Loosing Weight

I just realized that I recently past the one year mark for when I decided it was time for me to loose some weight. When I started sometime in February last year I tipped the scales somewhere north of 275 pounds. As of this morning, I now weigh 221lbs. Down some 54lbs from my first weigh in. I have been somewhere under 230lbs since sept'04 so I have maintained a weight loss of at least 40 pounds for about 5 months now.

One question I get asked by almost everyone is "how did you do it?". Atkins? Exercise? Low Fat? Weight Watchers? Etc etc.... any number of Fad 'diet' options. The answer was none of the above. How did I do it? The easy answer is I just ate less. I suppose there is more to it but in the end it all boiled down to that very simple fact. I ate less. ALOT less than I had been to that point.

Some Things I learned about weight loss along the way.

One, what you eat has nothing to do with whether or not you loose weight. Full stop, end of story. There are no ifs, ands or buts. The issues regarding what you eat have a lot to do with nutrition and health but NOTHING to do with weight loss. This is not to say you should not be concerned with the healthiness of your choice of foods. However if you want to loose weight and keep it off you have to understand this one very simple fact that often gets passed over or lost in the noise of weight loss schemes. Eating to much nutritional food will get you fat just as fast as eating Big Macs. It is just easier with Big Macs cause they pack more calories into less space... and they normally taste better than healthier alternatives.

Two, Weight loss IS starvation, albeit low grade. This is something nutritionists and doctors glaze over because it sounds highly unappealing and it is more important that you loose weight than worry about the fact that you have to starve yourself in order to shed pounds. Why is this the case ? Well in short your body has to metabolize its fat stores in order to shed those excess pounds. Before your body will start metabolizing that fat it must receive less caloric intake than it needs to maintain your body mass. Thus to loose weight you must run a caloric deficit. A typical medical obsfucation for the simple answer. Weight loss is the process of your body eating itself when you don't feed it enough. The less you feed it the more of itself it will consume. This is a very hard fact to overcome for a lot of people. Fast weight loss comes from Large caloric deficits (or a surgeon with a vacuum cleaner). How large ? A rule of thumb is that a pound is about 1000 calories. Thus if you loose 1 pound a day you are running about a 1000 calorie deficit per day. This is pretty much out at the outer edge for what doctors recommend when loosing weight.

Three, exercising in and of itself does not cause you to loose weight. It improves your cardiovascular health, it builds muscle, increases your metabolism, and lastly BURNS CALORIES. Now in conjunction with number two you may see the value of exercise when it comes to weight loss. The more calories you burn the easier it is to eat less than what you burn. Increased metabolism increases your base burn rate or amount of calories you burn at rest... like sitting in a chair all day, on the couch when you get home and while you sleep. But in and of itself it does not loose weight for you. It only works in conjunction with a calorie deficit.

Four, Excecise is not necessary for a successful weight loss process. However it can be beneficial.

So again how did I loose weight ? The same way EVERYONE looses weight. I ran a caloric deficit, or in other words my body burned more energy than I gave it. I did this without really changing what I ate so much as the size of my portions. In the end I made four changes.

One, I ate out less, one to two times a week rather than 5-6.

Two, I started eating meals that had < 500 calories for two meals a day (frozen dinners etc)

Three, I more or less gave up soft drinks

Four, Massively increased the amount of water I drank. Lowers hunger pangs.

3 things I did not do.

One, eat 'diet' foods or drink 'diet' drinks. A typical dinner was tater tots dipped in ranch to go with breaded chicken pattie sandwich with cheeze... about 800-1000 calories but with two sub 500 calorie meals during the day it rarely added up to my base burn rate of 2400. Now some of the frozen dinners I used were diet brands, Smart Ones, Healthy Choice etc but that is because I found some that I liked quite a bit. I also ate Uncle Bens Rice Dishes, Zartarains, Some Stoeffers. Some brands I really don't buy mostly because I am not strong enough to not eat the larger dishes with multiple servings in them. In the end I have come to the conclusion that most of the so called Diet Dishes are in fact not diet at all. They are just smaller portions of the same things. As for drinks. I really don't buy the concept of Diet Cola's. Most of them taste awful to me with few exceptions. When I wanted a soft drink I figured it into my calories for the day.

Two, Excercise. Not one trip to the gym. Not one new thing. Occaisonal round of Golf and a rare trip to walk around in the state park (Golf once a week max, Walks once a month max). I did do some of the parking far form the entrances, stairs and stuff but I have always done a lot of that.

Three, Deny myself my favorite foods, meals at restaurants. When I did eat out I orderd whatever struck my fancy. Occasionally I made deals with myself about going out an extra time if it was to get something more reasonable but never did I drink only water or order just salads. Well except the La Placita Chicken breast Salad but that is one meal of a salad... besides that went with like two baskets of chips, salsa and cheese dip... yummmmm cheese dip. Anything was game during holidays/vacation.

It certainly wasn't easy. I may even have stood in front of the fridge and cried a time or two out of frustration at not allowing myself to assuage the beast in my stomach demanding I feed it. But the pounds came off and they are staying off. You don't need help. You don't need expensive diet plans and special foods. You don't need Gym memberships. In the end what you need is determination and perseverance. Probably not the answer anyone looking for a way to loose weight wants to hear. But if you will take that to heart I am willing to bet you have a better chance of success than the people who go looking for the 'secret'.

How you accomplish your caloric deficit is up to you. What worked for me won't work for everyone. The one thing I think I learned that can help everyone is that the more you try to change to loose weight, the harder it is to keep it up and often any weight loss disappears fast when you revert to previous habits. You have to make a lasting change in how you live. There are lots of way to get there in the end. For some, changing the types of foods they eat or the amount of daily exercise they get is something they can make permanent. But it wasn't what worked for me. So that is my answer about my weight loss. Perhaps it will help someone else in the battle against the bulge.