Tag Archives: wellness

Weight loss: By the Numbers

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Making a chart of the changes you make to get to a better, healthier weight has two distinct advantages. One advantage is purely psychological, a physical reference that can be referred to providing positive reinforcement and proof of a desire to change. In addition, capturing quality data on a daily basis will give direction to our efforts by correlating our actions to actual results. Of course, the more data that we have, the better job we can do.

My weekly chart

If you look at the first column, each row marked ‘Week’ shows the distance that I walked first thing in the morning on the day at the top of the column. The first two weeks I was only concerned with that particular data as I was tracking the increase in distance to my 3 mile a day goal, just in case my intended gains were too ambitious. For Week 3 I decided to also track my morning weight and start logging my calorie intake during the day, mostly as a guide to help me learn better food choices.

As I have said before the weight number is initially going to be used as a tool to examine how my body is handling hydration and it looks like that is working well. Notice that all of the weight numbers are very close together and vary by 5 pounds throughout the week. My hydration is just under 1 gallon of water a day, I am drinking mostly water, no milk yet and only an occasional diet coke, no judging. These numbers do not show any significant weight loss but it does show that my hydration is were it needs to be. Always check the color of your urine at least once a day, yellow is good, lighter yellow to clear means you are getting too much water, brown or red, go to the hospital.

Having all but eliminated bread of any kind from the food I eat, I did have some french fries last week and tortillas for breakfast once, but the rest of the time I stuck to fiber, fat and protein without any difficulty. Bacon was my new best friend the third week, 4 eggs, 4 bacon is 420 calories and very filling. When you consider that my basic breakfast runs around $2.50 and the lunch salad of spinach, zucchini, onion and tuna about $3 a day, changing eating habits are also saving considerable amounts of money as well.

At the extreme right of the table I use columns for weekly totals, distance, calories burned and calculated fat loss from diet and exercise. These will not correlate directly and that is OK, they are references only, as I have said before, your weight will vary with water before fat. The chart will make more sense as more data is added to it, by the time we get into week 7 the weekly numbers will begin to show where the results are headed and changes can be made if necessary. We are changing things and everyone responds differently to stimulus, even if the stimulus is the same.

Diet and Exercise?

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288.6
You know that losing weight is 90% diet and 10% exercise, right? Well, sometimes is seems more like 99 and 1 to me. Dieting or more specifically ‘calorie reduction while maintaining strict macro control’ is a lot harder than it sounds. So hard in fact that after many years of trying, I finally hit on one approach that is currently working for me, a minimalist approach that occurred to me almost by accident as I was attempting to script another menu in a long list of unsuccessful weight control attempts. I work nights and usually eat when I get home, if I eat during working hours on break I eat too much and I can’t control macros or calories, so what I did was to sculpt the one meal that I had complete control over and virtually ditch all of the other food that I was eating for a bit.
Now, starving yourself is self-defeating, I know this, there are things that your body needs to have and will begin to fail without. So I looked at where I wanted to go and steered myself in that direction. I weighed in at 314, big even by my standards and I wanted to drop some large pounds, but without killing myself in the process.
Looking at the big picture, I put my ideal weight at around 215, but that was a long term goal. A good short-term goal in my mind was to drop 10% of my body weight, mostly fat ideally, and use this benchmark as a jumping off point. Once I had attained the first goal I would reassess where I felt I was at, make sure that I stayed as healthy as possible and make a new and improved goal to start in on. 10% of 314 is, let’s say, 31.5 pounds. In fat loss terms that would represent a dietary caloric deficit of 110,250 calories. Figuring my daily calories for current weight maintenance at around 3250, I designed my diet intake meal as 6 eggs, 1 can of tomatoes/chilies, 16 oz. milk, about 830 calories total, a 2420 calorie deficit. The plan looks extreme but take into consideration that my food intake is mostly protein and fat which, over time will trigger ketosis, which is what I am trying to do and that when I am in ketosis, my body will burn fat for energy instead of carbohydrates so external calories will be augmented by internal calories from body fat. Also included in this regimen is daily doses of vitamins and fish oil. I expect at least one cheat day a week, where I may consume some carbs, no potatoes, no bread, no grains of any kind, though. Today is 5 weeks that I have been practicing this restrictive diet and my weight has come down to 286.6lbs. as of standing on the bathroom scale 30 seconds ago. I feel better than I have, I don’t feel bloated like before, my clothes are fitting better, I have started to wear the old 44’s again. Once I hit my target, 3 pounds to go, I will start incorporating daily weight-training into the mix so that I can gain strength and elevate my fitness level, and take advantage of not having to move an extra 30 pounds all of the time. I never would have thought that this would work and I don’t suggest that anyone try this, I tried everything else, this was in fact the last straw for me. I try to live by a few golden rules and one that has gotten me through many tough times is, “Well begun is half done.” Wish me luck, I will be posting more as time, or rather time off, allows.