A Post about Dieting

Since July 4, I have lost 39 lbs. I intend to lose about five more pounds (goal is about 152), but my goal is so close I can taste it! I’ll discuss the diet specifically at a later date.

Back in 1999, I fell off the end of the clothing rack at normal stores; I got too big for a 16. Since I had retained my shape over all, I hadn’t really noticed how huge I was until *nothing* in stores fit me. I found this so frustrating that I decided I needed to lose some weight. At that point, I weighed 220 lbs. I went off on a summer of backpacking and when I stopped 450 miles later, I weighed 209 lbs. Not much loss considering I *should* have been burning more calories than I could possibly be carrying. Obviously a diet was still needed.

I already knew that I have a huge appetite and that hunger was definitely going to be an issue for me, so I looked into every appetite suppressant there was. I ultimately went with Twin Labs Diet Fuel, which contained caffeine and ephedra. Ephedra has since been banned, but that stuff definitely worked. Late into the dieting I started to have blood sugar/mood crashes, but I’m not sure if that *was* the herbal speed or just my body fighting back against giving up the weight. Stimulants like this also have the ability to cause you to use calories very inefficiently, causing a bit more weight loss. The problem with them is that they have unpleasant side effects for some people and can cause addiction to them. I had no problem at all stopping use of this product.

For the rest of the dieting business, I took advice from The Hacker Diet. I like statistics, what can I say. I did try some of his suggested exercise plan, but ultimately, I did a LOT of brisk walking and a little bit of running. It’s what I enjoy the most, so I did it almost daily.

I started out eating 1200 calories for about 3 weeks. This involved eating a lot of fruit, at least for me. I decided that I simply could not keep that up, so I went to 1600. I think I did that for four months, maybe five. I got down to about 180 lbs., and I just couldn’t stand dieting any more, so I went up to 1800 calories for about a month. After that, I ate pretty normally, but I never lost the habit of weighing myself every day, so I kept most of that off with the occasional drops into the 170s on various diet schemes (I tried many, many of them) and floating up to 190 at the holidays. I could just cut back on beer, bread and fried foods and get back down to 180 lbs., so I maintained that weight for a long time.

Part of the reason I started to take seriously the idea that I had a problem with wheat gluten is that I stopped being able to just cut back and get the weight off. Also, I would gain more than 2 lbs. in 24 hours, which didn’t make a lot of sense. I also had secondary lactose intolerance, which was the ultimate reason I changed my diet so drastically last October. Anyway…

Now that I’m down to a normal BMI (I will wind up at about 23), I never, ever intend to diet again. As a successful dieter, here’s what I’ve learned over the years.

• There is no try. Do NOT fool around with weight loss. You have to fully commit to taking off the weight and KEEPING off the weight. If you allow yourself to gain weight back, it will likely be MORE weight than you lost. This is part of our metabolic programming and it’s designed to keep us alive through famines.
• Eating less and exercising does not work for most people, not for more than a few months, anyway. Only the most tenacious among us can actually get to a “normal” weight that way. Your losses *will* slow down, and you’ll have to cut calories more to keep losing at a reasonable weight. The numbers prove this – fewer than 10% of people can keep off the weight, yet over and over, this is what we are told to do.
• Exercise does not really help you lose weight. It might help your body prefer to burn fat instead of muscle, or it might not. Exercise makes people hungrier, so unless you can stick to a strict calorie count, you’re going to eat more if you exercise.
• All calories are not equal, at least not to your metabolism. Foods are actually burned in a lab to assess their calorie counts, but your body is *not* a Bunsen burner. It can use, store or excrete calories. This means that it can *waste* calories if it wants to, or it can store or burn every single calorie you eat. If you’re doing calorie reduction and you’re freezing cold all the time, your body is NOT wasting calories. Most people who are very thin but seem to eat a lot have a metabolism that wastes calories. One way to do this is through producing more heat. Another way is through excretion via inefficient digestion. This is another reason not to play at a reduced calorie diet – your system *learns* to be more efficient with it’s little ration, and this is why people gain more weight back than they lost.
• Weigh yourself every day and keep track of the number. A Wii Fit is great for this, but you can do it with a notebook and a digital scale, preferably one that does 1/10th, but at least one that does 1/5th of a pound. Let me say this again, louder: WEIGH YOURSELF EVERY DAY!!! Weekly weigh-ins are a total disaster, especially for women. Do NOT be afraid of the scale, but understand that you do not lose weight in a linear fashion.
• Do not weigh yourself more than once a day. Do it first thing when you wake up before you consume any coffee, water or whatever. Wear the same clothes or wear none, but that needs to be the same. The scale can be your friend, now and forever. You need the feedback, and you can find any problems much faster this way, before they get out of hand.
• You will need to weigh yourself every day, forever. Just accept it, and this is part of what I mean be not fooling around with weight loss. Modern clothes are incredibly forgiving and most have some stretch to them. Even your skinny jeans fit a lot tighter right after you take them out of the dryer than they do on a second wearing, and what if you don’t wear them every day? If you gain over X amount weight for whatever reason, you take action that day before it gets worse. Do not justify it for hormonal reasons and expect it to correct itself. I’m going to use 2 lbs. as my permitted fluctuation. Different things work for different people to drop the weight, and if you’re very tall, you might need to allow 2.5-3 lbs. If you’re over that, FIX IT NOW.
• You cannot expect to go back to eating the way you did before, no matter what way you choose to lose weight. That’s what got you fat in the first place. People whine that “but why can’t I eat like everyone else?” Who is everyone else? Thin people? Fat people? People who have naturally wasteful metabolisms (and we all know some and envy them!). Think like the thin person you are now, and don’t throw out all the work you did.

I’m not selling anything here, but since I don’t intend to diet again, I hate to throw away what I have learned. I will do a sort of review of the diet I’m using and some others as well, but not today. At the moment, I have some actual work to do.