No pithy subject matter at this time, just a few quick notes on the new eating habits.
1) While traveling, it is darn near impossible to judge how much you are eating. At home, I can carefully calculate every calorie I consume, but on the road this is impossible. My goal is to get to the point where I intuit the right amount to eat. Right now, the window between hunger and too much to further weight loss is too narrow to hit without good references. So my one week business trip made an indeterminate impact on my weight loss.
2) Nevertheless, I am exceeding my targeted weight loss of .25lb per day. Based on a weighted moving average of my weight since I began, I have averaged .29lb loss per day. Based on my actual weight when I woke up this morning I have lost .48lb per day since beginning this new practice. For the record, Aug 6 - 255, Aug 28 - 244.
3) According to that information, I have been operating at a real calorie deficit of somewhere between 975 and 1675 calories per day, probably closer to the 975 level due to accounting for water weight loss. Since I am targeting about an 850 calorie deficit a day and am definitely underestimating my activity level, that seems about right.
4) I need some way to weigh myself consistently and accurately while on the road. Without a correlated weight measurement, most of these numbers become difficult to pin down.
5) I continue to be shocked at how foods differ in calorie content. Who would have figured that a Schlotzsky's sandwich and bag of chips had more calories than a big mac with fries? Who would have figured I could eat three pieces of pizza for dinner and still lose weight?
6) Counting calories is sometimes a pain and sometimes not. Every time something new comes along it is a hassle, but the things I eat every day are no problem anymore.
7) I've had just a few hard to handle days. I relate these to types and quantities of foods eaten. When cutting back on calories, it is important to choose things that will stick with you (higher protein, complex carbs) and also to eat enough. 200 calories will only ever make me want more. Satisfaction begins at around 300 calories. Fullness shows up at around 600 calories and over full tends to become evident at about 800 calories. These amounts vary with the composition of what I am eating. It is much easier to over-eat fatty foods due to their high calorie density and low water content. Vegetables, on the other hand, are almost exactly the reverse. Low calorie density in complex carbs combined with high water content lead to earlier fullness.
That's about it for now. I'll post more every couple of weeks.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Sunday, August 12, 2007
August 12 - Chicken or Egg
I am a car guy. Not so much the bench racing grease under the fingernails type, but I truly love to drive. Given the choice between driving to a city 4 hours away by car versus flying, I'll drive every time. I like cars that make driving more enjoyable. Cars that make you feel more "connected" whatever that means. So, I like to drive cars that some folks think are pretentious. Except I liked to drive (and ride in) them since before they symbolized pretention so I don't think that applies to me, really.
I get it from my Dad. He like cars too. I first remember riding in a Jaguar XJ6 and 12. Later BMWs and Porsches and Mercedes. My first car was a BMW 318i in 1984. I really feel I need to point out, again, that this was before BMWs symbolized yuppies and pretention. Before the joke, "What is the difference between BMW owners and porcupines" was invented. "With porcupines, the pricks are on the outside" is the answer, BTW. I should point out that we come from Canada, though my Dad is naturalized American, now. That is important for the next bit.
Canada is a well described as a middle class country. Not too many truly poor due to a strong welfare system. Not too many truly rich due to an equally heavy tax burden. I travel to Canada fairly frequently now as my primary client is there. Over dinner one night a Canadian and I got into a discussion about how Americans "love their cars". The clear opinion on the other side of the table was that Americans are all wrapped up in how their cars make them look. Just as clearly was a certain pride that Canadians don't seem to have such cares. Except...
I'm Canadian. They insisted that my love of cars (driving performance, really) was a byproduct of living in the U.S. for the last 20 years. Except...
My Dad was Canadian, too, and I picked up the car and driving love long before we moved to the U.S.
Tonight, I sit in a hotel room in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I just got back from dinner. I noticed a few more BMW M3's in that last few hours than I would have at home, but for the most part the car population was just a bit more conservative. Not terribly. Mostly I did not see any of the larger luxury cars.
Anyway, back to the discussion, and the title of the post. I find myself asking the question, do Canadians a) really not into cars? or b) not into cars because their means don't permit that luxury. In other words, are Canadians middle class by choice or by force? If the latter, do them just profess to be happy with their lot and look down at those who accomplish, and acquire, more? Very broad generalizations here. My client, here, just bought a brand new Infiniti G35. He loves it, but wrestles with the idea that it makes people think he is pretentious. What a shame that he can't just enjoy it.
When I heard him tell me that, I realized that Canadians are perhaps just as car conscious as Americans. Perhaps just as image conscious, that is, with a slightly different set of values. The question remains, is the system, here, a product of the values or are the values a product of the system? As with most such questions, a bit of both, probably.
P.S. I need to note that on both sides of the border, I know many folks who couldn't give whit about cars other than their ability to get from point a to point b. That's probably a more healthy, if not enjoyable point of view. Kind of like preferring a bowl of oatmeal to eggs, bacon and toast with butter.
P.P.S. I also acknowledge that these are sweeping generalizations that need to be given context on a person by person basis.
I get it from my Dad. He like cars too. I first remember riding in a Jaguar XJ6 and 12. Later BMWs and Porsches and Mercedes. My first car was a BMW 318i in 1984. I really feel I need to point out, again, that this was before BMWs symbolized yuppies and pretention. Before the joke, "What is the difference between BMW owners and porcupines" was invented. "With porcupines, the pricks are on the outside" is the answer, BTW. I should point out that we come from Canada, though my Dad is naturalized American, now. That is important for the next bit.
Canada is a well described as a middle class country. Not too many truly poor due to a strong welfare system. Not too many truly rich due to an equally heavy tax burden. I travel to Canada fairly frequently now as my primary client is there. Over dinner one night a Canadian and I got into a discussion about how Americans "love their cars". The clear opinion on the other side of the table was that Americans are all wrapped up in how their cars make them look. Just as clearly was a certain pride that Canadians don't seem to have such cares. Except...
I'm Canadian. They insisted that my love of cars (driving performance, really) was a byproduct of living in the U.S. for the last 20 years. Except...
My Dad was Canadian, too, and I picked up the car and driving love long before we moved to the U.S.
Tonight, I sit in a hotel room in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I just got back from dinner. I noticed a few more BMW M3's in that last few hours than I would have at home, but for the most part the car population was just a bit more conservative. Not terribly. Mostly I did not see any of the larger luxury cars.
Anyway, back to the discussion, and the title of the post. I find myself asking the question, do Canadians a) really not into cars? or b) not into cars because their means don't permit that luxury. In other words, are Canadians middle class by choice or by force? If the latter, do them just profess to be happy with their lot and look down at those who accomplish, and acquire, more? Very broad generalizations here. My client, here, just bought a brand new Infiniti G35. He loves it, but wrestles with the idea that it makes people think he is pretentious. What a shame that he can't just enjoy it.
When I heard him tell me that, I realized that Canadians are perhaps just as car conscious as Americans. Perhaps just as image conscious, that is, with a slightly different set of values. The question remains, is the system, here, a product of the values or are the values a product of the system? As with most such questions, a bit of both, probably.
P.S. I need to note that on both sides of the border, I know many folks who couldn't give whit about cars other than their ability to get from point a to point b. That's probably a more healthy, if not enjoyable point of view. Kind of like preferring a bowl of oatmeal to eggs, bacon and toast with butter.
P.P.S. I also acknowledge that these are sweeping generalizations that need to be given context on a person by person basis.
Thursday, August 9, 2007
August 9 - Gluttony
This is a brief follow up to yesterday's post. Some things I left unsaid.
I love to eat. Many of my friends know they can count on me to know where to eat. As I mentioned, I get to treat others to meals from time to time in my line of work and you can bet that customers don't ask you to take them to Mickey D's. Eating wise, there is nothing I like so much as to sit down to a 20oz Ribeye with a side of Bearnaise sauce, a baked potato drenched in butter and a pile of sauteed vegetables, preceeded by an appetizer of shrimp cocktail and a wedge salad with blue cheese crumbles and dressing, bacon, tomatoes and croutons all accompanied with a nice red wine and followed by a creme brulee and a glass of port. Yep, if you have the opportunity to have me take you to dinner, you should definitely take me up on it :-)
That one meal almost assuredly exceeds the total calories I am consuming in a day, right now. Oh well. It will happen again, for a treat, that I earn with calorie deficits elsewhere, but not right now.
I just did not want to leave anyone with the impression that I don't realize that it is all my bad habits that have me where I am.
I also don't really want anyone to think that I think this is a diet, per se. Calorie control is what I am going to try to do for the rest of my life and it is something that I am going to try to make easy to do.
That said, I still love to eat, so I know that in order to occasionally eat the gluttonous meals I so truly love, I am going to have to figure out how to make room for them in my calorie budget. I expect a combination of exercise with a little cutting back on other meals will suffice.
Since yesterday, I lost another 1.5#. This will slow radically, shortly. I calculate that is a little more than 4# water loss. It would not surprise me if I woke up tomorrow with no additional loss. On the "how it feels" front, it is after noon and I have not had lunch yet and I am only feeling the slightest of hunger. This has been much easier, from a discomfort perspective than I expected. The hardest part has been overcoming the snacking urge which has far more to do with things other than hunger and is habitual so it just happens without much conscious thought. So far so good. No straying.
I love to eat. Many of my friends know they can count on me to know where to eat. As I mentioned, I get to treat others to meals from time to time in my line of work and you can bet that customers don't ask you to take them to Mickey D's. Eating wise, there is nothing I like so much as to sit down to a 20oz Ribeye with a side of Bearnaise sauce, a baked potato drenched in butter and a pile of sauteed vegetables, preceeded by an appetizer of shrimp cocktail and a wedge salad with blue cheese crumbles and dressing, bacon, tomatoes and croutons all accompanied with a nice red wine and followed by a creme brulee and a glass of port. Yep, if you have the opportunity to have me take you to dinner, you should definitely take me up on it :-)
That one meal almost assuredly exceeds the total calories I am consuming in a day, right now. Oh well. It will happen again, for a treat, that I earn with calorie deficits elsewhere, but not right now.
I just did not want to leave anyone with the impression that I don't realize that it is all my bad habits that have me where I am.
I also don't really want anyone to think that I think this is a diet, per se. Calorie control is what I am going to try to do for the rest of my life and it is something that I am going to try to make easy to do.
That said, I still love to eat, so I know that in order to occasionally eat the gluttonous meals I so truly love, I am going to have to figure out how to make room for them in my calorie budget. I expect a combination of exercise with a little cutting back on other meals will suffice.
Since yesterday, I lost another 1.5#. This will slow radically, shortly. I calculate that is a little more than 4# water loss. It would not surprise me if I woke up tomorrow with no additional loss. On the "how it feels" front, it is after noon and I have not had lunch yet and I am only feeling the slightest of hunger. This has been much easier, from a discomfort perspective than I expected. The hardest part has been overcoming the snacking urge which has far more to do with things other than hunger and is habitual so it just happens without much conscious thought. So far so good. No straying.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
August 8 - Die with a "T"
I've struggled with weight my entire life. As a kid I was never much for sports and always had "baby-fat". It turns out there is no such thing. All real baby fat is gone by six months or so. I was at my fittest at about age 24 when I worked on a loading dock loading and unloading trucks whilst finishing college. I think I maybe was 195# at the time, the lowest I had seen since before high school graduation. I subsequently took up a sedentary profession and weight just slowly increased over time.
My first breakthrough moment regarding weight occurred when I was about 27 and saw that I was up to about 245#. It was time to do something and I did. I began relatively vigorous exercise (for me who had never done so). I took a brisk walk every morning through a vertical relief of over 100 feet for about half an hour and followed that with a half hour of lifting weights. In addition to that, I tried my first real diet. I tried the low-fat approach and successfully got my fat consumption down to about 6 grams per day. You have no idea how hard that is to do until you try it. Just looking at a potato chip gives you 6 grams of fat.
Results were good. I got down to about 215 and something like 17% body fat which is fairly healthy. My blood pressure dropped. My cholesterol was OK. And I was able to maintain it for close to a year. But then life interfered and I began to gain again. I rose to about 225#-230# and maintained that weight until I was about 30. Then began another slow rise to about 245# again as my life became even more sedentary and I began to get jobs that came with expense accounts. There is nothing like really good, free food :-)
Soon thereafter, I decided to diet again. This time I went the other way around. I traveled a lot and so ate out a lot which is a bane of a low fat diet. I decided that a variant of the Atkin's diet would work for me. And it did, very well. I dropped weight in no time and kept it off for a quite while. It was very easy to stay on at first. I probably got back down to around 215#. However, such a diet is not very compatible with the people you live with and ultimately I went on and off this diet several times. The weight came back. In the last year or so (I am closing on 40) my weight has been pretty stable at about 257#.
And now it is time to do something. I have noticed a few things that have changed about me of the past few years I do not like. One is that my job has become so incredibly sedentary that I am lucky if I walk as much as a 1/4 mile in a day. I work out of the house. It has only one story. I get almost no incidental exercise anymore. The result is that, at my weight, I am in worse shape than I might have been 10 years ago. My tummy has a big crease at the waistline. I do not want that to turn into a flap.
Aside from my weight reaching a level that has made me seriously question my eating habits, I have also begun to suffer from health issues associate with weight gain. 8 years or so ago I threw out my back and have suffered from back pain. That is relieved by weight loss. My feet have begun to suffer from Plantar's Fascitis on an occasional basis due to over stressing them with weight. Most shocking, quite recently, I developed a joint inflammation of my big toe known as Gout. Gout! I'll leave it to you to learn what that is if you want. It happened as a result of my weight and trying the high protein approach again recently.
So other things I have noticed in general:
1) my weight rises to match my eating habits and then stabilizes. This is to say that it takes a certain amount of calories to maintain a given weight.
2) unbalanced diets, whatever else may be said about them, are difficult for me to maintain over the long term.
3) I no longer have any idea of how much I should be eating. That is, if I ever did have any idea.
Assuming I am not special, I have come to the conclusion that I eat too much (shocking, no?) So I am going to eat less.
...
What? You want more? It's pretty much that simple. Unbalanced diets take advantage of some physiological tricks to achieve a little extra delta in weight loss, but ultimately they succeed because you really are eating fewer calories. Trust me, on a diet where you aren't consuming more than 10g of fat per day, it is really hard to stuff enough calories into yourself. Protein diets make the body really work for its calories and also act as an efficient diuretic producing prodigious water loss at first. But, as your body adapts to eating and converting all that protein, you will find yourself having to regulate quantity. This time, I am going to do it the old fashioned way. I am going to eat less. Further, I am never going to eat more. At least, that is the plan.
Here are the details. The body is a machine that turns food into energy and waste. Energy gets used or stored. If you eat less energy than you use, you will lose weight. If you eat more than you use, you gain weight. Simple. My plan is to eat less than I use until I reach a weight I am comfortable with and then eat as much as I use for the remainder of my life. Again that is the plan. I have only just entered battle so the plan still seems good. We'll see.
As I mentioned above, I have no idea how much food I should be eating. I need to figure that out. To begin with, I looked up my Basal Metabolic Rate. This is the rate at which I burn calories just lying in bed all day. Lucky me, I get a budget of approximately 2300 calories to play with. Next, I am going very carefully determine exactly how much I am consuming in calories. This has not been too hard yet. A bowl of cereal in the morning is about 300 calories. A couple of basic sandwiches at lunch is about 600 calories. A good dinner is about 600 calories. I am keeping a log of everything I eat and my weight. I am going to track the rate at which I lose weight versus the calories and determine from this much more precisely what my metabolic rate is. I am also going to track any exercise I do. Today that is limited to 100 -200 calories from a brisk walk.
A pound is about 3500 calories. I'd like to lose weight at a rate of about a pound every 4 days. This means I will need to have a deficit of around 875 calories per day. So, if I get 100 calories of exercise and have a BMR of 2300, I can eat about 1525 calories a day. Today is day three and I have not had a problem with this. They say the first 72 hours are the hardest to get used to and this was as easy or easier than the Atkin's diet. I had a few hunger pangs yesterday, but today was good. For the record, I found 1500 calories to be quite a bit more than I expected.
For example, today I ate a bowl of cereal for 290 calories. A bowl is one cup of raisin bran with one cup of vanilla soy milk. That worked until lunch. For lunch I had two sandwiches on normal-sized multi-grain bread. I stuck to the recommended serving sizes for the lunch-meat. Had one slice of cheese, each. Had 1tbsp of light mayo on each and lots of field greens. That was 620 calories and left me full. Dinner was a zucchini casserole made with zucchini, ground beef, tomato sauce and cheese. I ate about 1/4 of it. I had determined that the total calories in the casserole were about 1400 so that was another 350 calories plus 120 calories for two slices of whole wheat bread and another 60 calories for a cup of sugar free pudding for dessert. Again, I felt fully satisfied. I took a longer walk today for 150 extra calories burned so I had enough budget for an extra snack. So I had a nectarine that I figured to be something less than 100 calories. That's 1540 calories against 2450 burned leaving an energy deficit of 910 calories for today and I do not feel hungry.
What I am learning right now, in detail, is what 1500 calories looks like over the course of a day. I intend to eat a lot of different foods to get good idea of how much is enough. I'll track calories at least until I hit whatever I decide is going to be my steady state weight plus a few months to stabilize at that weight.
The trick to maintenance will be stepping on the scale daily and logging the weight. if I see my weight trending upwards then I will know that I have to cut back a little.
None of this is a new idea. But there is a book that presents a new way of thinking about it. It is called "The Hacker's Diet". You can find it at http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/.
Something I have seen is that I have lost quite a bit more weight than is suggested by two days of an 850 calorie deficit. I have gone from about 258# a the start of the high protein diet two weeks ago with a week off after the gout to 255# at the start of this diet to 251.5# today at the start of the 3rd day. What I am concluding is that a reduced calorie diet is also diuretic and the reason is simple. Food carries salt which causes you to store water. Less food = less salt = less water stored. I have no illusions of further rapid weight loss, but any diet that starts with a downward kick is a nice bit of positive reinforcement.
I am concerned with recidivism. I know I can do this for a few weeks. It has not been hard so far. I think I can do it for a few months. I am fairly sure I will be able to lose as much as 50# this way (205# sounds good, but I won't know until I get there.) What I don't know, but sincerely hope, is that I will be able to do this for the rest of my life. If it takes continued exercise of discipline as it does now, I don't hold out much hope. What I look forward to is the possibility that I am about to learn some new habits and that this way of living just becomes natural. Good luck to me :-)
My first breakthrough moment regarding weight occurred when I was about 27 and saw that I was up to about 245#. It was time to do something and I did. I began relatively vigorous exercise (for me who had never done so). I took a brisk walk every morning through a vertical relief of over 100 feet for about half an hour and followed that with a half hour of lifting weights. In addition to that, I tried my first real diet. I tried the low-fat approach and successfully got my fat consumption down to about 6 grams per day. You have no idea how hard that is to do until you try it. Just looking at a potato chip gives you 6 grams of fat.
Results were good. I got down to about 215 and something like 17% body fat which is fairly healthy. My blood pressure dropped. My cholesterol was OK. And I was able to maintain it for close to a year. But then life interfered and I began to gain again. I rose to about 225#-230# and maintained that weight until I was about 30. Then began another slow rise to about 245# again as my life became even more sedentary and I began to get jobs that came with expense accounts. There is nothing like really good, free food :-)
Soon thereafter, I decided to diet again. This time I went the other way around. I traveled a lot and so ate out a lot which is a bane of a low fat diet. I decided that a variant of the Atkin's diet would work for me. And it did, very well. I dropped weight in no time and kept it off for a quite while. It was very easy to stay on at first. I probably got back down to around 215#. However, such a diet is not very compatible with the people you live with and ultimately I went on and off this diet several times. The weight came back. In the last year or so (I am closing on 40) my weight has been pretty stable at about 257#.
And now it is time to do something. I have noticed a few things that have changed about me of the past few years I do not like. One is that my job has become so incredibly sedentary that I am lucky if I walk as much as a 1/4 mile in a day. I work out of the house. It has only one story. I get almost no incidental exercise anymore. The result is that, at my weight, I am in worse shape than I might have been 10 years ago. My tummy has a big crease at the waistline. I do not want that to turn into a flap.
Aside from my weight reaching a level that has made me seriously question my eating habits, I have also begun to suffer from health issues associate with weight gain. 8 years or so ago I threw out my back and have suffered from back pain. That is relieved by weight loss. My feet have begun to suffer from Plantar's Fascitis on an occasional basis due to over stressing them with weight. Most shocking, quite recently, I developed a joint inflammation of my big toe known as Gout. Gout! I'll leave it to you to learn what that is if you want. It happened as a result of my weight and trying the high protein approach again recently.
So other things I have noticed in general:
1) my weight rises to match my eating habits and then stabilizes. This is to say that it takes a certain amount of calories to maintain a given weight.
2) unbalanced diets, whatever else may be said about them, are difficult for me to maintain over the long term.
3) I no longer have any idea of how much I should be eating. That is, if I ever did have any idea.
Assuming I am not special, I have come to the conclusion that I eat too much (shocking, no?) So I am going to eat less.
...
What? You want more? It's pretty much that simple. Unbalanced diets take advantage of some physiological tricks to achieve a little extra delta in weight loss, but ultimately they succeed because you really are eating fewer calories. Trust me, on a diet where you aren't consuming more than 10g of fat per day, it is really hard to stuff enough calories into yourself. Protein diets make the body really work for its calories and also act as an efficient diuretic producing prodigious water loss at first. But, as your body adapts to eating and converting all that protein, you will find yourself having to regulate quantity. This time, I am going to do it the old fashioned way. I am going to eat less. Further, I am never going to eat more. At least, that is the plan.
Here are the details. The body is a machine that turns food into energy and waste. Energy gets used or stored. If you eat less energy than you use, you will lose weight. If you eat more than you use, you gain weight. Simple. My plan is to eat less than I use until I reach a weight I am comfortable with and then eat as much as I use for the remainder of my life. Again that is the plan. I have only just entered battle so the plan still seems good. We'll see.
As I mentioned above, I have no idea how much food I should be eating. I need to figure that out. To begin with, I looked up my Basal Metabolic Rate. This is the rate at which I burn calories just lying in bed all day. Lucky me, I get a budget of approximately 2300 calories to play with. Next, I am going very carefully determine exactly how much I am consuming in calories. This has not been too hard yet. A bowl of cereal in the morning is about 300 calories. A couple of basic sandwiches at lunch is about 600 calories. A good dinner is about 600 calories. I am keeping a log of everything I eat and my weight. I am going to track the rate at which I lose weight versus the calories and determine from this much more precisely what my metabolic rate is. I am also going to track any exercise I do. Today that is limited to 100 -200 calories from a brisk walk.
A pound is about 3500 calories. I'd like to lose weight at a rate of about a pound every 4 days. This means I will need to have a deficit of around 875 calories per day. So, if I get 100 calories of exercise and have a BMR of 2300, I can eat about 1525 calories a day. Today is day three and I have not had a problem with this. They say the first 72 hours are the hardest to get used to and this was as easy or easier than the Atkin's diet. I had a few hunger pangs yesterday, but today was good. For the record, I found 1500 calories to be quite a bit more than I expected.
For example, today I ate a bowl of cereal for 290 calories. A bowl is one cup of raisin bran with one cup of vanilla soy milk. That worked until lunch. For lunch I had two sandwiches on normal-sized multi-grain bread. I stuck to the recommended serving sizes for the lunch-meat. Had one slice of cheese, each. Had 1tbsp of light mayo on each and lots of field greens. That was 620 calories and left me full. Dinner was a zucchini casserole made with zucchini, ground beef, tomato sauce and cheese. I ate about 1/4 of it. I had determined that the total calories in the casserole were about 1400 so that was another 350 calories plus 120 calories for two slices of whole wheat bread and another 60 calories for a cup of sugar free pudding for dessert. Again, I felt fully satisfied. I took a longer walk today for 150 extra calories burned so I had enough budget for an extra snack. So I had a nectarine that I figured to be something less than 100 calories. That's 1540 calories against 2450 burned leaving an energy deficit of 910 calories for today and I do not feel hungry.
What I am learning right now, in detail, is what 1500 calories looks like over the course of a day. I intend to eat a lot of different foods to get good idea of how much is enough. I'll track calories at least until I hit whatever I decide is going to be my steady state weight plus a few months to stabilize at that weight.
The trick to maintenance will be stepping on the scale daily and logging the weight. if I see my weight trending upwards then I will know that I have to cut back a little.
None of this is a new idea. But there is a book that presents a new way of thinking about it. It is called "The Hacker's Diet". You can find it at http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/.
Something I have seen is that I have lost quite a bit more weight than is suggested by two days of an 850 calorie deficit. I have gone from about 258# a the start of the high protein diet two weeks ago with a week off after the gout to 255# at the start of this diet to 251.5# today at the start of the 3rd day. What I am concluding is that a reduced calorie diet is also diuretic and the reason is simple. Food carries salt which causes you to store water. Less food = less salt = less water stored. I have no illusions of further rapid weight loss, but any diet that starts with a downward kick is a nice bit of positive reinforcement.
I am concerned with recidivism. I know I can do this for a few weeks. It has not been hard so far. I think I can do it for a few months. I am fairly sure I will be able to lose as much as 50# this way (205# sounds good, but I won't know until I get there.) What I don't know, but sincerely hope, is that I will be able to do this for the rest of my life. If it takes continued exercise of discipline as it does now, I don't hold out much hope. What I look forward to is the possibility that I am about to learn some new habits and that this way of living just becomes natural. Good luck to me :-)
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