My weight from January 15th to today. Graph made on skinnyr.com
I was getting to be fat. I wasn’t just a guy with an average build plus a belly anymore, or a guy finding his extra chin in his 30’s, I was right on the brink of fat. Like, if I was in an army movie made in the 1940’s, with the way people were so skinny back then, I would have been the fat guy in the platoon. Like, not obscene fat. Just a guy that, if you word-clouded the first impressions of people asked to describe him physically, the word “overweight”, in that cloud, would be pretty fat.
I have never been a jock, but I wasn’t always overweight. In fact, until I graduated from college, I was a pretty thin dude. But my love for food grew, and my love for exercise didn’t, and that has consequences.
I wasn’t a complete slug. I enjoyed walking and hiking, riding my bike, tossing the football around at the park. I embraced the WiiFit brand of Yoga from the moment it was available. But physical activity was an indulgence, not a habit. And eating unhealthy food in unhealthy amounts was a habit, not an indulgence.
My priorities were making me fat. My habits were making me fat.
I had just about finished that process of telling myself I wasn’t going to worry about it, which was really just a way of trying to cope with the fact that I felt powerless to do anything about it. I would start an exercise plan, lose it after a couple of weeks, and then come back six months later to find myself 5 pounds heavier. Soon it would count as a triumph just to get back to where I was the first time I was sick of being so heavy.
I didn’t like the way I felt, and I didn’t like the way I looked. I had learned a few lessons from my previous attempts, and from reading I had done into calories and metabolism and food. So in January I decided that I was going to make a strong run at losing weight, and that there would be a couple of rules going in:
1) There wouldn’t be drastic changes to the food I ate.
2) There wouldn’t be crash fasts, or painful marathons at the gym.
3) I would be patient about results.
I strongly believed that with discipline, pre-planning, and some carefully-applied math, this could be done. I had some data about my weight over the past several years, and I used it to set out a target – I wanted to lose 27 pounds. The Mayo Clinic recommends that if you want to lose weight at a healthy pace and not have it all rebound back at the first opportunity, that you should stick to a pace of 1-2 pounds a week. That meant asking myself if I could commit to a 3-6 month process. I didn’t see how there could be any better time than now to try.
I like math. I like using it. One pound equals about 3,500 calories. So I needed to figure out how many calories would keep my weight the same, and get my net intake down below that threshold by 3,500-7,000 per week – 500-1,000 calories a day. This had to be done as a combined assault – some of it from food choices, some of it directly from exercise, and some from the metabolic benefit of the HABIT of that exercise. And it had to be done in a way that fit into my life, or else it wouldn’t stick.
Food: Even now I can still have a Double-Double from In ‘N Out when I get the craving, and that’s very important. If you try and go cold turkey on everything food-wise that gives you pleasure, you’re just loading up a binge that will knock you completely out of your track.
But here are some adjustments that worked – I stopped having a bagel on days when I was having cereal with breakfast (why double-blast carbs like that right after getting out of bed?) I stopped ordering French Fries unless I was splitting them with a friend. I went from a full glass of wine with dinner to a half-glass, so I could still have the taste. A Subway foot-long became a six-inch. I slowed down my eating, and stopped before I normally would, trusting that I really was full, and my brain just takes time to get the signal. Simple choices of portion size and side dishes added up to hundreds of calories without costing me the major tastes I enjoyed.
Exercise – I got the gym membership, like so many others after New Years’ Day. The difference is, after January turned to February, I was still showing up. Three mornings a week before work I did a mix of elliptical sweat and basic strength exercises. I averaged about 45-50 minutes a visit – enough to feel accomplished, enough to get used to a certain background level of muscle soreness, but not enough to make it impossible to show up again two days later. I didn’t believe in the need for extreme suffering. I didn’t believe the gym needed to own me. I did my bit, hit the showers, and then proceeded to work, sipping my Carnation Instant Breakfast out of a cool thermos (only 250 calories!)
On days away from the gym I did Yoga stretches on WiiFit and checked my weight. That was four weigh-ins a week – enough to capture trends but not enough to be completely overwhelmed by the noise of daily variance. Weight can bounce up and down a lot, and it’s easy to let that seize control of your mood. This was a choice to give it just a little less power.
And every day, I walked. I get 15-minute breaks in the morning and afternoon at work, and every day this year I have used them to walk laps around the office park. It’s not scenic, and there are no magic scents wafting through the air, but I would guess that probably 15-percent of my weight loss has come just from sticking to the routine of those brisk, daily strolls.
The difference in strength, flexibility, and energy level has been phenomenal. And the rewards have been fun along the way – a good Swedish massage here, new clothes there. It was another key decision to make that all my rewards had to be themed around the healthy new habits, rather than taking the form of food or boozy nights out.
And I have what I wanted – I can still love and enjoy food, including those Double-Doubles. Or I can have a 3-day weekend in San Diego where I absolutely gorge, and I know that after a couple days of coming down from the high, my body will still be in fundamentally-good shape and my new habits will keep my weight stable.
I’m still not a jock, in fact my weight is now pretty much exactly at the average for an American male my age and height. But considering where I was, and where I could have gone had I let that hopelessness and inertia carry me, I’m thrilled to be here.
So there it is – my amazing weight loss story boils down to “eat better and get your ass off the couch”. Probably couldn’t sell many books with that story, but it worked. Discipline, pre-planning, and carefully-applied math. Adjustments to food habits, not radical changes. No fads, no fasts. Patience.
I know the last step of this ritual involves the “Before” and “After” pictures, maybe with the old fat-body pants. Well, I’ve got a few options for the bad, bloaty “Before” shot. And I’ve still got the fat-body pants. As for the “After” picture – I don’t think I’ve got a good one yet that really captures the extent of the change. When that comes along, maybe I’ll share both. In the meantime, that chart makes me smile plenty.
What’s next? Well, I’m greedy. I think I’m going to go for another 10 pounds.