gain weight far faster than you lose it! Second, you carry 3 or 4 pounds extra when you're eating a normal diet. Third, as you get close to your "ideal" weight the actual number isn't that important.
Just before Christmas I was just about 162lbs. Then Christmas vacation back in Ireland happened. My worries about being surrounded by food proved well founded. I find it very difficult to resist grazing. Add to that not having a daily weigh-in and a certain amount of rebound after 6 months dieting and you have all perfect conditions for a big weight gain. First day back and I weighed-in at 175lbs, that dropped quickly as soon as I got back on the diet so I think I gained around 8lbs of actual fat, the rest was just "water weight". An 8lb gain in just two and half weeks is a lot. Its much faster than you can lose it and it really woke me up. Sometimes you need to experience something to really understand it - this was not a pleasant experience and I'm not planning a repeat. I spent January and February getting back to where I was in December.
In February I spent nearly 3 weeks on a cruise vacation to South America. Fantastic place - everyone should see Rio at least once in their lives! Before I left I resolved to try and maintain my weight at around 162lbs over the vacation. Still, a big part of a cruise is the food, its all paid for in the ticket. The ship restaurants typically serve 5-star food and there is as much of it as you want. I am delighted to say, I didn't gain any weight, once I was back home and back on my regular diet I pretty much weighed in at 162lbs. I didn't feel that I denied myself anything - we ate five course meals almost every night and I didn't always pick the low calorie options. But I didn't go crazy. I ate lightly during the day to leave room for the big evening meal. I avoided fried food almost completely and a lot of (but not all) the sweet stuff. I worked out pretty regularly - in fact I tried use the opportunity of eating an unrestricted diet to build some extra muscle. In the end it worked, It was a great confidence boost to see that I can maintain my weight in that kind of environment.
The second thing I learned was what that extra "water weight" really is. I think most people notice a very dramatic (3~4lbs) loss within the first few days of starting a diet. I've seen this three times so far. This cannot possibly be fat loss - you just can't shed it that fast. It has to be "consumables" - that is the extra food passing through, maybe some extra water that goes with that. What this means is that on the way down you have to really undershoot your target by maybe 4~5lbs to be sure that once you ramp you calorie intake back up to a maintainence mode that you don't overshoot your hard won goal. In hindsight this is obvious, but it took me a while to get it.
The third thing I realized is that at this point of the game its really only about vanity. I'm now under 160lbs. My body mass index is in the "normal" range. My blood pressure and resting heart rate are both excellent. From a health benefits point of view - the weight loss has done the job. Losing a few more pounds won't significantly change that. This is great - I'm in better physical shape now than I've been since I was a teenager. So what now? Where to from here?
Your answer may vary, I've decided I'm going to have fun and see how good I can look. I'm not going to become a body builder or a marathon runner. But I am going try to attain that lean six-pack goodness you see on every billboard advertising aftershave. Perhaps a frivolous goal to many, but you've got to have some of those alongside all the serious stuff. So this goal is all about how lean I can get, rather than aim at a specific weight, although you can be sure that the weight will be nearer the low end of the BMI range than the high end unless I build a huge amount of muscle (which is not the plan). I don't want to look muscle bound, just lean.
So the plan right now is continue what I'm doing down to at least 150lbs. I've still got a little paunch to lose. My body fat% at 162lbs was 17%, if I reach 150lbs without significant muscle loss (say lose 2lbs muscle and 10lbs fat), then my fat% will be around 12%. I expect that I'll need to get down to 10% or less to show a six pack. It can vary quite a lot person to person so I'm just going to wait and see how this looks and then decide the next step.
Wow! I’m now three quarters of the way to my target, 45 pounds lost to get to 170 down from 215 just 20 weeks ago. This feels great! I’m now slimmer than I’ve been since my late 20’s (I’m 39) – a decade’s worth of weight gain gone!
Since my last post at the start of September I’ve dropped from a 34” to a 30” waist. I bought one pair of 32” jeans along the way and just bought a pair of 30”. It was funny actually; I was in the jeans section of Old Navy and I couldn’t find the 30” sizes, only larger. The 30’s were hidden away on the very top shelf and they were the SMALLEST size they had! I’m going hold off an buying any more because I’ve still got 15 pounds of belly fat to lose and I figure I might get down to a 29” or even a 28” waist when I’m finally done. Looks like I might have to buy jeans in the kids section. My belt is now down to its last notch and it is getting loose – time for a new one.
I’ve gone through my wardrobe – all the XL sizes, 36” & 34”pants are gone. I’ve kept the L size stuff for the time being but that is starting to look a bit large. I think it will be M perhaps even S size when I’m done. What I am wearing looks great – its amazing how much better cloths fit when they aren’t being stretched over a big belly.
I’ve also started working out – I joined a gym two months ago. The objective is not so much to lose weight through exercise, but to minimize muscle loss during the diet and as a general additional step to get healthy. My body fat% when I started was 23% (which was actually surprisingly low). One month in, it was down to 21% and I’ll probably get another measurement next week. If I can believe these figures and I can avoid losing too much muscle then I can reasonable expect to be close to 10% body fat @ 155 pounds. That would be outstanding – well within athletic range. My routine has settled on 3 days a week; 40minutes of cardio on a treadmill followed by basic weight training. I split my 3 days up as chest/biceps, back/shoulders/triceps & legs. One session per week is with a trainer – the idea here is to first stay motivated to work out and second to have an expert show me good technique as I gradually get stronger. At this point I can run non-stop for 30 minutes at 6mph – 20 weeks ago I broke into a sweat walking upstairs!
The diet continues and now that the end is in sight it is really not a big bother. My only concern is that it looks like I’ll be trying to transition to maintenance mode right over Christmas when I be home with my family in Ireland. This will be hard – there are always mountains of food over the holidays lying around. I won’t have a gym to workout and the weather usually sucks so walking/running outside is problematic. I think the key will simply be damage limitation, don’t eat too crazy and try to get some exercise in. Mainly I’m not going to obsess about it and of course I get to show off my great new look to my family and friends.
The half way point, 30lbs down, 30 more to go, perhaps a good time to reflect on how this is going.
I think in general, so far so good. There are some great milestones that I've passed and I'm actually starting to enjoy how my slimmer body feels. At the same time the diet is starting to wear on me a bit and I'll be glad when its over and I can transition to maintenance mode. As I write this I'm at 185lbs down from about 215lbs a little over 12 weeks ago. I'm now only over-weight rather than obese according to my BMI. I've dropped from a 36" waist back to 34" which means I've been able to pull out all my old pants and jeans that I grew out of. My belt (that I've worn for a number of years) has 5 notches. When I first got it I used the middle notch. At my max weight it was just fitting at the last notch, now I'm back to the middle notch again. I've turned back the clock on the last year and a half of post smoking weight gain, I'm back to where I was when I smoked a pack a day. From here on in every pound I lose will be stepping back in time. As I mentioned before I've been gaining weight slowly since I was about 17 when I weighed around 150lbs. I was 37 when I gave up smoking and weighted about 185, so 20 years was a 35lb gain or about 1.75 lbs/year. Well I lose around 1.75 lbs per week on average so each week of diet turns back the clock 1 year. Wow! a weight loss time machine.
I feel different now, physically I'm more comfortable. I don't care what anyone says, having 30lbs of fat hanging off your waist is uncomfortable. My clothes fit better, shirts aren't stretched over my stomach (even XL ones were before). You can still see a little bit of a belly pushing against the shirt but its not hanging over my belt. My attitude has changed, frankly now that I'm much closer to average size I feel that I don't stand out as much. Franky it is nice to not be the one of the fattest in the room. If half-way feels this good I can't wait until I'm done!
On the other hand, I can't wait until I'm done. I'm getting sick of the diet. Not the food itself, like I said before it is actually what I like to eat, I'm just eating less of it and without all the fat adders. No, I'm just a bit tired of the discipline. I'd love to scarf down a few glasses of wine or beer or have that Friday afternoon ice cream at work (a tradition at my office - ice cream Friday's). I know everyone says you should give yourself some treats every so often or take a day off, but for the most part that just pushes out the day when I can ramp back up to 2200 calories and eat more or less normally. So I'd rather "get it over with". I don't think I'm in any danger of giving up at this point, the results so far have just been too good.
It seems to me that it is all too easy to become obsessed with what the scales says. I have seen blogs where people weigh themselves 3 times a day and lament that they gained back the two pounds at dinner time that they had lost by lunch time after their morning workout.
It takes time to gain weight and it takes time to lose it. The hourly and daily random ups and downs in weight completely swamp the slow and steady loss from dieting. Either decide to weigh yourself at wide enough intervals (like once a week) so that the overall trend can seen. Or if you can hack the math, weigh yourself once per day and then ignore daily figures and just look at an average of the last weeks data. The averaged data will show the true trend of weight gain or loss.
Use an accurate scales, there is nothing worse than adding more noise and uncertainty using poor equipment. After the first few days of this I purchased a Tanita HD 313-W Digital Bathroom Scale for $24 on Amazon. It has worked great.
Even when you're an engineer and you understand moving averages and even the exponentially smoothed moving averages that you are using to track the trend of your weight loss, it is still easy to get a bit disheartened by the daily weigh-in when it seems like the number is just stuck day after day. Have faith, just keep going and the number will inevitably drop.
Most people know what they should and shouldn't eat to stay healthy. More fruit and veg, less fat, less red meat more fish and so on. But of course if it were easy to eat right most people would, yet they don't. Simply laying out a menu of nutritious food that meets a calorie target for your diet isn't enough. You have to stick with that diet for the LONG term and once you reach your ideal weight you have to maintain a diet that keeps you there. In the end you are only going to stick to a diet if you enjoy eating it and it is no real hardship. If it is a constant daily struggle to eat the diet you have selected then you will by fighting an uphill battle from the start. So the true secret to successful weight control is finding stuff that you like to eat and developing a set of habits that don't let you eat too much of it.
Of course eating less then your body needs when you are losing weight means you are going to feel hungry and you are going to miss some of those tasty treats that load on the calories. The trick is to balance out those aspects however you can so that you can stay on plan. It seems to me that I've been lucky so far in that it hasn't been as hard as I expected to create that balance. I'm not sure if this is typical or not. But here are the reasons why I think its worked.
Eating every 3 hours plays a huge part in not feeling hungry. I'm sure of this because if I miss one of my schedule snacks then I notice it with real hunger pangs.
Recording EVERYTHING I eat in my journal and being a bit anal about counting calories has helped in a big way. I can't just sneak an ice cream and pretend it didn't happen. Because I know I'll have to enter it in my journal and I know it will blow the days budget. The thougt of that negative aspect makes it easy to resist. Keeping the journal has created a downside to cheating.
I generally like what I've been eating, sandwiches and salads were part of my diet before, I just ate more of them and loaded them with extra fat (for example a Subway 12" tuna sandwich with cheese for lunch).
Seeing results make it easier, success is great motivator.
I have never been a big sugar fan so I haven't had to fight a sugar addiction. If you like sugar all I can suggest is those artificial sweeteners and I think there is a lot of BS surrounding Aspartame that you should ignore.
In the end I'm a reasonably self controller guy and as food still lacks the ability to jump of the table and ram itself down your throat (some types of sushi notwithstanding) it is simply a matter of choosing what to eat and what not to eat.
So what have I done to cut 1050 calories per day out of my diet?
First, I started to eat breakfast which I haven't done in years. When I smoked breakfast was just coffee and a cigarette (well several actually) and that did just fine until a lunch at 12pm. Well since I gave up smoking I've been pretty hungry by the time lunch rolled around so I've been tempted to snack (ummm bagels) and have a large lunch especially if we went out. Well now I have a bowl of cereal in the morning before I go to work. It takes just a couple of minutes to eat, no cooking is required and the only major lifestyle change is I now have to go to the supermarket every so often to buy milk. I'm not a big sugar fiend so plain Corn Flakes, Rice Crispies or Cheerios is fine. I use whole fat milk because there really isn't a lot of calories difference from non-fat and I really hate non fat milk on cereal (it tastes like white colored water). So about 200 calories all together.
I drink lots of coffee, around 5 mugs a day. It is low in calories (as long as you don't load it up with half & half) and it is both a metabolism booster (i.e. stimulant) and appetite suppressant. Perfect diet food. Don't believe the BS about caffeine being bad for you. Note of caution, be careful with Starbucks and the like, a latte is not just coffee its mostly milk and that has a lot of calories. A tall non-fat latte has 120 calories which is way more than the 15 calories for a big cup of drip coffee with non dairy creamer.
Thank God for Subway! When it comes to a fast food joint where you can get good low calorie food for lunch they are great. I order a 6" on wheat of something on their 6grams of fat or less menu. Load it up with veggies, but no cheese or dressing, just black pepper. Between 250~350 calories. There is a Subway shop almost exactly a 1 mile round trip walk from my office, so I get a few minutes exercise and burn about 100 calories just walking to get lunch.
Around 3pm I have a piece of fruit, usually a banana or an apple. This gets me through the afternoon without feeling hungry. If I miss this snack then the pangs of hunger are really setting in by the time dinner rolls around at 6pm. Just 100 calories on average.
While I'm almost immune to caffeine at this point, since I gave up smoking I've found I really can't sleep well if I drank it in the evening. So I generally stop drinking coffee in the afternoon and start on water. I try to drank around 32oz.
After Subway, TOGOs Sandwiches is the other fast food joint that serves half decent low calorie food. For dinner I have either their Mediterranean Tuna Salad, the Farmers Market Salad or a half tuna sandwich and half salad. These options are about the only low calorie ones at TOGOs and they have plenty of bad stuff. My dinner is typically about 350 calories.
I have a final snack at 9pm, either a piece of fruit, a granola bar or a bowl of cereal. This means I don't go to bed hungry. Between 100~200 calories.
Once I settled into this routine I found that I'm eating around 1200 calories per day. I decided to make this my target rather than 1500 as long as its no hardship. That allows me to stay a little in front of my plan. I can exceed my 1200 calorie budget by 200~300 calories on a bad day and not feel too bad, because I know its is still inside the plan requirements. So far after 5 weeks this diet is working for me and it really hasn't been a huge hardship. In fact I'm a bit surprised at how easily I have resisted the bad stuff. Next article I'll talk about why I think that is the case.
So now I have a budget of 1500 calories per day, the question becomes what to eat? Perhaps first I'll start with what not to eat and work from there.
First just give up the killer stuff, candy, ice cream, cookies, non-diet soda anything loaded with sugar or fat. You know this food is just loaded with calories but it doesn't really fill you up (so you eat lots). Lucky for me giving up this stuff wasn't a great hardship, though I have been known to pig out on it occasionally, especially chocolate if its around. I used to think that as I drank fruit juice rather than soda I was selecting the healthy option - WRONG, both are loaded with sugar and calories.
Next on the list are what I call "Fat Adders". Whenever you watch fast food commercials its clear they are in competition with each other to add as much fat as possible. For Example, Pizza Hut..."We could only fit 5 types of cheese on top of the pizza so we have invented a way to stuff cheese into the crust to get even more on". The fat adders are stuff that are usually put on food, like cheese, butter, oil, salad dressing, avocado and mayo. You could have a huge bowl of salad (like lettuce, tomato, onion.....) and it would be less than 100 calories. You can easily double that or triple the calories with just a little dressing, cheese or bacon bits. The thing to remember with all these killer foods and fat adders is that they really don't "fill you up" or suppress you appetite, but they do load on the calories. So you really don't want them, they take up a big slice of the daily calorie budget but they don't make you feel less hungry. Often you can get 90% of the taste by using just the minimum amount of dressing for example and you can always select the low calorie option if available. The main this is be careful of fat adders - they are concentrated calories.
For the longest time I convinced myself that I really wasn't overeating. And in fact I really wasn't, at least not very much or very often. Here is what I ate the day before I started my diet and it was a pretty typical day:
So somewhere around 200 calories more than I needed. Not huge, but 200 calories extra everyday for a couple of weeks is 1lb of weight gain. And that is how I got to 215lbs. And I NEVER realized it until I sat down and actually worked out how many calories I was eating.
But wait there's more misconceptions and self delusions as to the amount of calories. Occasionally we will have Thursday breakfast at work, the admins bring in bagels, donuts and juice for everybody. Now I'm an educated guy, I knew the donuts were death on a stick so I stuck to the bagels and cream cheese - you know the healthy stuff. Boy I could easily inhale a couple of poppy seed bagels. Well guess what almost 300 calories for a bagel, add another 100 calories for the cheese and multiply by 2. An 800 calorie snack to get the day going, a full 1/3 of the total calories I need. And I NEVER knew until I started counting calories.
The hard part is learning a new way to consider food (calories) and then using that knowledge to change what you eat.
Counting calories is absolutely essential. It is one of those things that at the start is hard, that quickly gets easier and finally becomes so natural that you can do it in you head with no effort at all.
In order to count calories you have to control portions or servings. For example, I bought Corn Flakes, the nutrition label said 100 calories per serving and the serving size was 3/4 of a cup. So I actually went and measured it out with a measuring jug. Now I know for that particular cereal bowl exactly what 3/4 of a cup of dry cereal looks like. I did the same with the milk. Now when I count 180 calories for my breakfast cereal I know that it is reasonably accurate. You simply can't ignore serving size, do whatever you need to do to make sure you know what is going into your body. This might seem like dumb stuff to you, but I had never measured a cup of anything before. Didn't I mention I don't cook.
What did people do before the Internet? How did they live, hard to understand. Nowadays if you want to know how many calories something has just look it up online. I have found that CalorieKing.com is an excellent site for this purpose.
Of course there are times when you have to work out the calories in something from scratch. In that case just break it up into its ingredients, find the calories for each and add it up. You will do a lot of estimating of portions but I guarantee you will get better with practice.
Keep a record of everything you eat. Write it down. I use a spreadsheet (based on the one from Jeremy). Calculate how many calories you are eating every day. Don't worry about hitting an exact number. I take the average of the last 5 days and try and get that number to match my target. That way if I eat a couple of hundred too much one day I can eat a little less for the next 2 or 3 days and the average never gets too far away from the target.
A plan must have an objective, a goal, an aiming point. So what is mine?
I decided that it wasn't 20lbs or get below 200 or get to where I was before I gave up smoking. I went and found out what I should weight for my height and build. Basically there is a wide range for a given height and I chose the middle of the range, here is a link to an online calculator. I am 5'10", male and medium build, middle of the range for me was 155lbs (it sounds so little!)
So 215-155 = 60lbs to lose.
I'm originally from Ireland and my parents and whole family still live there. I go home to visit every Christmas, so seeing as I was starting at the beginning of June, I decided that I wanted to be done before I went home (I figured the new me would be a pretty good surprise for the family as they only see me once a year). So that is about seven months and is actually pretty close to 200 days which is a nice round number. So 60lbs in 200 days - I've got a goal.
Well 1lb of fat contains 3500 calories, so 60 lbs of fat contains 60*3500. To lose that over 200 days means I have to have a deficit of (60*3500)/200 calories per day. That number works out to be 1050 calories. So every day for the next 200 days I have to eat 1050 calories less than my body needs in order to lose 60lbs. But how many calories does my body need? Well everyone is different, but you can get a rough idea based on your weight, height and age and that is all you need to get started. The number of calories you need per day is called the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), here is a link to a good BMR calculator.
That told me that my BMR was 2545 calories/day. So a 1050 calorie deficit meant I could eat about 1500 calories/day.
Now before anybody in the cheap seats starts giggling about that guy with his facts and figures is trying to plan out a 60lb weight loss like a poorly run military campaign let me say this. It is a PLAN, and the only thing we can be sure of is that it will need to change over time. You did read The Hackers Diet, didn't you. Well we will monitor results daily (a weight-in) and adjust calorie intake as needed. The plan just gets us started in the right direction knowing approximately what we need to do.
