I was always really skinny, as a kid growing up and all through my twenties.
Then when I was 30 I studied Tae Kwon Do, and a little Jiu Jitsu, five days a week, and was in absolutely phenomenal shape. I could do a hundred push-ups like it was nothing. I could sprint into a full somersault and come out of it jumping as high as my head, and kick a 200 pound punching bag hard enough to make it slap the ground.
I ended up stopping, though, because my instructor was a bit of a maniac and we were all taking a lot of injuries in pursuit of his standard of perfection. I have a thumb that still hurts to this day if it takes any impact. I thought I would find another school and continue, but I never did.
In my mid 30's I hit a period of depression, which I'd always been prone to, and never really snapped out of it. I started putting on weight and getting out of shape and it seemed like the next thing I knew, I had gotten used to having a fat stomach and rounded shoulders, and not having anywhere near my former physical abilities and stamina.
The decline was pretty gradual, and for a long time I didn't really see the full effect that it was having on me. This year, however, it became very noticeable, at least to me. Not only was I visibly bigger, not just in the stomach but even in my face and arms, but I could feel myself getting weaker and weaker. Things I could do easily five years ago suddenly felt like a strain. And I realized that I was essentially backed into a corner; if I wanted to remain anything like the man I used to be, I was going to have to start taking action.
Over the years I've learned a lot about diet and nutrition, and so this year around my 39th birthday in June I put together a plan for myself that I thought was reasonable, gradual, and sustainable.
And it worked exactly the way I hoped it would. If anything, maybe better than I really dared to hope. I've lost at least twenty-five pounds, and my waist has gone from a 36, which was starting to feel more like a 38, to a 32 as of this week, when I put on jeans that I haven't worn in eight years.
I thought about doing a sort of process blog, where I charted my progress and thoughts on the subject, but I wasn't sure if it would work and that would have been pretty embarrassing
So I decided instead to wait and see, and if it worked I could write about it as a sort of retrospective. It did, so I am.
<CENTER><H3>I - The Plan</H3></CENTER>
I've absorbed a lot of information about dieting over the years, from TV and books and magazines, and from people I know who were trying one or the other of the various systems being sold, and I've tried to be a discerning consumer of this information and sift the hype from the facts.
I give a lot more weight to an article that I read in Science (which I confess I no longer read, but I used to) than I do to something said in an infomercial whose purpose is to sell me something. A lot of information is in between those two extremes obviously, but I think I'm reasonably adept at putting it into its proper context.
In the course of this learning there have been certain things repeated by experts, again and again across a variety of fields, and I decided to accept them as "facts," meaning that they could be used as reliable foundations for further ideas. Here's an example to illustrate what I mean... when I was 24 I had a roommate named Ed who was trying to diet, and he was trying to cut out all fat, because he believed that you have to eat actual fat in order to get fatter as a person. So one day he bought a one pound bag of Twizzlers and ate the entire thing in one sitting, because it said on the bag that they were fat free.
That's an example of a premise that if you take it as a fact and build on it, any future decisions will automatically be wrong. So I wanted to be careful about what I assumed was true.
So what informed my decisions? In journals on the subject of obesity, and a few reasonably scientific programs I've seen on the subject (like Scientific American or Nova for example, Dr. Phil and Oprah don't count) the doctors are more or less unanimous about a couple of basic things.
1) It is very, very hard to drastically change our basic eating habits. I've seen several doctors studying obesity say that statistically, you are very likely to rebound off of a diet if it involves too much hunger, or denying yourself too much variety.
And in a sort of one-off comment on the same thing, I read an article once that was signed by around 25 scientists studying longevity in humans. The thrust of their article, which I might go into in detail in another blog, was that the ONLY proven way to extend human life is through drastic calorie reduction. But they concluded that our instinct to eat is so powerful that it's a waste of time to try and apply that to all of humanity.
Basically we're programmed by evolution to react to a feeling of deprivation by overeating, to store up fat against starvation. Any successful diet has to avoid triggering that reflex.
Related to that is the fact that you never know if you're full until ten minutes after you eat. It takes that long for the signals from your stomach to tell your brain that you're sated. I have a theory that this is alsothe result of evolution because until relatively recently we were hunter-gatherers and subject to seasonal lean-times, so we had to be able to store up on salt and fat by gorging on food when it was available in plentiful supply. You can't do that if you're not capable of still feeling hungry when you're actually full.
That ended up being an important trick for me. if I finished the amount of food I thought I should eat and still felt hungry, I would tell myself to wait ten minutes. When I did that, I NEVER still wanted to eat. Not even one single time.
2) The second thing that I heard repeated over and over was that the recommended amount of weight loss is no more than one pound per week. That's based on the fact that more than that can be unhealthy, but also on simple statistics. Looking at decades of studies on weight loss, doctors report that small, gradual changes are what last. Attempts to go too fast cause people to rebound and put the weight right back on.
<CENTER>-----</CENTER>
So those were the two things I decided to accept as being true, and essential to any successful plan. Now all I needed was a plan
Obviously there are at least several billion diet options available to me, but I'm inherently suspicious of anything that's for sale. When people are trying to sell something to a mass market, they have to make hundreds of small compromises in their message that can amount to gigantic lies. So without even really thinking about it, I dismissed the idea of doing anything like Atkins or Weight Watchers or any of those.
I think that dieting can't possibly be all that complicated, and if all these different systems work for some people and not for others, more or less equally, then there's probably no big secret in any one of them. Also, I think that one reason they might be making it seem so complicated is that if it's NOT complicated, then there's no reason for you to buy their book, or subscribe to their system, is there?
So I asked myself, at it's core, why am I gaining weight? And the answer is, as it always must be, I am consuming more calories than I'm expending in a day.
<CENTER>-----</CENTER>
A calorie is a unit of energy, the energy that we use to power our biological processes. We consume calories in all foods, and we store them in the form of fat. Fat's purpose in our biological structure is exactly that, it's just stored energy.
When you get extra calories in a meal, your body saves them for a rainy day by creating fat. Then when you starve, which nobody reading this blog is likely to be doing, your body turns to that fat in order to survive, before it has to resort to more drastic measures like consuming muscle.
So there's the basic formula under which all weight gain and loss works. If you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. If you eat fewer calories than you use in a day, you will lose weight.
<CENTER>-----</CENTER>
Having reduced the problem to something simple and manageable, I just needed to figure out how many calories I burn in a day. So I did a little research and found that I need around 2000-2100, and resolved to come in under that number every single day. I reasoned that if I always did that, as a matter of routine, I would gradually and inevitably lose weight.
That being the case, I was free to eat anything I wanted as long as I kept within that framework. I broke up the calories by allotting 500 to each meal, one dessert which could be no more than 150 calories, and the rest would be used up by the cream in my coffee. I hoped that with that rough estimate, I would always end up coming in under my goal. Sometime it might only be by a few calories, and other times it would be by a couple of hundred, but the net result would be a dropping of weight.
I learned a little bit about how many calories different foods are, and how to achieve a balanced meal that hits my calorie target and I found that there was almost nothing off limits. Only the most ridiculous foods are so high calorie that I would avoid them, like a Big Mac is like 800 calories, which is more than any single meal for me and I can't imagine a context in which I could justify it. But really, they're so unhealthy that it's no loss at all.
I was really worried about how hungry this would leave me, because I know from experience as well as various doctors and articles that if you start to feel hungry, you get a desire to overeat to compensate, and I didn't want to have to constantly wrestle with that.
But instead what happened is that without giving anything up except the most extreme eating habits and without ever feeling hungry, I've lost all of the weight that I had put on. I'm as skinny as I ever was, and this week I ate turkey, pork chops, mashed potatoes, pasta, steak, and fried catfish, among other things.
Coming up...
<CENTER><H3>II - The Experience</H3></CENTER>
<CENTER><H3>III - The Aftermath</H3></CENTER>
Then when I was 30 I studied Tae Kwon Do, and a little Jiu Jitsu, five days a week, and was in absolutely phenomenal shape. I could do a hundred push-ups like it was nothing. I could sprint into a full somersault and come out of it jumping as high as my head, and kick a 200 pound punching bag hard enough to make it slap the ground.
I ended up stopping, though, because my instructor was a bit of a maniac and we were all taking a lot of injuries in pursuit of his standard of perfection. I have a thumb that still hurts to this day if it takes any impact. I thought I would find another school and continue, but I never did.
In my mid 30's I hit a period of depression, which I'd always been prone to, and never really snapped out of it. I started putting on weight and getting out of shape and it seemed like the next thing I knew, I had gotten used to having a fat stomach and rounded shoulders, and not having anywhere near my former physical abilities and stamina.
The decline was pretty gradual, and for a long time I didn't really see the full effect that it was having on me. This year, however, it became very noticeable, at least to me. Not only was I visibly bigger, not just in the stomach but even in my face and arms, but I could feel myself getting weaker and weaker. Things I could do easily five years ago suddenly felt like a strain. And I realized that I was essentially backed into a corner; if I wanted to remain anything like the man I used to be, I was going to have to start taking action.
Over the years I've learned a lot about diet and nutrition, and so this year around my 39th birthday in June I put together a plan for myself that I thought was reasonable, gradual, and sustainable.
And it worked exactly the way I hoped it would. If anything, maybe better than I really dared to hope. I've lost at least twenty-five pounds, and my waist has gone from a 36, which was starting to feel more like a 38, to a 32 as of this week, when I put on jeans that I haven't worn in eight years.
I thought about doing a sort of process blog, where I charted my progress and thoughts on the subject, but I wasn't sure if it would work and that would have been pretty embarrassing
So I decided instead to wait and see, and if it worked I could write about it as a sort of retrospective. It did, so I am.
<CENTER><H3>I - The Plan</H3></CENTER>
I've absorbed a lot of information about dieting over the years, from TV and books and magazines, and from people I know who were trying one or the other of the various systems being sold, and I've tried to be a discerning consumer of this information and sift the hype from the facts.
I give a lot more weight to an article that I read in Science (which I confess I no longer read, but I used to) than I do to something said in an infomercial whose purpose is to sell me something. A lot of information is in between those two extremes obviously, but I think I'm reasonably adept at putting it into its proper context.
In the course of this learning there have been certain things repeated by experts, again and again across a variety of fields, and I decided to accept them as "facts," meaning that they could be used as reliable foundations for further ideas. Here's an example to illustrate what I mean... when I was 24 I had a roommate named Ed who was trying to diet, and he was trying to cut out all fat, because he believed that you have to eat actual fat in order to get fatter as a person. So one day he bought a one pound bag of Twizzlers and ate the entire thing in one sitting, because it said on the bag that they were fat free.
That's an example of a premise that if you take it as a fact and build on it, any future decisions will automatically be wrong. So I wanted to be careful about what I assumed was true.
So what informed my decisions? In journals on the subject of obesity, and a few reasonably scientific programs I've seen on the subject (like Scientific American or Nova for example, Dr. Phil and Oprah don't count) the doctors are more or less unanimous about a couple of basic things.
1) It is very, very hard to drastically change our basic eating habits. I've seen several doctors studying obesity say that statistically, you are very likely to rebound off of a diet if it involves too much hunger, or denying yourself too much variety.
And in a sort of one-off comment on the same thing, I read an article once that was signed by around 25 scientists studying longevity in humans. The thrust of their article, which I might go into in detail in another blog, was that the ONLY proven way to extend human life is through drastic calorie reduction. But they concluded that our instinct to eat is so powerful that it's a waste of time to try and apply that to all of humanity.
Basically we're programmed by evolution to react to a feeling of deprivation by overeating, to store up fat against starvation. Any successful diet has to avoid triggering that reflex.
Related to that is the fact that you never know if you're full until ten minutes after you eat. It takes that long for the signals from your stomach to tell your brain that you're sated. I have a theory that this is alsothe result of evolution because until relatively recently we were hunter-gatherers and subject to seasonal lean-times, so we had to be able to store up on salt and fat by gorging on food when it was available in plentiful supply. You can't do that if you're not capable of still feeling hungry when you're actually full.
That ended up being an important trick for me. if I finished the amount of food I thought I should eat and still felt hungry, I would tell myself to wait ten minutes. When I did that, I NEVER still wanted to eat. Not even one single time.
2) The second thing that I heard repeated over and over was that the recommended amount of weight loss is no more than one pound per week. That's based on the fact that more than that can be unhealthy, but also on simple statistics. Looking at decades of studies on weight loss, doctors report that small, gradual changes are what last. Attempts to go too fast cause people to rebound and put the weight right back on.
<CENTER>-----</CENTER>
So those were the two things I decided to accept as being true, and essential to any successful plan. Now all I needed was a plan
Obviously there are at least several billion diet options available to me, but I'm inherently suspicious of anything that's for sale. When people are trying to sell something to a mass market, they have to make hundreds of small compromises in their message that can amount to gigantic lies. So without even really thinking about it, I dismissed the idea of doing anything like Atkins or Weight Watchers or any of those.
I think that dieting can't possibly be all that complicated, and if all these different systems work for some people and not for others, more or less equally, then there's probably no big secret in any one of them. Also, I think that one reason they might be making it seem so complicated is that if it's NOT complicated, then there's no reason for you to buy their book, or subscribe to their system, is there?
So I asked myself, at it's core, why am I gaining weight? And the answer is, as it always must be, I am consuming more calories than I'm expending in a day.
<CENTER>-----</CENTER>
A calorie is a unit of energy, the energy that we use to power our biological processes. We consume calories in all foods, and we store them in the form of fat. Fat's purpose in our biological structure is exactly that, it's just stored energy.
When you get extra calories in a meal, your body saves them for a rainy day by creating fat. Then when you starve, which nobody reading this blog is likely to be doing, your body turns to that fat in order to survive, before it has to resort to more drastic measures like consuming muscle.
So there's the basic formula under which all weight gain and loss works. If you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. If you eat fewer calories than you use in a day, you will lose weight.
<CENTER>-----</CENTER>
Having reduced the problem to something simple and manageable, I just needed to figure out how many calories I burn in a day. So I did a little research and found that I need around 2000-2100, and resolved to come in under that number every single day. I reasoned that if I always did that, as a matter of routine, I would gradually and inevitably lose weight.
That being the case, I was free to eat anything I wanted as long as I kept within that framework. I broke up the calories by allotting 500 to each meal, one dessert which could be no more than 150 calories, and the rest would be used up by the cream in my coffee. I hoped that with that rough estimate, I would always end up coming in under my goal. Sometime it might only be by a few calories, and other times it would be by a couple of hundred, but the net result would be a dropping of weight.
I learned a little bit about how many calories different foods are, and how to achieve a balanced meal that hits my calorie target and I found that there was almost nothing off limits. Only the most ridiculous foods are so high calorie that I would avoid them, like a Big Mac is like 800 calories, which is more than any single meal for me and I can't imagine a context in which I could justify it. But really, they're so unhealthy that it's no loss at all.
I was really worried about how hungry this would leave me, because I know from experience as well as various doctors and articles that if you start to feel hungry, you get a desire to overeat to compensate, and I didn't want to have to constantly wrestle with that.
But instead what happened is that without giving anything up except the most extreme eating habits and without ever feeling hungry, I've lost all of the weight that I had put on. I'm as skinny as I ever was, and this week I ate turkey, pork chops, mashed potatoes, pasta, steak, and fried catfish, among other things.
Coming up...
<CENTER><H3>II - The Experience</H3></CENTER>
<CENTER><H3>III - The Aftermath</H3></CENTER>
