Losing Weight

Couple of the bloggers I read either lost weight or are trying to lose weight.

If you been following Kim you know that you’d been taking is Ozempic for health reasons as well as weight loss, and now having lost the weight is being kept on for maintenance reasons, which is quite a bite out of his income.

Filthy is decided to drop some ballast as well and is suffering just like I did when I started.

Get a load of this:

Man what a fatass!

That was well before I decided to start trying. I’m guessing 275-280 there.

The best way, of course, is to control your diet. One of my brothers was having a discussion about losing weight with his doctor, who said much the same thing. He told him that how many calories you lose in a half-hour on an elliptical? 250? You can wipe that out with a handful of chips and a beer or two.

How about not eating or drinking that stuff to start with?

So that’s how I started. Herself and I signed up for Slim4Life. I decided early on it was bullshit and I wasn’t going to buy a bunch of their expensive snacks. I wasn’t going to eat their expensive supplements. But the forms they use, and the handbook they have, is worth putting up with them with them for a week or two. They sign you up and give you a plan. There are certain things that you’re not supposed to eat while you’re in your initial loss phase. From what I recall, since I didn’t keep the book around, I was on plan four, so I couldn’t have cheese or beans, and all list of other sort of things. Nothing earf shattering. No dairy I think. Certainly no sugar and certainly no alcohol.

I lost 9 pounds the first week just not drinking.

They had you keep track of what you ate on a pretty easy to use sheet. I don’t remember what most of the entries were, but they were categorized as protein, vegetable, high glycemic… That sort of thing.

I do remember that I got three servings of a high glycemic food per day. That would be half a cup of rice, a slice of bread, half a large baked potato (or a small one), and I forget how much pasta. Basically, if you had a sandwich for lunch then you might only be able to have half a cup of rice with your dinner.

The serving sizes and number of servings were pretty easy to remember.

In no time I lost about 35 pounds.

And then I decided slowly to indulge once again. A mistake. The idea is when you got down your target weight you would start introducing the disallowed foods one by one to see how your body reacted with them. I just jumped back. I got this, after all.

So for a few months I hovered around 230 to 245 or so. Eventually I picked up a walk in the afternoon, in addition to walking the dogs, and then added biking. But alcohol was thwarting a lot of my progress. Still, I lost enough weight to start attempting to run again. I’d run up and down my alley four times every other day. At first it was rough. But soon enough I was hovering in the 220 neighborhood. After Herself left, I stopped drinking altogether, and became more diligent about my exercise.

That’s when my weight started plummeting. Also, since I didn’t cook dinner very much, and still don’t, I caloric intake was much easier to manage.

Basically my diet went some like this (and still does):
In the morning I’ll eat eggs and some sort of meat like bacon or sausage. I’ll have a piece of toast, and maybe a mandarin orange or a few strawberries. That keeps me to early afternoon. Then have a salad of some type. The days I don’t feel like making a salad, I’ll go to salad & go, or Chick-fil-A and get a salad.

Then, I eat a normal dinner. Sometimes. Last night, it was steak and a baked potato, tonight with the girl it will probably be fajitas or salmon. We both eat pretty light. Some might say I eat like a chick.

You can get an app to track your calories. I use tap and track, but there are plenty. The good ones have restaurant entries. Put in your parameters and then record what you eat. You’ll see pretty quickly what foods are high caloric, such as cheese, nuts, any snack food. You’ll learn that you don’t want to blow your budget on something that’s not going to fill your guts.

I went back onto the app and tracked a typical day for me, Then I did one for the girlfriend’s son to show her how many calories an adult male needs. On a typical day I’ll eat somewhere in the neighborhood of 1800 or 1900 cal. 2000 is a benchmark for normal man. And that measurement included some sort of indulgence, like some chocolate, or fancy coffee drink. It doesn’t include the many calories I burn biking for an hour, or running for an hour.

It’s really stupidly easy. It just takes discipline.

And this has been the payoff:

So go for it. I’m 60 years old, and I dropped around 85 pounds over a year and a half or so. Lost over 6″ from my waist, dropped from 2XL to L. Not seen are my now mid range A1C, better heart function, and all the good stuff health brings like better stamina and strength. For the first time in my life, you can see veins in my hands and arms.

If a slob like me can do it, you certainly can.