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:
*************************************
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:
*************************************
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.
*******************************
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.
*********************************
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.
*********************************
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!
No comments:
Post a Comment