dieting – Atomic Slingshot Press

Dealing with Failure

So my bid to lose weight has failed.

And failed hard. I’m back to 278lbs.

It’s not as bad as before at 286lbs, but it is getting there. It’s only a matter of time.

So whenever I fail at something, I do an autopsy on the situation. A court of inquiry on what happened.

Cause failure is a big part of life. We are humans, we are going to fail more times than we succeed. It’s inevitable.

So the question remains, how did I gain back over 10lbs from my low at 264lbs?

It’s simple, really. I stopped counting calories. Counting calories added time to make my food. The apps used are more suited to people who make individual meals instead of a meal for a family of four. It’s hard to keep things accurate when dishing out a bowl. I ended up guessing more times than I was correct.

After I stopped, it has become easier to eat second and fourth helpings of food. In short, I have slipped back into my old habits.

So I need a better plan than counting calories. I just don’t know what to do yet.

Any suggestions?

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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.

Diets

So tonight I am going to talk about something completely different than normal. I am going to talk to you guys about keeping healthy while doing a sedentary job like writing a novel.

I spend my days sitting at a computer hacking away at work. Essentially I fly a desk. No field work for me. Which was how I kept in shape before I got out of field work.

I am 6 ft tall. According to the infamous Body Mass Index, I need to weigh in at 183 lbs. I normally weighed in on average 225lbs when I was in the field. It fluctuated wildly depending on what I was doing that week.

When I started flying desk at work I quickly went from the average 225lbs and then in two years I topped out at 275lbs. Ouch. Stretch marks and a big gut.

I started exercising and played around with my diet. But not much. I dropped to 269lbs in 4 months time. I eventually gave up and stopped going to the gym. My diet went back to what it was before.

So Feb. 1st of this year, my wife and I started what is called a Paleo Diet. Which, in a nut shell is cutting gluten, dairy, and additional sugar. We did it as a 28 day challenge.

That essentially means that we became vegetable loving carnivores for the month of February.

No sugar moved a lot of our staple foods out of our diet. Gluten did the same. Dairy was the easiest as I didn’t drink much milk before hand. I went a month without going to a fast food joint.

The results was amazing. I am now under 250lbs. Today I weighed in at 248 lbs. That is a change of 21lbs in a month. I look trimmer, have more energy than I did before. And I now drink my coffee black. That’s right. I have joined the crazy insane club of black coffee drinkers. A month of no sugar has essentially turned off my sweet tooth. I don’t crave pop or candy anymore. I may indulge one day, but it is one candy. I don’t pig out and drink an entire 2L of pop in a single sitting.

I added no exercise to my daily routine. The only thing that changed was my diet. That is it.

Am I a health professional? No. Far from it. This is just my experience. I got results. You may not. If you experience changes to your body as you write, you may have to make a lifestyle change. I did. I am happy for it.