Losing a Dozen Pounds: Fred Goes on a Diet

Over the past two months, I've been consciously monitoring my weight and through some diet/exercise changes, I've managed to lose just over ten pounds.  I am now at almost the exact same weight that I was when starting college, a decade ago.  

This post is about how that process worked for me, and also about some things I've learned about losing weight that I thought might be worth writing down.  Let's get to it, but first, here's a line chart of my weight loss over the past two months:

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Long story short: I was a plump kid growing up.  During my junior year of high school, I tipped the scales at 230 pounds (I'm six feet tall).  Fed up with my chubbiness, I started running the summer before my senior year of high school, and right before starting college, I started to smoke cigarettes - owing no small favor to my youth and fast metabolism, this very non-traditional combination seemed to work throughout my college years, with regard to my weight if not my overall health (I was a stable 183 lbs. throughout most of college, even after I had quit smoking for good).

But somewhere between college and the present day, a combination of my diet, exercise routine, and/or metabolism had conspired against me to start the process of storing adipose tissue for a long hibernation that never happened.  To be honest, even when I started thinking about dieting earlier this summer, I never felt I was seriously overweight (though from a technical perspective, I was pretty heavy for a man my height).  I continued to train for half marathons in the spring and in the fall, with improving times each race, but my eating and drinking patterns stayed the same throughout the year.  As a result, my weight would oscillate about 10-15 pounds throughout the year, depending on whether or not I was training for a race (race training involves up to thirty miles of running per week).  Late last July, I tipped the scales at 199.4 pounds, which was a warning sign, and in early July of this year, I was pretty close to that same number (195.6) and heading in the wrong direction.

You ask, what changed that made me take action this year?  Well, I noticed some things about myself that I didn't particularly like.  Clothes I had reliably fit into for years started to feel tight around my stomach and waist.  Walking up the steps to where I work started to feel "different."  Looking in the mirror, my face didn't look as chiseled and hot damned sexy as I would have liked.  And my wife, who had had an amazingly positive experience losing some weight via Weight Watchers over the last year, was inspiring me to give "conscious weight management" - that is, dieting - a try.

July 3rd used to be the day when Red Bank, NJ, had fireworks, and it remains a day of barbecue and good times among my friends.  This year, I'd decided that day that I would make a lifestyle change.  So here's what I did.

I knew that Weight Watchers worked for my wife, and I wanted to see if it would work for me.  But I didn't want to pay for it, because I'm frugal as shit, so I went online and found the formulas for determining one's daily allotment of "Points" using Wikipedia.  You can view the math by clicking the link, or an image of the 300-level college math type formulas (in that font that only exists in college math textbooks!) is presented below:

It took me some time, because I was rusty on this type of math, but I was able to convert my height to meters and my weight to kilograms in order to work out the formulas for myself.  At the end, I determined I was able to eat 43 "points" worth of food per day (plus a weekly allotment of 49 additional points), and in doing so I should in theory lose one to two pounds per week.  (You can look up the point value for most foods online, and most "diet" food you get at the grocery store helpfully lists the point value on its packaging.)

Armed with this information, I started to track and monitor what I consumed.  The first "wow" moment for me - and I think anyone who has lost a few pounds will tell you the same story - was when I realized how many points I had been eating before.

Right after college, I'd enjoy a post-workout snack of light yogurt, an apple, and some mixed nuts (all reasonably healthful choices).  These days, after a long run, I would often scarf down not one, but two, peanut butter sandwiches.  I was thinking that because I used healthy peanut butter and whole wheat bread for the sandwiches, it was a healthy snack, but those two sandwiches were a combined 18 points (more than a Quarter Pounder with Cheese from McDonald's).  Other examples: I did (and still do) love to drink beer, but each cold beer I consumed was five points, and that tall glass of OJ was at least half a dozen.  So I also found I was drinking lots of empty calories.

I knew something had to give, so my first step was tweaking my diet in order to get below my daily points goal.  Here are a few things I added/changed:

• Tried to have a vegetarian salad (zero points) and some piece of fruit (also zero points) as part of my lunch as frequently as possible
• Minimized drinking calories, including sticking to water, tea, seltzer, almost black coffee, and one diet soda per day (all zero points), and also limited alcoholic beverages - for the most part - to once weekly
• Made lean protein and/or seafood (extremely low in points) and vegetables a key staple of each dinner, and minimized carbohydrates (which are very high in points) as much as possible (though I certainly treated myself on occasion)
• Chose wisely when it came to snacking - light yogurt (2 points per serving), mixed nuts (4-5, but extremely filling), hummus and carrots (2 points), or homemade no-bake energy granola bites (3 points) were all good choices
• Limited myself to one peanut butter sandwich per day, and only if I had the points to spare
• Hershey's Kisses became a clutch go-to for a chocolate fix (2 points = 3 Kisses)
• Finally, I limited all food intake after 9 pm

The above steps were somewhat limiting but also mostly bearable.  I rarely felt hungry, including at night time (midnight snacks are a legendary weakness of mine, but I've mostly been successful against them during this diet phase).  Over the past two months, I've allowed myself to drink alcohol socially once a week; I've eaten more than a couple of cheeseburgers; and when friends offered me chocolate or sweets, I almost never passed them up.  I simply controlled how much of the above, delicious products I ate at a single sitting (i.e., portion control).  

ASIDE ABOUT DIETING "POORLY": Speaking of cheating on a diet, no serious nutritionist would mention this because it's (a) completely true and (b) goes against 99.9% of nutritionist dogma, but the cheeseburger is an ideal guilty pleasure while dieting.  They're delicious, eating them makes you feel awesome and fat and disgusting, but they are loaded with fat and protein and are therefore extremely filling.  A McDonald's Quarter Pounder with Cheese is 16 points; not great for you, but a 200-lb man could eat light for breakfast and lunch, grab some McD's for dinner (without fries) and not gain any weight.

ANOTHER ASIDE ABOUT DIETING "POORLY": Same goes for eating pizza without meat toppings.  Plain/veggie pizza is only 5 points per slice, so that same 200-lb man could house half a large pizza for 20 total points and not gain any weight (as long as they took it easy the rest of the day).  Pretty amazing, when you consider that all pizza contains dough and mozzarella cheese, but ultimately true.

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Exercise played something of a role, too.  You can earn "activity points" through exercise, which supplements your daily points total.  I didn't know for sure how to calculate them, so I assumed conservatively that 100 calories burned = 1 activity point.  By this math, a three-mile run was worth five activity points (which compensates for one - ONE! - cold, frosty beer, perhaps proving the old adage that "you cannot out-run a shitty diet").  Five miles earned me eight activity points, as did a 4 mile run + 20 minutes of weight lifting.  

While in retrospect, I feel dieting was way more valuable than exercise in losing the weight I've lost over the past couple months, and though I definitely agree with the argument that weighing yourself within one day of a spirited workout session is a terrible idea (my body seems to want to retain water afterwards, which artificially inflates my weight for a while), exercise was also beneficial.

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Looking at the line chart at the top of this post, there were definitely peaks and valleys in my journey over the past two months.  I weigh myself each Tuesday morning, and there were Tuesday mornings where I hated the number I saw on the scale, and immediately wanted to say fuck it, I'm going to pick up some Five Guys for dinner tonight, go home to eat the whole thing and down a six-pack while I am at it.

The fact I dieted throughout the summer did not help with respect to weight loss consistency.  On weeks where I took it easy on the weekend and had no events or parties to attend, I would lose two to four pounds per week.  But weeks where I ostensibly went hog wild, eating and drinking to excess on the weekends (there were a few of these), would lead to a weekly gain of up to two pounds.  On average, this ended up being exactly the result the formula suggested - a net loss of just over one pound per week (not bad for continuing to drink beer on the weekends). 

Again, in retrospect, it's easy to look at this like training for a road race and say that, just like a training program has good weeks and bad weeks, so does a diet.  Saying that doesn't make the bad weeks suck less, though.

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Some people have a lot of weight to lose; I harbor no illusion that I was one of those people.  I had a little pouch around my stomach I wanted to minimize, and I ended up shedding the equivalent of one of those ridiculously light weights from the gym floor.  But oh well, I am happy that I did it, and I plan to maintain my current weight as long as I can.  Now that I am maintaining my weight, I am giving myself a few extra points per day, and I am now also officially training for a half marathon in November (TBD).  Though this isn't a direct goal, I may end up losing a few more pounds just through training alone.

And yes, I do plan to celebrate soon with Five Guys and a six-pack of beer.  But in doing this, I would also plan eat really healthy the rest of the day - it's a trade-off, just like going to work each day to earn an income is a trade-off.  I don't want to have to do this all over again, which is perhaps the most motivating aspect of all!

The Hopeless Homeowner Series: Installing a New Tub Surround

(The Hopeless Homeowner Series is something I write about on the very rare occasion that I think to take pictures of a home improvement project while it is ongoing.  These posts are typically funny because I am just now learning to be handy, and often make mistakes in the process.)

 

Our house has but one full bath, and before last weekend, it looked like the above picture.  (Note that the faucet and the hot/cold water knobs have been removed for maximum groatiness.)  The above picture aside, we actually keep a pretty clean shower; we routinely clean it with bleach so there is very little mold or mildew and the tile behind the peeling white paint is actually structurally sound.  For this reason, we had no existential motivation to completely gut the tub, but we obviously didn't like showering around peeling paint and 70's-era pink tile. So we settled on the "in-between option" of a tub surround.

I'd heard about the idea of a tub surround from a friend of mine, but was immediately concerned by many poor reviews for existing units on Home Depot's website.  (For those who do not know, a tub surround is a three- or five-piece fiberglass apparatus that can be adhered permanently to either tile or drywall to simulate the look of brand-new tile.  The cheapest ones are under $100, really fancy-shmancy fake granite ones can approach $500.)  Then, I realized that the people who post reviews on HomeDepot.com almost always breathe through their mouths, so I decided to bypass that particular bowel of the Internet and check some other DIY-focused websites.  

There I found that installing a tub surround was not a bad idea, but could be deceptively difficult (often because the walls surrounding tubs are not perfectly square and require some creative fitting of the tub surround pieces).  Our case would be somewhat easier because the tiles behind the surround were structurally sound (meaning we didn't have to ply off the tiles and build up the drywall underneath to match the surrounding tiles) and because our walls were plumb.  But it was also more difficult in a sense, because we have a window in our shower - Giggity! - which would require some intricate cutting to get the fiberglass pieces to fit.

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With me on this project was a family friend who had done this before, and was more handy than I.  We began at noon with a trip to Home Depot to pick out the tub surround.  April and I selected a middle of the road option - the ASB Distinction, at $227 - and also purchased three tubes of Loc-Tite tub surround adhesive and two tubes of bath/shower caulk.  (The grand total after taxes was about $270.)

The reviews of the ASB Distinction, while often mouth-breathing in nature, imply that the fiberglass material is rather flimsy (this was true in our case; the top of the right corner cracked and had to be caulked into place at the end of the job).  Installing each of the three pieces was easy.  Measuring their fit, on the other hand, was not.  The main issue was the window in our shower; it had a ledge that jutted out 1/4" on the left-hand side, but not at all on the right-hand side of the window.  This led to an asymmetry in our measurements, compounded by the fact that the - bear with me, imagine you're facing the shower while you read this - left-hand side of the window almost (but not quite) matched the right end of the "left-hand side" piece of the surround (which was intended to cover the left, back corner of the shower).  This meant we had no margin for error and had to use a utility knife to shave razor-thin bits of the "left-hand side" piece of the surround, so it fit just right into where the window ledge and molding began.

Also challenging, from my novice perspective, were the holes for the faucet and hot and cold water dials.  Here, there was some margin for error, because each hole would be more than covered by the fixture itself, once it was re-installed.  However, if you severely misalign the holes on a horizontal axis (like I almost did, forgetting here to measure twice), caulking would not fix the mistake and you would be out some money.

With the help of a utility knife, 2" and 1 1/2" circular drill bits, and a Dremel, we were able to measure and cut the three pieces in about two hours of painstaking labor (mostly checking and double-checking our numbers).  Then we applied one entire tube of Loc-Tile tub surround adhesive to each piece and installed the pieces, slamming each piece with our bare hands and then bracing each piece against a wall (which you'll see in the picture just below this paragraph).  We also taped the surround to the wall in sections, just to help the pieces stay up while the adhesive bonded to the tile, and before we were able to caulk.

Before we began to caulk, we wanted to re-install the fixtures, and this is where we hit our biggest snag.  The hot and cold water dials reattached easily enough, but for some reason the original faucet would not screw back into the plastic nub you see in the very top picture.  We tried everything - left-twisting, right-twisting, light touch and brute force - and brute force ended up snapping the plastic nub in half.  Using a wrench, we were able to gently remove the rest of the plastic nub from the underlying 5/8" copper pipe.  I was now off to Home Depot, muttering and cursing under my breath, for a replacement bath faucet.

I found a replacement bath faucet in brushed nickel (which doesn't perfectly match the other fixtures, but was close enough) for $25 - which was fortunate, because I easily could have spent $100 or more on a brand new shower head and bath faucet combination set.  While I was out shopping, our family friend was able to handle most of the caulking (the seam you see on the right hand side of the back wall in the above picture was the trickiest junction, requiring multiple applications of caulk to provide a seamless look).  

Upon my return, we were able to (presumably) adapt the 5/8" copper pipe in the wall to the 1/2" plastic nub included with the replacement faucet.  We tested it by running the faucet for 30 seconds (big mistake), thought everything was fine, and cleaned up for the day at about 4:30 pm (the faucet added about half an hour to the project).  The picture of the finished product is below, with an (EPIC FAIL AHEAD) appendix to follow.

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On Monday morning, while my wife was about five minutes into what should have been an enjoyable first shower in prettier surroundings (although I'm certain she missed the hot pink disco tile), I was downstairs in the kitchen filling my travel mug and about to leave for work when I thought to myself, I'm going to check in the basement one more time, just to make sure there isn't a slow leak with that faucet.  I feel like I have a sixth sense for smelling disasters - I always trust my inner paranoid psychopath.  This time, He was correct, because on the way downstairs, I heard a rapid drip coming from our downstairs half bath (right below the main bath) and thought to myself: Shit. This can't be good.

I must have caught the leak fairly early, because the ceiling was only leaking in one place in the middle, and the paint was only distended in a 3" x 3" circle (I grabbed the utility knife and cut the distended paint so that the water would leave the ceiling ASAP).  The ceiling itself didn't distend, which was also good news.  Our basement is unfinished and when I ran down there next, I also found water leaking to the floor of the wall facing both bathrooms.  So water must have dripped down from behind the shower wall, through the wall insulation to both the basement and the bathroom ceiling.  I ran upstairs - thankfully my wife left the bathroom door unlocked - and screamed something like "Babe.  You're going to have to turn off the shower.  Major leak downstairs."

She complied, finishing her shower across town at her parents' house and later that day filing for divorce.  (Only two-thirds of the above statement is true.)

At this point I knew the problem was outside my realm of understanding, and it was also 8:15 on a Monday morning and I needed to get to work.  So I called the neighborhood plumber - who is generally great and also fair with his prices, if not cheap - who called me right back and was over the house within an hour.  It look him about 30 minutes to determine the issue was two-fold.

First, the copper 5/8" pipe that I mentioned before had been loosened from the main pipe from the basement to the bathroom.  With significant water pressure over 1.5 showers, it eventually started to leak.  Also, the plastic 5/8" to 1/2" adapter that came with the $25 replacement bath fixture was - as you might imagine - of poor quality.  He replaced it with a brass fixture.  We then proceeded to run both the bath faucet and the shower for ten minutes apiece and determined there was no further leakage.  The plumber charged $135, mostly for his time, an understandable sum that left a bad taste in my mouth only because it was such an oversight in the first place.

Assuming the downstairs bathroom ceiling does not need to be partially replaced, and assuming the walls can survive this one-time water intrusion, the entire tub surround project cost about $450 (counting gas money and beer for our family friend).  I'm hopeful there will be no lingering after effects, because the ceiling seems to have dried without any problems that are visible to the eye, and also because I placed the dehumidifier on max-dry setting right up to the insulation once I discovered the leak.  The $450 figure is not bad in my opinion, especially compared to a bathroom renovation, but still higher than it should have been due to user error and my inexperience.  Next time I'll definitely remember to double-check each and every fitting - and also remember to use Teflon tape to ensure that each fitting is properly protected against pressure leaks.