The summer after the seventh grade, Middle School Stan was tired of being made fun of for being fat. From a fairly young age, kids – even his close friends – called him “Stan, Stan – the big, fat man.” This happened even though he wasn’t that overweight, by most standards. But kids are brutal, and the criticisms kept flying.
Fortunately, rather than pushing Stan to despair, it pushed him to action. So that summer, he stopped taking “seconds” at meals, cut back on sweets, started drinking diet drinks and water, and made (at least to a 13 year old) some major diet shifts. It worked. When he went to school in the eight grade, people who hadn’t seen him that summer (or on Facebook, since, you know, we were still using AOL Instant Messenger via our Netzero dial up internet back then) could barely recognize him.
Fast forward 16 years to 2015. I found myself in a similar predicament but one I thought would be much more difficult to overcome. I weighed 20 lbs more than I did when I got married and 30 lbs more than I did in college. And that number was growing, even though I was exercising at every opportunity and was eating a bunch of “healthy” stuff that I didn’t really like all that much. The thought crossed my mind, maybe this is what life will be from now on – uncontrollable, unending weight gain.
Thank God I was wrong.
I decided to do some research (I’ll talk about this another time), and this research led me to make several simple yet effective diet changes:
- I cut out bread almost 100% and other carbs as much as I could (within reason) – even complex carbs.
- Ditto for sugar, especially sugary drinks.
- I focused my diet on getting my calories from protein and fiber, especially eggs, chicken, lentils, and beans.
- I cut out beer and limited wine intake to primarily cabernet sauvignon.
- I limited snacks to nuts and (occasionally, in moderation) cheese.
- Oh yeah, guacamole. I ate guac whenever I could.
My goal with making these changes was to get down to my marriage weight without having to change my exercise routine. Instead I got down to my college weight in about 3 months.
“But how much were you exercising?” you ask. Roughly 30 minutes a day 3 days a week (but not with any true consistency, due to schedule fluctuations). So yeah, barely enough to even work up a sweat. If I added exercise to the equation, I would’ve lost at least another 5-10 lbs, and this is something I plan to do in the future (and hopefully track it on this blog!).
“But how little were you eating?” you query. Let me put it this way – if I was hungry, I ate. I don’t believe in diets where you have to be hungry. To me, that’s a degree away from anorexia. And you’ll be shocked once you’re pulling calories from protein and fiber how easily your body metabolizes them. (As a side note, I frequently had major stomach pains prior to changing my diet, and these pretty much disappeared after I made the above changes.)
“But how much weight did you put back on after you stopped the diet?” Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere. For starters, my “diet” was more than a temporary change to lose weight. When I first started, I was stricter than I am now, but I still adhere to a lot of the fundamentals of the diet in an effort to just be healthier and not put junk into my body. And it’s been great. I have more energy, less stomach pain, and I pretty much eat as much meat as I want. And when I cheat a few times during the week, it doesn’t impact me. At my lowest point, I weighed in at 154 lbs, and last check I was at 156. Since it’s normal for your body to fluctuate a few pounds here or there, I haven’t practically gained back anything.
Now this may not work for everyone, and you have to be careful to make sure you get all the nutrients you need for the day, but the bottom line is that losing weight seemed like scaling a mountain and ended up being more like a stroll in the park.