My Diet: Some Downsides

As you may know, I have been doing a diet for nearly a month now. I have lost 17 lbs so far. At the moment, it feels great. I have lost waist sizes, and I have more energy. My appetite is down, and I no longer feel hungry all the time.

It hasn’t always been this way.

When I first started the diet, I was eating nearly 3000 calories a day. I would eat five helpings of spaghetti at dinner, and I never ate salad. I was approaching 290 lbs.

What I did to start was to control my food intake, cause no amount of exercise is going to help me lose any weight if I don’t control my eating.

The first thing that I did was to get an app for my cell phone called “My Fitness Pal.” It is a calorie counter program. I entered my information; my height, weight, and how many pounds I wanted to lose. It then told me how many calories I was allowed to eat if I wanted to make my goal weight.

Now, I am nearly 34, so I know myself. I know that if I don’t hit this hard, I will lose motivation. I’m still working on the discipline thing. So I put down that I wanted to lose 2 lbs per week.

It gave me 1800 calories per day. That’s it. Before I decided to change my habits, I could eat that at lunch.

The following two weeks were some of the hardest days of my life. I discovered that a plate of pasta, just the noodles, was 500 calories. And I would eat three to five helpings of it.

My Discoveries

I discovered that grains are not my friend, they cost too much in calories. I also found that I can fill myself up with salad, pickles, cucumbers, cheese, and such, which would only cost me 500 calories.

My appetite has shrunk; which is a good thing. I no longer feel hungry if I don’t gorge myself. I no longer pine after the tasty delicious…

I do have my bad moments. The times that I make a mistake and eat waffles, which I discovered are 250 calories each, which I ate 5. Then I spent the latter half of the day hungry cause I really wanted to make my calories.

Hangry and not knowing what to Eat

I always thought that ‘Being Hangry’ was just a joke. That it was not a real thing. I discovered that it is a real thing. I also found that I get hangry bad. Those Snickers commercials have a grain of truth wrapped in them.

Another issue is I never know what to eat anymore. My go-to meal was always spaghetti, and I make a mean spaghetti. However, I overeat it. I can’t help it, I’m still a glutton after all. So the big issue is eating food that I love as much as spaghetti, that I can enjoy as much and not worry about consuming too many calories. 

Hope

There is hope, though. Find someone to do the diet with. To help fill out the daily food journal when you know it’s not going to be good and don’t want to deal with it. Find someone to encourage yourself to keep going, past the first few weeks. Past the Hangry stage.

Cause once past that stage, it gets easier. The appetite decreases, the energy goes up. Results start coming in.

I weighed in nearly a month ago at 286.5 lbs. Today I weight 269.5 lbs. I will take those results.

Future

Now, only changing my diet is not going to work in the long run. At some point, I will plateau and stop making gains. I have been making plans for more exercise. It is getting nice out, so more time walking around is in order. I have also pulled out my old rollerblades and plan on making a fool of myself on them. I am also going to be getting a bike at some point. Something that can fit in the limited storage space I have.

But that is all cardio, don’t you plan on gaining muscle? I have heard that a couple of times. And yes. I do. But, I plan to get down to a better weight first before I gain it back in the form of muscle. It is in the cards, however, not yet.

I will be in better shape by the end of the summer.

Cause, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Someone out there that inspired me but eludes my memory…

Perhaps I will do another blog post about my different mantras. It seems appropriate.

If you like what you are reading and wish to support me in my endeavours, please sign up to my newsletter, visit my Amazon Author Page and purchase one of my books. Or buy me a coffee. Your help and support are much appreciated.

My Diet: Reasons and Update

As you all may be aware, a little under three weeks ago I started my diet and the start of my lifestyle change journey. However, despite the flowery text, my journey has not gone very far. The results, however, have been good so far.

My ultimate plan is to lower my weight from 286 lbs down to 195 lbs. When I was a teenager, I tore ligaments in my knees. Luckily, I didn’t need surgery for it. However, my knees have been giving me issues lately. My doctor says that my weight is one of the causes of it. This isn’t surprising to me. My knees have been a constant source of problems for me since I was sixteen.

Reasons

This is one of the main reasons why I want to get into shape. Another is heart disease and other health issues. According to many health authorities in Canada, like the website Obesity Canada:

“Obesity is a progressive chronic disease, similar to diabetes or high blood pressure, which is characterized by abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that may impair health.”

This is a significant problem facing people today. We eat too many sugary foods. According to an article published in the New York Times on Sept. 12, 2016, the sugar industry shifted the blame of heart disease from sugar to fat. It claims that the sugar industry has influenced and is influencing the nutritional information that we consume. This can be seen by merely looking at the nutritional information on packaging. Most processed products are full of sugar. You can’t buy anything without having sugar in it.

According to an article in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, there is a substantial similarity between drug abuse and sugar consumption from the standpoint of what excess sugar does to the brain’s chemistry.

Update

As such, I have cut out all sugary drinks, and foods out of my diet. I’ve not gone as far as tearing the organic section of grocery stores apart for meals with no sugar added.

I have also cut serving amounts and started to count calories. The principle is calories in, calories out. I make sure that I eat just underneath the calories that I need. That means no more five plates of delicious, gorgeous spaghetti. No more late night cheese pizza. I’m eating more salad, more quinoa, and fewer carbs.

I have not purchased an expensive gym membership or a treadmill for my home. Unless the diet is looked at first, no amount of exercise will cause me to lose any weight. I have tried that way before.

So far in the last three weeks, using the simple changes in cutting calories, I have lost 15 lbs. I understand that my current method won’t get me to my end goal. I will have to switch things up and exercise more. To get down to 195 lbs, I will have to continue on the lifestyle change journey. 

I will discuss those other changes as they happen. As well as what works for me and what doesn’t.

There are also downsides to this diet, which I will talk about in other blog posts.

If you like what you are reading and wish to support me in my endeavours, please sign up to my newsletter, visit my Amazon Author Page and purchase one of my books. Or buy me a coffee. Your help and support are much appreciated.