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 :-)