Note how I actually look kinda alright with a guitar (it's actually his squire telecaster- it's in horrible need of a setup, very high action!). Hopefully it's obvious this isn't a 285 pound guy here. Nope.
So in between the last blog post in June 2018 and now, I've lost ~30 pounds. Easily the most weight I've lost since 2007 when I did nutrisystem; I'm the lightest I've been since 2008. I'm even approaching my marriage weight.
I had forgotten that I had waxed poetic in a LONG screed about what I was doing in terms of my diet and exercise. Well, I've had (sustained!) success now, but was it doing the stuff I talked about?
Sorta?
Looking back, I was mostly right in that post. Going to some form of OG Atkins was the key. However if you read that post closely, you can see I had given up on the idea of being very low carb, but not because of efficacy. It was because I was worried about side-effects. I was convinced that being low carb meant heart palpitations and anxiety symptoms. The plan then was to sort of hover in a moderate low carb realm, about 150 or so per day.
So what happened?
Well, I tried doing this in June. Looking at my health app, I averaged 195 carbs per day, so not as succesful as I'd like, but still lower than a SAD diet.
I also upped the ante on exercise. Like May, I run 5ks and just plan ran on the regular. I even had a 15k step day that month. I did bodyweight training also.
I lost no weight at all.
Well darn. Still eating too much. I averaged 2181 calories per day (remember: 6'1" man). Huh.
I'll get em' in July! Still did all that exercise. Averaged 200 carbs per day, and pushed the calories down to a daily average of about 2090 or so.
I gained a couple pounts that much. 282. Just a few pounds away from my high in January, and the year was more than half over.
I was pretty pissed off. But, strangely, I wasn't filled with feelings of hopelessness this time. I think it was due to a few factors.
I was really inspired by Kent Altena, because he was a guy that lost a ton of weight, gained it all back, and proceeded to *lose it all again.* He was also older than me, so I couldn't use the excuse of "well he's young and its easier."
A second inspiration was a coworker who wasn't really fat in my opinion but who was looking to lean out even more than he was. His discipline and slashing carbs and really sticking with it was inspiring. And it worked. He got as lean as he wanted.
ANOTHER coworker's wife had a baby. When he came back from paternity leave, he was noticeably slimmer. Yep, low carb again.
Plus, back in January, it was working. Not fast, but it was working.
Finally, I realized that I was only really doing low carb by "reputation." I went and found a pdf of Atkins and read a good bit of the original book. In my last blog post, I mentioned some things about the original Atkins diet so it seems like I was reading that book back in June. The big revelation was limited, yes, LIMITING fat, not necessarily like you would on a low fat diet, but not going crazy either.
So in August I reapplied myself to low carb in earnest. Some differences from my January attempt: I was very careful about nuts and dairy, especially nuts.
More importantly, I was far stricter with carb consumption. In my first attempt, I landed around 50-70 carbs per day. In this attempt, I tried hard to stick to 20 carbs a day, AS PER THE ACTUAL ATKINS BOOK!
Immediately I dropped five pounds, the lovely "whoosh" effect where you drop water weight fast. Well guess what kids, that DID NOT HAPPEN in all my other diet attempts in 2018. I had resigned myself to never getting that satisfying initial blast of weight loss ever again in my life, so this was the initial success I needed. It pushed me out of the 280's which was a great early goal.
However, I also had a trip to LA with my employer on the calendar. Travel is a destroyer of worlds for a diet, but I stuck with my diet for the most part. Note for the "most" part. I allowed myself alcohol and one amazing dipping ramen meal in Little Tokyo.
But that was it, and I IMMEDIATELY slammed on the brakes on the carbs, and when I weighed myself again a couple of days later, I lost another two pounds. Ok, now we're cooking.
The next big challenge was a trip to visit family in September. I had intended to be a good boy but once faced with hometown favorites I pretty much ATE LIKE A MADMAN POSSESSED. But, once again, I slammed on the brakes the moment the trip was over (a week), and once I weighed myself again (a week later), I only gained .5 pounds. Ok! Great! Totally acceptable!
As the days progressed, the weight loss slowed (as I expected) but I was in the upper 260's by my birthday (October 2). This was a major milestone since the 260's was a weight "zone" I had only occasionally dipped into since 2008. So whenever I get there, it feels good, especially since my dream forever and ever was to get back into at least the 250's. Being in the 260's means you aren't that far off.
The next major goal was to get under 263, because 263 was the lowest weight I had achieved since 2008 (I did this in 2013). Birthday week in October and a visit from a friend in early November were both events that caused me to go off-plan (and eat ALL THE CARBS I love in the bay area), which is understandably going to slow progress. However, on Christmas Eve I got a nice little gift with a couple pound loss to get to 262-ish (can't remember the fraction).
Now I had lost over 20 lbs, gotten to a low weight I hadn't achieved in years. But more important than that, I had:
1. MAINTAINED modest weight losses for months, instead of fasting for days at a time (yes, I've done that) to hit those weights for one precious day, to just viciously rebound.
2. Controlled the symptoms of nervousness by being smarter about mineral intake (more on that later).
3. Yet still cheated (more on that later also!) and even had vacations and multi-day stretches where I ate enormous amounts of carby food. The key, though, is slamming on the brakes hard.
Unfortunately I then really did the dumbest thing since August, I allowed myself way, way too much "off time" from the diet: Christmas Day all the way until January 1st, a full week, most of which was spent on a vacation to Las Vegas. Going from "famine" to "feast" I ate ridiculously, to the point of feeling sick half the time. Still, I slammed on the brakes and thought I did well, but I regained six pounds. Mostly water weight? Sure. But demoralizing. I had low carbed strictly (20 carbs per day) for ten days to get off that vacation weight and was rewarded with a huge gain in weight.
Fortunately, I stuck with it, and that water weight came off, at long last, at the end of the month. So being careless at the end of the year cost me the entire month of January! However, since I had already achieved a small measure of success, I did not give up like I might have in the past. I knew I had something working, and just needed to get back to it.
February and March were about getting into the 250's. This took awhile since in any diet you have to make adjustments.
In late 2018, I would lose weight on about 2000 calories. Well, as you lose weight, that number goes down. I started pushing to be around 1500-1800 calories per day. Boom, just the trick. But I also had some other work stressors and other things going on that made things hard, but I also had no major cheat "zones" (like vacations and multi-day off plan times). Finally, on March 13th I did it. I hit 258, and finally hit that long coveted area of the 250's.
Since then, I have gotten down to 254, despite big work stress and even a cheat day or two in the past 4 weeks. But, I've also been able to push a little harder to get calories AND carbs down, 1500-1800 calories and no more than 20-30 carbs per day.
But again, even more important is the maintenance component. People at my work have frankly lost more weight than me. but I've kept my weight down since August, instead of yo-yo'ing up and down. I've been at weights I haven't sniffed in a decade and spent *months* at those weights.
As far as practical effects, I now wear size 38 jeans, as opposed to size 42. My clothes are now universally comfortable, instead of having a few comfy shirts (they are all now comfy shirts- basically I truly fit in XXL shirts now, instead of "mostly" fitting in them). I do note that I get by on less sleep, probably because the sleep I get is higher quality (wife would always say that I had some kind of sleep apnea based on snoring and so forth. No doubt this is getting better as the weight goes down). Mostly though, it's having this incredible piece of mind that I am actually on the right path, this isn't hopeless, and I can do this. That is GOLD. That is EVERYTHING. The hopelessness and despair that this problem can engender is a yoke I wouldn't wish on anyone.
So why in the world is this working when in early 2018 it failed?
1. READ THE BOOKS. LEARN STUFF. Yeah sure, everyone knows low carb is ditching bread/rice/sugar. But I was ignorant of some stuff.
Salt: Yeah, I wasn't getting anywhere near enough. I used to just pinch some in my fingers, thinking this was a quarter teaspoon. Well, I actually *used* a quarter teaspoon measuring spoon and yep, I was taking in *far* less salt than I needed (5000-7000 mg of salt is what folks recommend). When you have a mineral deficiency (which is common in low carb because your body pees it out as you lose water) you get... yep, nervous. Anxious. Heart palpitations. Getting enough salt didn't entirely take these symptoms away, but it did greatly help, to the point where I could stand doing the diet. I don't supplement salt anymore- frankly, I've adapted (took FOREVER) and I don't feel bad anymore. I do take magnesium and a multi-vitamin in the morning.
2. I WASN'T LOW ENOUGH CARB. Yep, big difference in being 20-30 carbs per day and being ~70. There is a reason why the OG Atkins book says no more than 22 carbs.
3. The cheat days are pretty essential, but I spaced them out more as time went on. Cheat days help in a number of ways: you don't feel locked in a food prison beacuse you know you can eventually have a day in which you eat anything you want. They reset you hormonally so any kind of weird leptin resistance thing can get reset. The symptoms of being low carb are relieved for a bit. However, as I've gone on with this, I realized I had to go ideally 15 days in between cheat days, it not longer (my record is something like 22-23 days low carb with no cheats).
4. Intermittent fasting absolutely plays a role.
While IF alone has not worked for me, IF with low carb has been great. Typically I fast furing the day and eat in the evening. I'll sometimes (but not always) eat breakfast, but even if I do, that's a fasting window from 7am until 7pm, a 12 hour fasting window. On low carb IF is easier than when you are eating SAD. It has been a great tool to suppress calories.
5. Count EVERYTHING.
Yeah, I'm a believer in this. Get the lose it! app and count count count. Carbs and calories. You need to see the data, you shouldn't guess, and the phone app makes it almost comically simple to track things.
What about exercise?
Yeah, about that. I walk, sometimes, and not as much as I should. I do think my surge in guitar playing gives me a "better than just typing at a computer" level of activity that's helped. But really not much more than that. I do think exercise can help (in fact there have been some days where I haven't been totally on-target with the diet because I was at a work conference or whatever, but I had a high level of activity on those days and they didn't seem to hurt me). But all-in-all, exercise has not been a big part of this. I'm not opposed to it- especially walking which I genuinely enjoy. But look: I have coworkers that do insane bootcamp things and I've lost roughly the same amount of weight as them. Except the boot camp approach is silly and unsustainable.
One last note, and a word of hopefulness for anyone reading this.
It. Takes. A. Long. Time. To. Figure. This. Out. Here I am, finally sustaining and maintaning weight loss, but I've been trying to do this since 2008, and it's 2019 now. There have been a zillion life events I would have loved to have been 254 for, but I failed despite desperately wanting that. Failure is the norm when it comes to this. You can't just "quit food," and your body has mechanisms to maintain equillibrium. But, as I have worked hard to discover, there are ways to kick into gear your body's "slimming" protocols: they do exist.
But, and I can't stress this enough: what works for me may not exactly work for you. I was absolutely the right idea in January 2018. The difference between what I was doing then and what I did in August wasn't huge at all. 30-50 grams less carbs. More salt. Welp, that was all the difference, it turned out, between this thing working and failing. Know that you may need to tweak in all kinds of ways for your circumstance.
One other note. With diets, it is easy to take for granted how extreme your daily life might seem if you've gotten used to it. I've gotten completely used to eating almost no carbs all the time, turning down all special work food, etc. I don't complain or even feel bad about it.
I was chatting with another coworker about this and I remember what she told me: "it is really admirable what you are doing with not eating carbs, but I can't do that." That really struck me. Here is a thing that obviously works (at my employer, there has been probably 150 lbs of weight lost between the low carbers in the office), yet this person can't imagine themselves doing it "cause whatever?" This is not meant to be judgy: Not one tiny bit. It just made me realize how extreme this diet seems to people who haven't gotten used to it. So if that is you, please, PLEASE believe me: it is DOABLE. Not just doable, but ENJOYABLE. Yes, OF COURSE you will miss your favorite carby foods sometimes. Yes you WILL get BORED sometimes. But it is also pretty darn palatable. There is a lot of variety in low carb, and yes, I fully and 100% advocate making yourself low carb treats to get you by. Yes, those can be dangerous (the hyper palatibility factor kicks in, and you can overeat), but if making some kind of low carb imitation of cookies/cake/etc. is what is going to keep you on plan one day, well, great. Better to have a day where you end up eating 300-400 more calories than you should than to just BLOW UP THE WHOLE THING.
Final final final note. My old friend Eric would have just loved to read this, and it fills me with pride that I finally am accomplishing something he pushed me to do for years (with lots of good natured kidding about my fatness). I am essentially doing the very first thing he ever suggested I do: cyclic keto, more or less, just customized to fit me as a person. I miss him so much and if he can look down on me in Heaven (I'm a Christian but I'm not actually sure if people in Heaven know or care about us here on earth. My Catholic friends are more sure about it though!) he might say something like:
"Finally you took my advice. Now get Jason a sandwich."
