MikeIsLosingIt.com

Down go the calories, but not down my throat. As of Thursday I cut my calories down to about 1000 per day. But I should be doing this only for a few weeks and then I’ll push it back up to normal. I have a physical scheduled for June 16 and a BMI requirement attached to it. I have to be under 40 BMI by then (for reasons that will have to remain my own at the moment), which means that I need to weigh about 280. I’ve already dropped over 3 pounds since my last Wednesday Weigh-in, so it is going exactly like I hoped so far. I’m kind of hungry in the afternoon and evening before my small meals, but nothing bad. I’ve left my breakfast the same…but of course now I feel super stuffed after it since I’m eating so much less the rest of the time. Coincidentally our 15th Wedding anniversary is on the 17th, the day after the physical. So, you can bet I’ll be enjoying a nice cheat that day. 🙂

294.8 today. That’s 2.8 lbs this week and 26.8 total. Pretty good considering I had my first “cheat” day in a month. We had to take a small road trip Saturday, and while Louanne had a meeting, Nadia and I went to the Toy and Action Figure Museum and then to Braum’s for an ice cream cone. That was great fun. And afterwards we all had Arby’s for dinner on the way home.

Having a small cheat wasn’t a significant problem. It just means that I have to be that much more on my guard for a few days so that I don’t make a habit of it…because doing something once means it is significantly easier to do it a second time, and then before you know it you’re off the wagon (or eating it, as I said in my last post). I’m changing my lifestyle, so for now I have to be extra careful so that I don’t fall back into my old ways.

-Or- 

“How to Stay on the Wagon without Eating It”

 
-“I’m Mike and I’m a fatoholic.”

-“Hi, Mike!”

Maybe that’s the way many of us should introduce ourselves, because it just might increase the likelyhood that we could lose weight and finally keep it off. In my research about weight loss I’ve come across a staggering statistic multiple times. For those of us who need to lose weight, around 95-98% will not keep the weight off if we lose it. That means for every 100 of us tubbies out there, only about 2-5 will keep it off. If that’s true then why bother? Shouldn’t we then just cry “Doom!”, give up and go have a large double-chocolate shake instead? Maybe not. I think the key is figuring out how we can ensure that we end up being one of those 2-5 who succeed.

With those kinds of numbers against us I believe the solution is a radical change in one’s life. A completely different attitude about weight, nutrition, and exercise needs to be adopted. I’m dubbing the problem “fatoholism.” We need to approach our weight problem just like the alchoholic approaches his drinking problem. The recovering alchoholic quickly learns that he can’t drink in moderation, he must avoid bars, he must be careful about social gatherings where people drink, and so on. Eventually, after a long term of avoidance, he may begin to reintroduce some of those “risky” environmental temptations, but in any case he must still remain on his guard. And it is unlikely he will ever be able to drink in moderation for the rest of his life, because the chance of eventually falling back into excess is just too great. He must radically change his lifestyle and view of drinking, because if he doesn’t then he will almost certainly fall off the wagon. Similarly, if we don’t do the same we will end up eating that wagon, whether the alchoholics get off it or not. So they better get off it or watch their fingers and toes if they want to keep them.

We fatoholics must approach life like the recovering alchoholics if we want to be in the Two-to-five-percenters Club. Much like the drunk living in denial who says, “I need to cut back” or “I’ll only drink on special occasions” and quickly finds that he’s drinking more than ever, we fatties tell ourselves all kinds of similar things that never work. We say various things like we’ll eat less, skip desert, give up Cokes, use Splenda, eat low carbs, use Stevia, eat high carbs, give up processed foods, go to the gym, take acai berry, buy a bicycle, eat organic foods, and on and on and on. While many of those things may or may not have certain health or nutritional benefits, none of them are going to cause you to lose weight and keep it off. The facts of losing weight and maintaining that loss are simple; it isn’t a complex subject. You must eat less and exercise more…for the rest of your life. Regardless of how difficult this may be in practice, it is true nonetheless. It is an immutable fact that eating more calories than you burn causes you to gain weight and eating less calories than you burn causes you to lose it. That’s it. You don’t need 1000 diet books to explain that. You must admit you are a fatoholic and change…your…lifestyle. Nothing else will work.

Also like the alchoholic who has a physical addiction and cravings when he quits drinking, we have all kinds of physiological things that happen to us when we begin to lose weight. Normal processes kick in and our body tries to keep us at whatever weight we were at. We have to deal with lowering metababolism, hunger, cravings, and so on. These things add to the difficulty (thus the 95% who don’t succeed), but they aren’t insurmountable. We can succeed.

How? How can we succeed? Again, there is no magic forumula, super-food, or diet that will do it. None of those things will keep the weight off. You have to change your lifestyle, for the rest of your life. You have to find the thing that will help you do that. For me it is hiring a personal trainer to train me three times per week. I have determined that I will workout multiple times per week, every week, for the rest of my life. Even if that means I have to hire a personal trainer for the rest of my life to stick to that, that’s what I’ll do. For you it may be that, or Weight-watchers, or finding a motivated friend, running marathons, or something else you come up with on your own. But whatever it is, you must change your life. A “diet” implies a goal that can be reached and then the diet will end, in which case the weight gain then starts all over. Change your lifestyle. That is how the cycle ends.

You can do it.

297.6 today, so I broke the 300 barrier! That’s 2.4 lbs this week. I was hoping for 3-3.5, but I’m not disappointed in the least because it is likely I gained some muscle as well, considering the amount of weight-training I’m doing and the high protein diet I’m eating. It isn’t easy to gain a lot of muscle and lose fat at the same time, but the way things are structured in my regime some muscle gain is likely. So, my total weight loss now is 24 lbs.

Here’s the rundown of my daily diet…

Every morning for breakfast I have three slices of turkey bacon, a six egg-white omlette (yes…six), and a piece of whole-wheat bread. Last week I got tired of the smell of bacon sticking around in the house for hours every day, so I changed my tactic. Now I fire-up the grill every weekend and cook seven days worth in advance. Yesterday I cooked thirty pieces at once to have my supply for the week (yes, I do realize that 3×7 doesn’t equal 30, but I couldn’t cook all that bacony goodness without us having some right then, too…so there). Then I broke up three pieces for each day into seven zip-top snack bags. Voila! Now I just empty the baggy of bacon bits into the eggs I cook every morning and I’ve got my ginormous bacon omlette, and all without the house smelling like IHOP’s kitchen all day.

Now what about the egg whites? Egg whites are the best protein you can get, but what a pain to separate six egg whites every morning by hand. My alternative for that is to use some egg whites from a carton that we get from Costco. They taste good, are real egg whites, there’s little mess, and so on. They’re a little more expensive than buying cartons of eggs, but well worth it. The best thing about egg whites? Those six egg-whites have the protein of six whole eggs but the calories of only about two-and-a-half. Excellent!

So that’s breakfast, but now what?

Next comes my first protein shake and some nutritional supplements. For you Hobbits out there I guess we can call it Second Breakfast–usually had about three hours after breakfast. Once again, more egg white protein for that too. Our solution for that? We bought 20 lbs of dried egg whites (powder) directly from Rose Acre Farms. That should last us half a year and it’s half the price of buying a protein shake powder from the health food store. The problem? It tastes NASTY! Three eggs worth of that powder in 8 oz. of milk might even make a billy goat retch. But, add some Splenda and a little bit of vanilla extract and it turns it into something kind of yummy. Billy goats no longer need to fear.

Lunch. Baked boneless chicken breast and either some brown rice or a large salad with a couple of tablespoons of dressing and a little bit of parmesan cheese on it. Nothing fancy. Louanne marinates the chicken in something like Newman’s Own and cooks it up for me every couple of days. She helps me immensely.

Second lunch, early dinner, afternoon snack, or whatever you want to call it…protein shake number two. Just like the first one, but I also have a couple of pieces of string cheese. Sometimes I skip the shake if I’m not really hungry at all.

Finally, dinner. That’s basically the same as lunch. Typically if I chose salad at lunch I choose the rice here, or vice versa. I may also throw in some green beans, broccoli, sugar peas, or some other good, green vegetable.

So, that’s what I eat every day. I’m having something every three hours or so, and I frequently feel pretty stuffed after I eat. It feels like I’m eating a ton of food, but it is actually only 1500 to 2000 calories every day, depending on portion sizes, whether or not I skip my second shake, and other variables. It’s also very low carb but about 200-225 grams of protein, which for my size and the amount of weight-lifting I’m doing is pretty basic for muscle gain.

So far this has all gone really well, and I’ve rarely had any sort of cravings. Yesterday and today I felt stressed over food a couple of times, but I just upped the portions a little and drank more water. I worked out really hard on Friday (I went to the gym twice), and this weekend I ended up having to repair a bunch of storm damage on my roof. So I just think the extra activity meant I needed to eat more. I’m also guessing my metabolism is increasing some as I get in better shape. In any case, upping the portions and water seemed to knock out the stress I was feeling over eating.

My point in all of this? If I can do it, so can you. I’ve finally come to grips with the fact that the only realistic way you can lose weight and keep it off is to eat less and exercise more. It’s not a difficult concept, but for some reason we seem to constantly search for some magic answer or revolutionary scientific program. You can read a thousand different diet books and bounce from program to program, but 99% of them are useless. Ultimately the solution always boils down to that same simple answer. If you want to lose weight and keep it off forever…eat less and exercise more, for the rest of your life.

What? Were you expecting something profound?

Thanks for the all the encouraging words I’ve received since launching the site yesterday!

So far the program really hasn’t been too difficult, except for the physical agony the first couple of weeks of weight training (I think I now know what the 7th Level of Hell must be like). It also helps greatly that my trainer at Stroud’s Fitness, Tim Freeman, is totally encouraging. That makes a huge difference.

I have the mindset of being in it for life rather than simply, “do this to lose weight and then I’m done.” That has helped me avoid being overly stressed about it. I’m viewing it as just the way I live now. I hated it at first, then I greatly disliked it, and now I just mildly dislike it. I expect that eventually I’ll go through something akin to Stockholm syndrome and then I’ll start to love it. Then I’ll be one of those twisted people you meet now and then who actually thinks exercise and weightlifting is fun. God help me.

300.0 lbs this morning. I’m almost three months into my program and it has been almost three weeks since I started the diet portion of it. As of this morning that is 21.6 pounds lost.

321.6. That’s how much I weighed three months ago on February 15, 2010. It was the heaviest I’d ever been, and at 5’11” that meant I was fat…fatty fat fat…fatty-boombalatty even, and it’s nothing new. I’m 44 years old and started down that road around 6th or 7th grade and have been overweight ever since. Except for two very brief times in my life when I slimmed down to near where I should be, being overweight has been a constant struggle. Like most people in my position I’ve yo yo’d up and down countless times. I’ve tried low carb, high carb, Zone, Protein Power, exercise at home, starvation, liquid-diet, exercise at a gym, and every other thing I could think of to lose weight. Despite all of that, the results have always been temporary–I’ve been unable to keep it off, just like 90-95 percent of all those who attempt to lose weight.

At the beginning of the year I found myself on the verge of getting a Lap-Band, thinking maybe that could finally solve the problem. It is a surgical procedure where an adjustable band is placed around the top of your stomach, preventing you from eating large portions of food. It’s nowhere near as invasive as a gastric bypass, which essentially reroutes your digestive system, and it is completely reversible, but it is still surgery nonetheless. Consequently it is expensive and has significant risks. Further, the more I examined the success rate the more I began to doubt it as a true solution. In all the research I did I found that regardless of which procedure is chosen, the average person can expect to have lost and kept off about 50% of their excess weight after five years.

Losing 50% of your excess weight and keeping it off is a much better statistic than just about any other weight-loss program, but in my view it wasn’t anywhere near good enough. In fact, I thought that actually sounded pretty lousy. From my perspective that meant I could expect to still be about 75 lbs overweight…after five years and $10,000! And I wouldn’t be the slightest bit more physically fit than when I started. My heart would be no stronger and I would have no more muscle than when I started (actually I’d probably have much less). I’d simply be 75 lbs overweight instead of 150. How could that be viewed as a good thing? At best, I could view that as not quite as abysmal as not having the surgery at all.

So, what was the alternative? I reasoned that if I were willing to spend $10,000 on surgery that would likely result in a mediocre outcome at best, I might as well put that money toward a personal fitness trainer instead. After all, that same $10,000 could pay for a personal trainer three times per week for two years, and at the end of that time I should theoretically be in excellent physical condition. Even if I lost only a pound per week I’d have still lost more weight in that two years than I could expect to have lost and kept off after five with surgery. Yes, unlike surgery it would require me to have enough discipline to go to the gym at least three times per week, but considering I would have an appointment, which I had paid for in advance, my guess was that it wouldn’t be a problem. I would not miss my paid-for appointment without a truly valid reason like sickness or a definite work commitment. If I just had a gym membership and tried to do it on my own (which I have tried many times in the past), before long I’d miss it once, then again, and in no time I wouldn’t be going at all. The personal trainer would make the difference.

I’m happy to say that so far my assumptions have been correct. In the three months since I started training I haven’t missed at all, except for twice in one week when the whole family was down with a virus…and even then I immediately rescheduled and made up the days the following week. I started off the regime with only weight-training–I didn’t make any diet changes at all. I thought that sticking to the exercise would be stressful enough at first without adding a diet to the mix as well. I figured that as I got used to the routine I’d add in a diet change later.

Doing exercise alone I lost about a pound-and-a-half per week for the first couple of months. As I expected, the first few weeks were brutal. I was stressed and in pain most of the time, and I HATED going to the gym…every…single…time. But, I kept going anyway because I knew I needed to, I had an appointment, and I had paid a lot of money for it. So, misery be damned, I went every time. Now, after three months I still can’t say that I actually like going, but at least I dislike it much less than I used to, and sometimes I don’t actually mind going at all. Also, I frequently have a definite burst of energy a couple of hours after I workout, which is a very good thing to experience.

About three weeks ago I took the next step and had my trainer give me a diet program to follow. I’m following a very standard body-building, weight-loss diet: very high protein, low carbs, a lot of water, and eating about five times per day. I feel like I’m eating a ton of food, all day long, but it is still only about 1700-2000 calories on any given day. Since I added the diet to my regime I’ve been losing about a half a pound per day. So, in all I’ve lost about 22 pounds since I started with the trainer back in February, with 10 of it being in the last three weeks alone. I haven’t been the slightest bit discouraged and have had no significant problems.

I believe I’ve finally found my solution! I’m in it for the long haul and fully intend to workout at least three times per week for the rest of my life. Even when the two years are finished I intend to continue with a trainer at least a few times per month and workout on my own the rest of the time…since by then it should be so ingrained in me that motivation won’t be a problem. My goal? I want to be down to a single-digit body fat percentage within about a year, and I fully expect to make it there.

I’ll be posting regularly on this blog from now on, and I hope that some of you might find inspiration and encouragement from it. I’ll also post pictures from time to time to document my progress.

Cheers!