Ryan's Guide to Weight Loss - Step 3

Assuming you have completed step 2…. Congratulations! You just went a week without eating the really bad crap that most of America subsists on. You should notice a difference in the way you feel. I know I felt way better both physically and mentally after giving up all the trash food. So, what is next?

Now it is time to start cutting back. You can go into your calorie goals and set the drop down to “Lose 2 pounds a week”. You can start with 1.5 or even just 1 if you aren’t feeling terribly ambitious but I think losing 2 a week is relatively easy when you are as fat, or fatter, than I was.

How many calories you can eat per day to lose your desired amount will be completely variable so I will stay away from specifics and just talk about what I did to help keep my calories at or under that limit. The first big thing to watch out for is hunger. Hunger is your enemy. In fact, hunger is likely why you are fat right now (surprise, surprise, I know).  A big part of this is not only managing your calorie intake but managing your hunger. I am not suggesting you try some mind-over-matter BS or something; I am talking about eating to quell hunger. Easy right? Well, “sorta”.

The problem with hunger is that when it gets too strong it makes it very difficult to maintain self control when it comes to what and how much you eat. I am convinced that a strong feeling of hunger affects your ability to reason. I bet I could find a study somewhere on the affects of hunger on the brain that would back that up. All I know is that the days when I got super hungry from having to skip meals I was far more likely to commit a “calorie fail”.

So, to fight hunger you just need to eat. If you spread your calorie limit out over the day you will not get unbearably hungry and you will be less likely to cheat or over-eat. In my case my target was ~1600 calories a day. So I started eating at roughly this schedule:

7:00am – Breakfast (~250C)

9:30am – Snack (~150C)

11:30am – Lunch (<= 450C)

3:00pm – Snack (~150C)

6:00pm – Dinner (<= 600C)

On top of this eating schedule I would do a couple other things:

·         Drink 12-16oz of water or iced tea with each meal/snack.  If you must have soda you can do diet, but I am personally a little afraid of artificial sweeteners.

·         Drink 2 - 3 cups of hot green tea throughout the day, it’s not only good for you but helps fill you up and some studies have suggested it boosts metabolism.

·         Eat as much raw celery and carrots as I wanted. I decided to not count these calories since a large carrot is about 15C and a celery stalk is 10C. Some have argued you burn more calories digesting them and I am going to willfully choose to believe that (but I won’t put money on it) :P

·         At dinner I would eat a TON of veggies. LOTS of veggies. It would fill me up and make me a lot less likely to finish my wife’s steak or reach for a calorie fail dessert after.

There it is. That is your goal and the end of the calorie counting/consumption part of my steps. Really, it is all you need. What was that big, magic, secret rule again? Oh right, consume less than you burn. That’s it. You should start noticing the pounds coming off within a week, and you should also notice that you feel better overall. PLUS, perhaps the biggest bonus, is that when you start watching the fat drop off it motivates you (or at least it did me) to keep going and lose more.

Coming up next I will talk about what I ate (my “usuals”), and tips and tricks to cut calories in everything you eat. After that I will talk about my experiences and success with exercise.

Let the insanity BEGIN.

So, remember when I posted a while back about having lost the motivation to improve? Well, I think all I needed was a swift kick in the butt. And I think I've found it in the certifiably insane P90X home fitness program you've probably seen in a late-night infomercial. The wife and I are doing it together, and two days in (out of 90, hence the name), I'm very impressed.

The program emphasizes muscle confusion, constantly switching up the exercise routines and increasing intensity over time. The workouts are about an hour a day, 6 days a week. Yesterday was chest and back (basically an hour of alternating between a dozen forms of push-ups and pull-ups) with an additional 15 minute ab workout. Today's DVD featured some plyometric nonsense that will undoubtedly render me unable to walk in the morning. Tomorrow is shoulders and arms, followed by yoga on Tuesday (there are 12 routines in all, some of which we won't even do until 30 days from now). If I am able to stick with it, I can already tell that 3 months from now my body will be utterly unrecognizable.

A strict diet is also prescribed. The first 30 days call for obtaining 50% of one's calories from protein, 30% from carbohydrates, and 20% from fat. It's Atkins without the fat, and it's very tough. The program dictates that I should eat about 2700 calories a day (the workouts burn 600 a day, they say, and I believe it), but I'm finding it difficult to jam down that many calories when half of it comes from protein, so 2400 is about all I can handle so far. If half can come from chocolate chip cookies, count me in. :) After the first thirty days, the protein is reduced and the carbs increased, making life a little easier, with another step towards normalcy for the final 30 days. I'm pretty determined to make it work, so hopefully I'll be able to keep it up.

So here are the "before" stats and pictures (warning - shirtless Dave pictures below):

Weight: 185 lbs.
Chest: 39"
Waist: 39"
Hips: 40"
Thighs: 19.75" right, 18.75" left
Biceps: 14" right, 13.5" left



I will attempt to post an update about once a week, or as often as I feel there is progress to be shown. You can follow my progress here, as well as on my profile at The Daily Plate.

I have done a six week program with a trainer before, but never a three month one entirely at home. I'm sure it will be tough, but I hope it will be rewarding as well. We shall see!

About Me (Jeff)

I grew up in Illinois and was always reasonably active. I played baseball as a kid, joined football and track in high school, then got into weights and martial arts when I got to college. I fluxuated between 170 and 195 throughout college. After college I started working at a bar and decided I enjoyed beer more than I enjoyed exercise. The pounds started piling on over the next couple years. I crept up to 210,220...and by the time I moved to California in 1995, I was at 225.

In CA, I started hitting the gym thinking "This will be the answer.". My roomie and I enjoyed living in Venice Beach and being into the gym scene there. We both put on a lot of mass but neither of us really lost the fat we wanted to lose. I was jogging on the beach and lifting weights so I didn't understand why I wasn't slimming down. I was now up to around 235-240 with the added muscle weight. Looking back now, I can see that I was missing a vital component...I needed to stop eating like a horse or a pig or whatever other farmyard animal you would like to visualize in this scenario. We would walk down the boardwalk and each pick up a few cheap slices of pizza or hit the A&W rootbeer stand and have a triple burger with fries for dinner. Maybe we would head out to the local burrito stand and grab a variety of tasty tortilla-rolled treats. No matter where it was we thought about eating, nutrition and/or calories were never part of the decision making process.

In 2000, I moved to Phoenix, AZ. I was up to 245 now. I started jogging more frequently...but, naturally, I didn't modify my diet and saw minimal gains. Eventually, I had to stop jogging when I injured my knee since it just wasn't prepared for the physics involved in 245lbs of man meat pounding it repeatedly into the asphalt below.

In 2007, I got married....at a whopping 285lbs. I knew my wife from back in my days of 210lbs but she never complained about my weight (However, please don't get the impression that she doesn't generally complain.). I also worked with a lady who had some success being on a medically supervised diet plan and gave me her doctor's number. I had my reservations but could see that it was working for her so I looked into it. I went to an introductory meeting that laid out the fees and the basics of what would be involved.

Fees:
Starting the program = $400
Every other week you must have a blood test that is only covered by medical insurance if your primary care doctor writes a script for you = $0-50
Every other week you must come into her office for a weight-in/review of blood test = $55

The basic concept of the diet resembles a hardcore version of Atkins. There are as close to no carbs on this diet as one can imagine. There is also a list of pills (around 6) that are taken daily...various OTC vitamins/minerals and one prescription strength supplement. She claimed that men would lose .8lbs/day and women .5lbs/day. I thought it all sounded too good to be true but what did I have to lose other than $500 and a few dinners chock full of pizza and beer.

I started this diet in July 2007 at 285lbs and by the end of December 2007 I was 186lbs. Yes, 99lbs in under 6 months. Crazy. There are plenty of people who said, "Oh, I don't know if you should be doing that...that isn't good for you." (Many of those people were morbidly obese too by the way.) I will concede that while it may not be considered the "healthiest" or the "most ideal" way...it is the way that worked for me. I am now off blood pressure medications and I no longer have the strain on my joints, lungs, heart, etc. If anyone feels that I am less healthy for having taken this path, then I will gladly live with that.

After the diet phase ended, the maintenance phase kicked in. It was time to learn about food all over again. Balanced meals and portion sizes were stressed for the next few months. The doctor recommended a variety of food tracking websites to make sure I didn't fall back into old habits. My favorite was TheDailyPlate.com which has since combined with LiveStrong.com.

My weight shot up to 195 right after going off the diet which concerned me, but I have been maintaining well for the last year and half since. It can be a struggle to make the right choices when there always seems to be a vacation or special occasion to tempt one down the path of least resistance. I eat much healthier foods now than I had in the past, and when I feel the need to indulge myself, I try to do so in moderation. This experience taught me a great lesson about calories in/calories out and what the body actually needs in order to function. I am at 200lbs today and hope to be back under 195 when my birthday rolls around next month.