Losing Weight

[jayfurr]

People who've been reading my livejournal or Facebook postings for a long time know the basic story: I weighed 210 the day I got married. I went off on my honeymoon, stinted at nothing, and came home weighing 224. I said "I'll soon lose THAT". Twelve years later I still do not weigh 210.

I got down to 217 when I attended the bicentennial meeting of the Demosthenian Literary Society in 2003, knowing that I'd be seeing folks I hadn't seen since 1988. But then other than that, my weight has generally hovered in the 230-235 pound range. This is the result of several factors:

• Traveling for work, staying in hotel rooms, eating a lot of restaurant food and room service.


• Not exercising 12 months a year -- I tend to be pretty active during warm weather and not so much at all during the long Vermont winters. No, I don't ski.


• Lack of commitment. I accepted weighing what I weighed, and deluded myself that by sucking in my gut I didn't look 'fat'.

Last year I began the biggest dip in my weight since 2003 when I started doing long training walks to get ready for the Washington, DC Breast Cancer 3-Day, a charitable event that calls on its participants to walk sixty miles in three days. You've got to do a ton of walking, and by a 'ton' I don't mean increasing your daily after-work stroll from a half mile to two miles. You need to be walking five to seven miles after work two or three days a week and then you need to be walking ten, twelve, and more miles on Saturday and again on Sunday. By a few weeks before the actual event you're supposed to try to do a 15-mile walk and an 18-mile walk on the same weekend.

So there I was doing all that and not really stopping to think about the effect all that would have on my weight, and one day I absent-mindedly climbed on a scale and went "huh?" when it read "226". I hadn't been below 230 in years, and I'd been at 235 or so when I started the walking. I hadn't really modified my eating habits, so that weight loss was almost certainly the result of the walking.

I got down to 217 again by the time the actual 3-Day weekend came around in October of 2008. I felt good -- I figured that I'd weigh even less after walking the sixty miles. Surprisingly, I put on weight during the event -- a ton of snacking on high-carb foods and drinking a ton of liquid, to say nothing of all the pounding I put my body through and all the water retention that resulted, had me tipping the scales at 222 when I got home.

November and December of last year were not proud months in my weight-reduction campaign. With cold weather and dark evenings and no 3-Day to prep for, I stopped the walking and saw my weight climb back up to the mid-220s. Disgusted at myself, I started walking at our local gym's indoor track, speed-walking five to six miles an hour, and bit by bit the weight dropped back off. One day the scale read "211" and I just about did cartwheels.

But then a lot of things happened and my weight rebounded AGAIN. I had a series of lengthy on-site training engagements added to my schedule and once back on the road I wound up eating a lot more than I should've. (If you've ever read or heard of the book "Mindless Eating" you know why this is the case: put an unlimited amount of food in front of most people and they'll keep on eating long after they're no longer hungry. When you get to expense all your meals and you spend a lot of time eating in restaurants where the portions are HUGE -- 2000+ calories for an entree, it takes a real effort of will not to eat and eat and eat and EAT. And once the 'clean your plate' habit gets formed, it's a hard habit to break.) And I came down with a rotten cold that lingered for over a month. And it rained CONSTANTLY whenever I was home in Vermont. I did NO exercise during that entire time. Surprise, surprise: one day I weighed myself and I was all the way back up to 225.

That was the final straw. And that brings us to the current moment and what I've decided to do about it all and why I believe now that I can get down to 210, and then once there, keep on going down until I'm ultimately at 195 or so. (195 would be the point at which a 6'2" male would no longer have a BMI in excess of 25.)

1. I'm getting back to doing lengthy training walks because I'm once again going to be walking in a Breast Cancer 3-Day. This time I'll be walking Philadelphia instead of DC, and this time, my wife Carole will be walking with me (as will my college friend Sandy Bryant), so I've got company on those training walks. We did a 13-mile walk in Stowe on Saturday, on a 90-degree, very humid day, and I wore a 20-pound weight vest and a ten pound hydration pack the whole way. I burned somewhere in the vicinity of 1700 calories. Burning 3000-3500 calories a week doing fast training walks is not only going to help in terms of absolute calorie burning but it SHOULD help kick my overall metabolism into a higher gear, or so I'm told.


2. I've 'put my money where my mouth is' by setting up a weight reduction 'contract' on StickK.com. Stickk is a site that lets you set a personal goal like losing weight, stopping smoking, etcetera and then has you enter a financial penalty that you'll face if you fail to make that goal. Research shows that weight loss 'bets' between friends or co-workers or family members can be much more effective than other methods of losing weight because of the competitive aspect, to say nothing of the desire to avoid enriching a snarky co-worker by letting him outdo you in weight reduction.
   
   Stickk allows you to choose a monetary amount and a recepient that gets the money if you fail to make your goal: it can be a specific person, a charity (Stickk picks the charity if you elect that option, to avoid the possibility of you deciding 'aw, heck, I'll just give up, the money will go to my favorite charity anyway'), or an ANTI-CHARITY. An anti-charity is an organization that you HATE. THEY get your money if you don't make your goal. I chose to go the anti-charity route and I chose, out of the list provided, the George W. Bush Presidential Library.
   
   My commitment contract, which you can see here, specifies that I lose 100 dollars every time I miss my goal for the week. I've got a ten-week bet going in which I have to get from 224 pounds to 210 pounds, so each week's goal is a further 1.4 pounds reduction. Since they took my credit card info the day I made the contract, if I don't report success each week, or if I fail to report in at all, shooooooooop goes the money right out of my bank account. My wife Carole is serving as my StickK referee and trust me, she'll KILL me if I cost us hundreds of dollars by pigging out at a buffet somewhere.


3. Last, I've found a calorie-tracking website, Daily Plate, whose interface I really like and which seems to have just about every consumable product, plus many many home-made recipes, in its database. I can enter the food I eat and the beverages I drink from a web browser or from my smartphone and know that the site will total up my calories, fat, fiber, protein, carbohydrates, and so on for the day, week, month, year, etcetera. It tells me how many calories I have consumed each day and tells me how many calories I have left in my daily calorie budget if I'm to stick to my goal of losing X pounds per week. And I can make all this public, so y'all can SEE what I'm eating.
   
   Want to see? Take a look: http://www.livestrong.com/thedailyplate/diary/who/jayfurr/ The layout is even nicer when you're viewing your own 'plate' -- the food shows up grouped into meals and you can designate what foods make up frequently consumed meals to speed data entry.
   
   I'm a bit compulsive at times and I frankly think it'll be a godsend to know that if I'm sitting in an airport club at O'Hare in Chicago and there's all sorts of snacks for club members to snack on, each one of those snacks that I give in and eat is going to have to go into my calorie count on Daily Plate or it'll be, my God, INACCURATE. And I can leverage that compulsion to my benefit -- it makes me actively think about each thing I eat rather than just saying "oh, one or two won't hurt me." As the book Mindless Eating demonstrated, very few people STOP at one or two.
   
   Furthermore, I was actually pretty damn surprised (although obviously I shouldn't have been) when I looked up some things that I routinely eat when I go out for dinner with Carole on the nights I'm home and don't feel like cooking. That meal where I order the Friendly's buffalo chicken tenders platter and a sundae? Don't even ask how many calories that is. More than I need for about a day and a half, and that's just for one meal. Add in the calories from the little impulse snacks, from the breakfasts and lunches where I eat more than I really was hungry for, and I was probably getting 4000 calories each day when 2000 would have been fine and less would have been even better.
   
   I think the Daily Plate site will seriously help keep me honest. Before now, I was like a kid with a checkbook or credit card that he never balanced, who just kept on spending. Now that it'll be so damn easy to track not just calories, but ALL the nutritional information from the food I eat, and I won't have to estimate (incorrectly) how many calories something contains, I think I'll be able to stick to my caloric goals and avoid... well, mindless eating.

I might mention, as well, that I've been successfully sticking to a vegetarian (but not vegan) diet since mid-July and that's also helping. I can't give in to eating whatever's set in front of me and I'm eating a lot more vegetables. But it's possible to gain weight on a vegetarian diet if you pig out, and that's where the other points, above, will really be critical.

But in the final analysis, the key thing is that all this is going to be public, assuming anyone cares to watch. I can't make a brave noise about going on a diet and then totally blow it off after a week, as many people do. I'm going to track every damn thing I eat, and all the exercise I do, and if I don't stick to the plan, well, the George W. Bush Presidential Library's going to be the beneficiary.

Feel free to be my harshest critics about all this. I need the motivation.

Comments

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

I went to a low-carb, high-fat, mostly carnivorous diet about 15 months ago. Lost 75 pounds so far.

[flaviarassen.livejournal.com]

My pain medication (teeth) is only allowing me to make one coherent comment: BMI charts are not always accurate. They told me I was too thin (135)for years, and only when I actually got chunky (155) did all of them tell me that I was what I should weigh. Granted, I would actually like to be closer to 145 (at my age now, I would look too gaunt in the face at my old weight), but the BMI charts do not all agree that I should be. They are even worse for The Hubby (tm), who would be positively skeletal at the eight they say he should be.

[jayfurr.livejournal.com]

Rev: Of course that works for you. You're a yeti. Me, I'd get bored eating massive quantities of meat and little else.

Flavia: you're 100% correct. If I recall correctly, a strict BMI interpretation would have us believe that Michael Jordan was obese during his playing days. The BMI doesn't take into account what percentage of the mass is muscle and what's fat.