I've been heavy most of my life, topping out at about 250# a couple years ago when I should be 180# or so. Very little exercise and a fast food and snack heavy diet the culprits. What finally got me to attempt to fix it was my little daughter looking up at me and sadly saying, "I want you to be healthy."

From years of watching others often get temporary success but ultimately fail, I decided that any rigid diet or exercise plan wouldn't work. I needed to be able to eat whatever I wanted, just needed to learn moderation.

On the exercise front, I went from getting out of breath just walking around the block,to being able to (barely) run a 5k. I used one of those couch to 5k app/programs that starts you off with just walking and slowly mixes in 30 seconds or so of jogging. I also try to do 15 sit-ups and push-ups every day. I still have never had a real work out in my entire life, but I guess I'm moving in that direction.

For the food, I decided to do the Weight Watchers tracking method. I still eat anything I want, fast food almost every day, but I've learned to keep myself full with a lot of water and vegetables. Weight Watchers can't fail if you're honest, it's simple math. This might not work for everyone, but I save all my extra points for one day a week, and therefore have enough points to literaly go crazy. Like CiCis buffet for lunch, and Golden Corral buffet for dinner, with ice cream and cookies at night crazy. Having that one day a week to indulge makes it easier for me to stay somewhat 'good' the other six days.

I lost 75 pounds in about 9 months and have kept almost all of it off.

My understanding of food (and I watch A LOT of documentaries, and read books and listen to personal experiences like these) for some it like alcohol for me. Replace alcohol with "eat/eating" in my Bukowski quote.  For me, while food is nothing more than a need to survive, I understand taking comfort in something. For me it's just not food, it's alcohol.

This is going to be kind of a long post, but I'll try to be succinct. I've had some success with weight loss in the past and have developed some strategies and theories for it, so I will share them here in case they help anyone else.

My starting weight today is 243.2.
My goal weight is modest, I just want to get down to 220. Once I get there, we'll see how it's going.

Here are some things I am going to be doing.

1. Weigh myself every day. I've talked to other people who only weigh themselves once a week or whatever, because they don't want to be discouraged if they don't see progress on a daily basis. Personally, I think this is a mistake. One of the big reasons is that your weight can fluctuate from day to day based on factors like retaining water, or having extra poop in your system, etc. Because of this, it's possible you might get a false reading if you happen to have an upward fluctuation on the day you weigh yourself, making it more likely you'll be discouraged rather than less likely. If you weigh yourself every day, you can see these minor blips work themselves out. It's not usually a strictly linear thing, it's more of a two steps forward, one step back sort of thing, which is a lot easier to track when you weigh yourself every day.

To try and minimize these fluctuations in my readings, I weigh myself first thing in the morning every day, before I've eaten or had anything to drink. The amount of food or liquid in your system can vary greatly from one day -or even one hour - to the next. If you weigh yourself after you've had anything to eat or drink, you're going to get some serious variations. I remember when I started my weight loss program a few years ago, I weighed myself the night before and was at 293.2. The next morning I weighed myself and came in at 288.6. That's a nearly five pound swing overnight. Now imagine if I had spent a whole week trying to lose weight and happened to step on the scale when it gave the higher reading. I'd feel like I was totally failing, when it was really just an inflated figure from food and water.

2. Establish am eating/sleeping pattern. For people who have regular jobs, establishing a pattern is probably not a major issue, as you have to be up at the same time every day, and have lunch hour at the same time (though I know there are other problems caused by work environments). For me, since I work from home and am not really working much at all at the moment, a disruption in my sleeping pattern is the number one reason I put on weight in the first place. Just getting up two hours later each day totally throws my eating pattern into disarray and has resulted in me eating almost a whole extra meal each day, and late at night when it's worst for you.

I'm going to try to get in the habit of waking up at 9:30 each day, so I can eat a meal at 10, a snack at 2:30, a meal at 6, and a small snack at 9:30. If I know when and what I am going to eat in advance, it also helps me with hunger - I can just be like, eh, okay so I'm hungry, but I'm going to be eating in an hour anyway, so I can manage.

3. Have a support system. Which is what we're doing here. I think it's helpful to be accountable to someone else besides ourselves. Last time I went through major weight loss, I had a weight coach from my health insurance plan who would call me once a month to see how I was doing. Knowing he was going to call me to ask about my weight, I didn't want to be in a situation where he called and I had to tell him I had gained weight or something. I also had a nutritionist I met with once every three months who didn't help me much with nutrition really, but gave me another person to be accountable to.

We can kind of get in the habit of letting ourselves down, but I think most people don't want to let other people down, and will work harder to avoid it than they will just to help themselves. For instance, if I write up this big post about weight loss ideas and then I end up gaining five pounds over the summer, I am going to feel like a giant douchebag. So in order to avoid that, I guess I'd better lose weight instead.

4. Do the obvious stuff and the small stuff. I haven't mentioned eating right and exercising because it's obvious. But we still need to do them. For me, it's really small stuff. I try to take a walk around the block every day. For food, I am just going to cut down on bread, and try to eat healthier snacks. That's about it. My meals are actually okay right now, it's the peripheral stuff that has led to weight gain. Like, last night I ate a snack - but it was too late at night, and it was cookies. If that had been earlier in the evening, and carrots instead, it would have served the same purpose but been much, much healthier for me. I think this is probably true for a lot of us - it's the small stuff that's the problem, not the big stuff.

Incidentally, I'm at the end of work day sugar crash. Just got to keep telling myself its sugar withdrawal and not true hunger. Mind over matter.

Shax-
Try keeping no/low carb snacks on hand.
For me, and this isn't something I particularly LOVE, but it works: I keep those turkey meat snacks in my fridge. If I get hungry, I grab one. Protein rich foods (which are no/low carb) do not satisfy quickly, but they sustain you a LOT longer. You just have to give it a few to get to your system. Sugar hits almost immediately, but carb-free foods do not.

I'm a naturally thin guy with a small-boned frame, but as I've gotten older I've found that I will put on weight if I eat a lot of junk. I'm a believer in the low-carb-high-protein approach, as long as you make sure you're getting your fruit and vegetables every day. At least, that's what works for me. I also find that not eating anything at all at night helps. Not stuffing myself to beyond full is important, too.

Apart from that, I think it's basically a matter of calories in and calories out. I don't count calories, but I have a pretty good sense of roughly what I can eat in any given day without putting on the flab.

Exercising a little, but not as much as I should. Once school lets out in three weeks, I'll be able to get into the exercise aspect more.

I'm less worried about carbs when it comes to fruit than I am about sugar. Eating too much fruit is only going to keep the sugar withdrawals coming, so I'm very aware that overdoing fruit is not a good thing. Baby carrots are my fallback when I absolutely HAVE to munch and I've already had a sizable serving of fruit.

My diet is good for me from pretty much all dimensions: low fat, low carb, organic, low sugar, low salt, low additives and preservatives, but my number one focus right now, even more than the weight loss which will come, is getting a better handle on my hunger and my addiction to eating. If I can change my attitude towards eating in general, then even four months from now, when I'm not rigidly following this thing anymore, I can be more certain that I won't just regain all the weight I lost and return to where I am now.


Incidentally, dinner tonight was amazing: two chicken breasts cooked in soy sauce (technically fried, but I used no oil nor butter) with cumin for added flavor. I feel VERY full and satisfied.


Today wasn't easy, but it wasn't as hard as I feared either. Hopefully, this will all become habit for me. I really enjoyed each of my meals today and look forward to them again tomorrow -- it's just a matter of not feeling miserable in the inbetween.



Day 1 in reflection:

Successes: Enjoyed all of my meals. Fought my beginning and end of work day cravings successfully.
Struggles: Beginning and end of the work day were ROUGH for cravings. Sugar withdrawal affected my performance at work in the morning.
Failures/cheats: I allowed myself black coffee with breakfast. I think I might allow myself decaf tomorrow, but I want to kick caffeine too while I'm at it.

All in all: An A day for me