Back in January I found that I was getting close to a weight that I was really not happy with (the high point was… wait for it… 252 pounds). I also found myself sweatier and more out of shape than I probably had ever been. As I was heading into the year of my 30th birthday and wedding, now was a good time to try and turn things around as its only going to get harder as I get older. I also couldn’t help imagining myself immortalized in our wedding photos as the sweaty fatso I felt like. That feeling alone was enough to motivate me to take a shot at this.
While the plan sounded good, it still needed a little something extra – some pizazz, if you will. It quickly hit me like a bolt of lightning – it needed a marketing slogan. The slogan practically wrote itself… “30 by 30″ – 30 pounds by the time I turn 30 years old. Since my 30th birthday fell 2 weeks after the wedding, it was essentially “lose 30 pounds by the wedding.”
I definitely buy the thought that everyone has a system (diet + excercise) that works best for their personality, motivation, body type, etc… and the seemingly limitless amount of diet books are a reflection of those those specificities (and a recognition of the fact that people wanting to lose weight can probably be convinced to buy anything).
I made it through roughly 4 months of a somewhat self-designed approach and then came across The Abs Diet and found that, unbeknownst to me, I was already “following” the basic tenets of the diet + excercise plan it laid out.
My approach (and ultimately The Abs Diet’s) boiled down to these few main principles:
“Avoid bad carbs” – while I’m not a proponent of the Atkins Diet I firmly believe that greatly limiting “empty” carbs (non-whole grain bread products) goes a long way to getting your body in a position to burn more calories. I was pretty strict about this for the past 9 months, which meant avoiding 3 of the things I held most dear: bagels, pizza and pasta. When I loosened the rules a bit, it would mean I’d get a burger without the bun, for example. If you need a bagel/pizza/some pasta, you’re much better off opting for a whole wheat version. While I suggest alternatives, I have to be honest and say I almost never had any of these over the past 9 months – like maybe 3 bagels, 4 slices of pizza and 3 pasta dishes. These were very hard to give up but I truly believe it made a huge difference. A lot of this thinking relates to the Glycemic Index, which in a nutshell deals with how much energy it takes your body to process the food you eat. Something like wonder bread is very high on the GI – it will cause your blood sugar to spike and then it will fly through your digestive system, leaving you hungry soon after. Whole grain bread is low on the GI – it takes your body more time/effort to process it, keeping you satiated longer, etc… Other examples of Low GI foods: yams, grapefruits, brown rice.
“Avoid what you know is bad for you” – pretty basic. When you can get the fries or a salad with the burger, get the salad. Nachos aren’t good for you. Avoid them. Beer is a ton of empty carbs and calories. I dodn’t all of a sudden stop loving beer, though so I would opt for Miller Lite when possible. I also tried some more gin and tonics and vodka and soda, etc…
“Watch out for trick food” – there are a few things that can be deceptively unhealthy that could potentially undermine your efforts, like granola, which is often packed with sugar. Fruit juice is another. You think: “All I drink is orange juice – I’m a Vitamin C machine!”. Juices are LOADED with sugar. If you want fruit (which you should), you’re better off eating the actual fruit in its most fruity form. Something you have to learn to do is read nutritional labels. Yes its boring and lame but you can really learn a lot about the food that’s around you which leads me to…
“Eliminate High Fructose Corn Syrup and Trans Fats” – which are like the crack of the processed food industry, only if crack made you really fat instead of skinny like Pookie in New Jack City. These two bastards are in everything. Take a moment and go through your pantry and see. You’ll feel a little sense of betrayal when you find out something you like, and could swear was “healthy” is laced with them (Carr’s crackers, I hardly knew you!). Karen and I went through the pantry and tossed everything that contained these two and from then on were conscious of the new things we bought. It’s hard enough getting yourself to eat the “right” things. Getting rid of these hidden crap will help you out a lot.
“It doesn’t have to be all or nothing” – a lot of diets tell you to have you control what you eat every day (say a 9 on a scale od 1-10 of restrictiveness) and then allow you to have a day where you totally go nuts (a 2 on that same scale). Personally I found myself more successful by hanging around the 7-8 most of the time and sprinkling in meals around 4-5.
“Stop drinking soda” – I think saying that drinknig regular soda and trying to lose weight should go without saying but you are also much better off with water (lots of it) or seltzer water than you are even with diet soda. I hated water. It tastes like… water. At home, I’d keep a bottle of lemon juice handy and give a little squirt into a glass of water or seltzer. I actually grew to love seltzer. Flavored seltzer even more. Ultimately I would always have seltzer on hand at home and I’d throw in a “splash” (literally) of juice – cranberry, cider, etc… – to give it a little flavor.
“Get going with some excercise” – that doesn’t mean you’re expected to go out and run a 10K. You can start small, in fact, you SHOULD start small. Diet goes a very long way to getting in shape but diet + excercise is will get you where you want to be faster. Make an effort to chart your progress (more on that later) and make sure you’re progressing – continue to raise the difficulty. Our bodies are very good at adapting to changes and that can be seen in how we they are very quick to find the most efficient way to complete the (physical) task at hand. That means, for example, that if you run a 5K 3 days a week for a month, by the end of the month your body will be better at running the 5K. The added efficiency results in your body burning fewer calories doing the same activity. Use this to your advantage and switch up your routine every 4-5 weeks. If you’re running more than you lift weights for 5 weeks and then lift weights more than you run or if you’re runing for distance, switch it up and run some higher intensity interval runs.
“If you fall off the horse, get back on” – I say this as someone who was very suceptible to feel really crappy after doing really well for days and then having a “hefty” night: don’t worry about it and just pick up where you left off. You’re supposed to have fun! You can do both – just becareful to avoid the benders though. The further you get from where you want to be, the harder it is to get back.
“Think long term” – It’s easy to get discouraged if the weight doesn’t come off. The rate at which you lose weight fluctuates greatly. Sometimes it comes off in bunches, sometimes you can go a month without a real change in poundage. If you know you’re eating/excercising the way you should, you have to develop teh confidence that if you keep doing things right, you’ll eventually see results. As corny as it sounds, I think looking at it as a “diet” can be terribly detrimental. Not only does diet imply deprivation (which is not a viable long term option) but if you are trying to get healthier/lose weight, if you think about it as a change in lifestyle, the results will come. I used to always think about how long it took to put the weight on – you can’t expect it to come off overnight. The good (refreshing) news is that it actually does come off faster than it goes on.
As I’ve always been a fan of stats of all kind, I wanted to pick a few things to track so I could see how they affected weight and weight loss. I would first set up an excel spreadsheet to track the following things:
Daily Weight: I decided to weigh myself every day at the same time (first thing in the morning works well) but not get focused on the day to day changes as I found that your weight can jump anywhere from .5 – 4 pounds in one day based on a variety of factors: water weight, time of last meal, etc… Instead, I decided to also track the 7 day moving average and follow that instead of the daily changes. While weighing yourself every day might seem a little much, it really goes a long way to preventing you from really falling off the wagon badly and potentially deep sixing any progress you might have just made. Check out the spreadsheet to see some other stats I’d track. [ my excel spreadsheet can be found here. it was loosely based on Jeremy Zawodny's ]
Excercise: This one was pretty straightforward. I would make sure to mark down what excercise I did (“5K” or “25 min. cardio + 30 min. weights” or “softball” – see spreadsheet for specifics)
Food I Probably Should Not Have Eaten: A lot of people recommend keeping a food diary and writing down everything you eat. I’m not disciplined enough for that so I decided to track the times I didn’t eat well to see how that might affect my progress. This would include things like “5-6 beers after softball game. ate 2 slices of pizza on the way home.”
Even if you don’t think you’re going to go back and analyze every little detail after the fact, I found that actually writing these things down just make you more cognizant of what you’re trying to do.
Something I wish I had done
Taken photos: The Excel sheet goes a long way into giving you tangible proof of your progress and was a good thing to check out when I needed a little extra motivation but nothing makes you feel better than seeing pictures.
Here are a couple of pictures that I’m considering “before” photos. It’s actually hard to imagine a more unflattering photo to have than the first one. Trying to catch the ball was inadvertantly a good way to make sure there was no sucking in going on. The one on the right is there to serve as a close up.
Before…
After…
The first photo was taken on our honeymoon in Kauai (representing dodgeball outside the continental US!) and the second was from Karen and my wedding in September.
What’s next?
While I have surpassed my initial goal of losing 30 pounds, I am shooting inch my way down to 200 pounds by the end of the year (as of 10/5/2006 I’m at 209). I think if I keep it steady with excercise 3-4 times a week, I should be able to get down there. I think the only thing that could stop me is the oncoming holiday feasting.
Karen and I have decided to put a team together to run Hood to Coast next August in Portland. This was something I would have had a VERY hard time doing last year and even though I’ve never run more than 4-5 miles in one go, I’m going to train over the next 9 months in hopes of being able to run 3 legs in 36 hours totalling around 15-18 miles.
In other exciting news, Karen gave me a super cool new iPod Nano and Nike+ kit for my 30th birthday that I plan to use to train for the race over the next year and try to get myself in shape to get my run on, long-distance style. A review of that glorious little system ins on deck.
Final Stats through 9+ months of work
Starting Weight – January 1: 252 lbs
Weight on June 15th: 211 lbs (30×30 achieved!)
Weight on September 9th (Wedding Day): 210 (42 lbs)
Weight on October 11th (9 months later): 208 (44 lbs)
Pants size went from 38 to 34.
A few random nuggets from the past 9 months…
- Men’s Health Magazine is a great resource of easily digestible (ha!) information that just makes you more aware of things as you move through your day that, in a pinch, might help you decide the lesser of 2 fast foods, etc… Also, their forums are good place to read about other people’s experiences.
- many times over the past 9 months I’ve found myself wanting to know the nutritional contents of varying foods and found that Calorie King was invaluable.
- One person’s experiences I read about halfway through 30×30 was Jeremy Zawodny’s account of how he lost 50 pounds last year.
- a few good health/fitness blogs who’s RSS feeds I subscribe to:
That’s Fit
Uncommon Body
Diet Blog
{ 3 comments }
to think i saw this whole thing unfold. alex and i can be nerds about this kind of thing – “do you know how much fat is most salad dressings?!”, fortunately we tend to keep that talk limited to the IM space (and the nail salon).
i’d like to say i jumped on the low-carb bandwagon very early and started learning the carb count on just about every food known to man, then i got all oprah and started gaining and losing weight b/c it turns out low carbing for a long period of time makes you binge on pizza for weeks after. it was fun to watch alex realize how much sugar was in the iced tea he liked so much.
then he became mr professional nutritionist, and i leanred about trans fats and all the delicious foods it contains. my girlfriend, carin, is health editor at redbook magazine and now even she’s sick of me and alex talking about all the good and bad fats, the good and bad carbs, proteins w/ all the essential amino acids – “NERDS, leave me alone!”
this kind of thing becomes an obsession and i can’t remember if alex mentioned this, but the one thing i learned from him was to stop counting calories, carbs, fats, etc, that’s just no way to live…
i think it’s time we wrote our OWN book featuring alex (i’ll ghost write..)
Awesome stuff. I’ve still got a ways to go but I’m looking at the 250 to 200 curve myself.
Also, go SLOPE.
Thsi is very cool. It’s a lot like something I just started doing. 250′s my goal myself. Glad to see that this ‘blogging for motivation’ thing works.
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