A quick recap: I was getting physically stronger and faster due to regular sessions on the treadmill. I was over the limit for the household scale and just assumed the exercise was causing weightloss. When I went for a yearly physical the doc told me I was heavier again this year and then referred me to a bariatric center. I was shocked.
I'm one of these people that deals with one problem at a time. I obsess about it, collect information, stew a little bit, half heartedly work on something else for a while, verify some assumptions, stew a little more and eventually define a plan and execute it. The problem is that the problems I obsess about are not always related to the work that needs doing. Usually they are, but not this time. I found myself sitting at my desk in front of the computer and incapable of focusing on the code. I was too distracted by thoughts about my weight to get any programming done. So, just like I do when stuck on a programming problem, I fired up Google and started researching.
It turns out that at 6'2" (1.88 meters) my ideal weight is about 191 pounds (86.6 kilograms). These things vary depending on which insurance charts or doctors charts you choose to believe but 191 is about right for me and my frame. I clearly remember thinking, "I am literally over twice as heavy as I should be. That's in--f@#$ing--sane." I'd just learned that for every pound of person that is me, I had an additional pound of fat. Oh, and when I run out of people pounds to count? Yup, there's still some fat pounds left over. Even more motivated now, I continued searching for answers...
Relatively quickly, a book title caught my eye in the search results. A programmer turned startup CEO turned bajillionaire decided to solve his weight problem. Based on his results, John Walker wrote an guide to losing and maintaining weight called The Hackers Diet. Perhaps it's because I'm a programmer that the explanations and enumerated requirements resonated with me. Perhaps it's simply because his book is almost totally goal oriented without any extra distractions about food pyramids and only a little about exercise thrown in. I dunno why, but I took away two key ideas that now govern my every food choice.
The first idea I took away was that weight loss is not the same thing as fat loss. There are other things that contribute to weight changes and end up confounding dieters. These fluctuations are due to poo and water weight. One can easily imagine gaining 2 pounds of water and losing 1/3 pound of fat in a day. How would you know you made progress? It turns out, you can almost ignore these fluctuations by weighing yourself every day at the same time and keeping a record along with a 10 day running average or other trend calculation. This provides a much clearer idea of fat lost. So I now use a modified version of The Hacker's Diet companion spreadsheet. In addition to the provided trend calculation, I added a ten day running average. I weigh myself each morning, plug the result in to the spread sheet, and have a much better idea about how I'm really doing every day.
The second thing that stuck with me-- and this really hit home-- is that a pound of fat is 3500 calories. Use 3500 calories more than you eat and you will lose a pound of fat. Eat 3500 calories more than you burn and you gain a pound of fat. I weighed roughly 200 pounds extra, so I had an extra 700,000 calories to use up. The only way to use them up is to eat 700,000 calories less than actually used. So how much was I using? The various calculators out there told me it takes about 3700 calories a day to maintain 370 pounds. Then I checked my goal weight and learned that I'd burn about 2300 a day when I got there. So, after discussing with the spouse, I settled on a daily limit of 1500 calories.
1500 is the value that governs my every food choice now. The value that matters is 1500. 100 for breakfast and 700 each for lunch and supper. I have always preferred two meals a day anyway so this works well for me. I can and do borrow from one meal to accommodate making the other meal larger. I just make sure I will be at or below, that's right, 1500 when the day is done.
Here is a typical meal day:
Breakfast - Coffee and a 100 calorie cookie to help the multivitamin go down - 100 calories
Lunch - Subway 12 inch turkey on wheat with pepperjack cheese, lettuce, pickles, jalepeno peppers, one line of yellow mustard and salt - Less than 700 calories
Supper - Whatever the spouse makes (assuming the a reasonably accurate calorie count is known) or a TV dinner for 300 - 500 calories. Perhaps a snack pack sized bag of chips (or two!) for 100 calories each. Maybe 100 calorie cookie or 100 calorie bag of cookies. Occasionally one beer or other 100 calorie adult beverage.
Yes, yes. The subway diet is cliche after Jerod. But their marketing department is telling the honest to goodness truth. It works. I have found no other food that gives you the value in feeling full for the calories eaten. Several of the Subway sandwiches are fantastic in this regard. If you know of any other chain that comes close, I'd sure love to hear about it. Other places are decent, yes, but Subway is the best I've seen so far.
If I know I'm having a large supper, I have a 6' sub for lunch. If the opposite is true, I reduce or eliminate supper. I keep a mental tally every day and consciously consider where I'm at in the 100+700+700 formula when it comes time to eat. If I'm still hungry a few minutes after eating, then I allow myself to eat more. Ok, I lied, 1500 isn't really the number. I will let the maximum slide up to 2000 calories in a given day but that's my absolute ceiling. Oddly, this hasn't been an issue very often. I am rarely still hungry after consuming 700 calories.
I do have to admit that I totally ignored these rules while we were on a trip for the Thanksgiving holiday. Both calculated values on my spreadsheet showed an uptrend (!!!) for two days or more as a result. This translated to having to lose the eight pounds from 362 to 354 all over again. But otherwise this is working well for me. I finally bought a scale that can handle up to 450 pounds. Kinda crazy to buy a freaking expensive treadmill BEFORE buying the forty dollar Walmart scale, I know. In any case, today I stand %18 of the way toward my goal of shedding 200 pounds and the trend lines continue to look good.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
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