How I lost fifty pounds while eating Burger King or Wendy's most days
How’s my resolution to keep writing in LiveJournal working out? Ha. Don’t worry, I’m about to make it up in volume. This is probably my longest post ever. This is what I’ve been up to for the past six months.
I avoided mentioning it, online or in person, for a long time, a) just in case I fell off the wagon and would look like an even bigger fool,and b) because I wanted to see when - and how - my friends would notice, on their own, without any prompting.
Shortly after my football season ended in December, I happened upon an interesting blog post from some novelist I've never heard of:
"How I lost 30 pounds while eating a donut every day"
It's a pretty good read if you're looking for motivation. As a geek, this guy went about it from a sensible and analytic perspective, an approach which appeals to me as well. He doesn't evangelize about any fad diet or alleged medical breakthrough. His is simply a story of fewer calories input. It's really that simple. There is no quick fix. Calories in minus calories expended; end of story.
This writer recommended a free phone app called LoseIt, which I downloaded and tried out. It's a calorie counting app. There are several other such apps out there, and they presumably work similarly. I picked this one simply because the blogger suggested it, and now I can recommend it in turn. It’s actually a web site; the app is just another interface for it. The app works without a data signal, which is nice.
To start, you simply enter your age/gender/height, your weight, your goal weight, and how aggressively you want to ramp downward. 2.0 pounds per week calls for too much austerity, while 0.5 would take eons. 1.0 is a number I've heard many dieting references quote as the rough limit to what you can lose sustainably. But since the app lets you choose all the way up to 2.0, that suggests to me that 1.5 is considered sustainable as well, at least by the app’s designers.
I wanted to lose 42 pounds. Why 42? Because that is the answer to life, the universe, and everything… but moreover, because that would get me one pound under my all-time adult low. That would be a sentimental victory. In order to arrive there by the start of preseason football in August, I had to go for 1.5 per week.
So you enter in your specs, and the LoseIt app runs whatever standard formulas the medical establishment and USDA endorse, and it tells you your calorie budget for the day. Then you enter in what you eat, and any exercise you get, and the counter decreases as you enter foods (or increases upon exercise). Exercise works like negative food. If you run far enough, you can buy yourself an entire small pizza, or a bunch of beers. Without exercise, though, those indulgences are hard to fit in.
The LoseIt app has a big database of foods. It’s stored locally on your phone, which makes it instant and convenient. It’s got store brand foods, menu items from restaurant chains, and generic items like “Beans, green, 1 oz.” You can enter data yourself, from, say, the nutrition label of a food that’s not in the database. If you just don’t know, you can just substitute something the app does know. Border Café tortilla chips become Tostitos. Absinthe becomes rum. The blood of unbaptized babies becomes Nestle Quik.
After entering just one meal, I knew I could keep it up without quitting. I knew I was all in.
For me, the key was making the process quantitative instead of qualitative. “Avoid fatty foods… exercise more… don’t drink too much… don’t order appetizers….” That foggy hand-waving advice is not effective. What worked for me was planning my meals with the quantitative knowledge that a Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Filet is 470 calories, their small chili is 220, an average beer bottle is 150, running 5 km will save me 535, and my budget for the day is 2114. A value like “628” is much more useful, much more actionable, than the vague concept of “less.” If you live your life trying to uphold the vague admonishment of “less,” you guarantee nothing. Whereas if you enter in your foods, and don’t lie to the app, and stay under your budget every day, You Will Undoubtedly Lose Weight.
In fact, I lost a lot more than those 1.5 pounds per week, on average. Either the app is using conservative math, or my living-and-breathing baseline expends more calories than the app estimates. I’m not complaining.
So the budget and formulas Will Work. You’re going to lose weight - if you don’t quit. That’s the hard part. It’s annoying to enter every meal every day without skipping. It’s tempting to lie by intentionally underestimating, say, the number of Doritos you just ate, two at a time every minute or two for 45 minutes. It sucks to restrict yourself to just one beer when you used to have three plus a shot. And it sucks to be hungrier than you’re used to. (I was afraid I’d be in a stomach-growling state for the first two weeks, but it lasted just three or four days, thankfully.) But I somehow got and kept religion about it. Again, the process becoming quantitative was what made the difference. Thoughts of “Oh, sure, why not have one more slice” are much easier to defeat when you know the quantitative severity of what you’re doing. “Try to do better and eat less” is once again unhelpful. After all, one extra slice is better than two extra slices.
Here’s what I’ve found and what I’ve decided:
• People say “You gotta let yourself relax once in a while, give yourself a vacation every ten days or so.” Nope! Even though it wouldn’t be the end of the world, I don’t ever break my daily budget unless I absolutely need to. (And if you have to wonder about it, then the answer is no, you don’t absolutely need to.) Look, one pound corresponds to about 3500 calories. For every pound per week, you are eating 500 calories per day below your maintenance level. So if you cheat by 500 calories one day, that’s not the end of the world. On a 1.5 slope, I could cheat by 500 calories every single day, and the worst that would happen is I lose 0.5 that week instead of 1.5. But here’s why you shouldn’t even do it once. If you declare occasional cheating acceptable, then that’s one more temptation you have to wrestle with every single day. For me at least, it’s so much easier to tame myself if I’ve declared cheating off the table entirely. The question of how best to allocate my scarce calorie budget is much easier than the challenge of not abandoning the budget in the first place.
• People say “You still shouldn’t eat so much fast food.” Too bad. Factors like cholesterol, sodium, et cetera… those are secondary concerns, far in the distance. My primary concern is calories. A calorie is a calorie is a calorie. If a fancy all-natural wholesome dish “costs” the same as one greasy Whopper without mayo, then I’m going to choose based on personal preference alone. It’s hard enough to keep religion on the calorie front. I don’t also need to fight the war on the sodium front. The skinny have that luxury but not the fat. In fact, I suspect a lot of people, when they decide to diet, choose to focus on those secondary concerns because those are an easier substitute, a cop-out. Fighting calories full-bore and ignoring cholesterol is actually harder, and requires more discipline, than fighting both with reduced intensity.
• I skip breakfasts. When I started, my budget was 300 calories more than it is now. (A heavier person starts off with a higher baseline, just because living takes more energy.) Back then I could have a small breakfast - in fact, I started by having a Snickers (280 calories) some mornings! But now my budget is under 1900 calories and I just can’t afford to waste 200-300 before noon. That would put me in skimping mode for the remaining two meals, and I’d rather avoid that, even if it means being kinda hungry in the morning. People say, “You shouldn’t skip breakfast. You actually eat less if you have breakfast than if you skip it.” That’s empirically true, but only for people who aren’t on a quantitative diet, and are just eating when and what they feel like. Maybe N calories at breakfast results in you unconsciously desiring >N fewer calories at dinner. But me, I’m on a budget, and I know damn well how many calories I’m eating at dinner. My 1900 calories won’t magically make me fatter when I eat them in two meals as opposed to three.
• Likewise, I find it’s easier to go hungry for a while in the evening and have a late dinner, then eat at six and run the risk of hunger at bedtime. If that happens and I’ve exhausted my budget, I’m in trouble. I can’t fall asleep with my stomach growling. I probably have to cheat. I’d rather save a few hundred calories until late, just in case. People say “You shouldn’t eat just before going to bed.” This advice, like the breakfast complaint, does not apply to me. Once again, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. N calories at midnight counts no more and no less than N calories at noon.
• Diet sodas. I chug liters every day. Each 20-ounce bottle buys me a half hour to an hour before my stomach realizes it’s been had. Water is fine too, obviously, but diet sodas are more pleasurable. People say “You shouldn’t drink so much diet soda - those chemicals are bad for you.” That concern is beneath even secondary ones like cholesterol. Anything that gets me through the day more pleasantly, I’m drinking, regardless of whether a mouse once got cancer after 100,000 times my daily dose of it.
• If I have calories to spare at the end of the day, even if I’m not hungry, you know what I do? I eat them! People say “You shouldn’t eat if you’re not hungry.” First of all: Oh, but I WANT to! Why do you think I skipped breakfast, if not to enjoy my dinner more? But more importantly: This is a conscious decision I’ve made, and a very important one. I try not to allow myself “rollover minutes.” Sometimes if it’s Thursday, and I’m not hungry, and the weekend is coming up, and I know I’ll want to drink a lot, then I’ll let myself stay, say, 400 calories under budget, so I can go 400 over on Saturday night with a clean conscience. But I don’t make a habit of that. “Rollover minutes” would actually cause more stress, not less. Every meal, regardless of circumstance, would become a dilemma: If I eat N more calories on Tuesday, that’s N more I won’t have available on Wednesday, or the following Monday, or next Christmas. I can’t deal with that. I stick to a daily budget, not weekly or monthly. And if I get to the end of the day with calories to spare, I eat them. I take rollover minutes out of the equation, and by removing them as a possible option, I save my sanity at every other mealtime.
• I don’t bother entering tiny things, like salsa, or a peppermint from the secretary’s bowl. As long as you’re not making return trips when she’s away from her desk.
• The LoseIt app underestimates running, I want to think. I compared the app, the readout from a treadmill (which takes your weight into account), and the results from typing “running 3.1 miles in 25 minutes, 205 lbs” into WolframAlpha.com. The latter two give similar numbers. LoseIt gives less. So when I go running, I use WolframAlpha to find a calorie value, and then in the app, I make up time and speed numbers until the app thinks I burned the same amount.
• In the last six months I have found myself choosing chain restaurants over individual restaurants. Why? Because chain restaurants - some of them, at any rate - have calorie information online. I have a folder of bookmarks in my phone’s browser for everything from McDonald’s to the Capital Grille. Some chains publish them on their own websites. Some don’t call attention to them, but they do business in New York or California where they’re forced to supply calorie numbers, and someone on the Internet has posted a PDF of their menu from there. And some chains just have calorie information supplied at third-party sites without attribution. Like, you can go to “myfitnesspal.com” or some place, and they allegedly have information for some menu items from Legal Test Kitchen, but don’t say how they got those values. I don’t really trust those sites to be accurate. I’m just mentioning it because you’ll encounter this.
• There are only a few foods I’ve nearly given up entirely. Pizza is one. That was a hard goodbye. Pizza is so, so good. But each 1/8 slice of a pizza is anywhere from 400 to 650 calories depending on radius and toppings. If you order by the slice, a pizza place will give you 1/6 or even 1/4 of a gigantic pie; and if you order by the pie, the slices are smaller but you sure ain’t stopping at just one. It’s just too many calories, and too hard to resist. French fries are another. They just don’t offer enough satisfaction and/or satiation for how fattening they are. If I have 1000 calories to kill, instead of a Whopper and fries, I have a Whopper and another kind of burger! Seriously, a burger is tastier than fries to begin with (that’s why burgers come with fries and not the other way around) and most chains’ junior burgers have fewer calories than all but the smallest size fries. It’s win-win.
• Wendy’s chili rules. A small chili tastes good, feels heavy in your stomach, takes several pleasurable minutes to eat, and has only 220 calories. Whereas a medium fries vanishes in sixty seconds and has twice that many calories despite not even filling you up. I eat a Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich with chili several times a week. It’s a great lunch, full of that indulgent fast food taste, but only 680 calories. Or even better, the grilled chicken saves you 90 calories and fills you up just as much as the fried one.
Jen (Costumes Jen) was the first to notice, since she’s the one who would dress me in my corset as Brad Majors. She noticed in only two weeks. My parents - whom I did tell - claimed to notice after about a month and a half. Everyone else started noticing about three months later.
Tonight, I’m meeting some football officials to study some rules questions before meetings and testing begin. None of my fellow officials has seen me since 52 pounds ago. I’m going to be so impressive.
I’m not going to quit keeping track of my calories, or even quit losing more weight. But I’ve been on this for six months, and tonight is one of the main reasons why.
I avoided mentioning it, online or in person, for a long time, a) just in case I fell off the wagon and would look like an even bigger fool,and b) because I wanted to see when - and how - my friends would notice, on their own, without any prompting.
Shortly after my football season ended in December, I happened upon an interesting blog post from some novelist I've never heard of:
"How I lost 30 pounds while eating a donut every day"
It's a pretty good read if you're looking for motivation. As a geek, this guy went about it from a sensible and analytic perspective, an approach which appeals to me as well. He doesn't evangelize about any fad diet or alleged medical breakthrough. His is simply a story of fewer calories input. It's really that simple. There is no quick fix. Calories in minus calories expended; end of story.
This writer recommended a free phone app called LoseIt, which I downloaded and tried out. It's a calorie counting app. There are several other such apps out there, and they presumably work similarly. I picked this one simply because the blogger suggested it, and now I can recommend it in turn. It’s actually a web site; the app is just another interface for it. The app works without a data signal, which is nice.
To start, you simply enter your age/gender/height, your weight, your goal weight, and how aggressively you want to ramp downward. 2.0 pounds per week calls for too much austerity, while 0.5 would take eons. 1.0 is a number I've heard many dieting references quote as the rough limit to what you can lose sustainably. But since the app lets you choose all the way up to 2.0, that suggests to me that 1.5 is considered sustainable as well, at least by the app’s designers.
I wanted to lose 42 pounds. Why 42? Because that is the answer to life, the universe, and everything… but moreover, because that would get me one pound under my all-time adult low. That would be a sentimental victory. In order to arrive there by the start of preseason football in August, I had to go for 1.5 per week.
So you enter in your specs, and the LoseIt app runs whatever standard formulas the medical establishment and USDA endorse, and it tells you your calorie budget for the day. Then you enter in what you eat, and any exercise you get, and the counter decreases as you enter foods (or increases upon exercise). Exercise works like negative food. If you run far enough, you can buy yourself an entire small pizza, or a bunch of beers. Without exercise, though, those indulgences are hard to fit in.
The LoseIt app has a big database of foods. It’s stored locally on your phone, which makes it instant and convenient. It’s got store brand foods, menu items from restaurant chains, and generic items like “Beans, green, 1 oz.” You can enter data yourself, from, say, the nutrition label of a food that’s not in the database. If you just don’t know, you can just substitute something the app does know. Border Café tortilla chips become Tostitos. Absinthe becomes rum. The blood of unbaptized babies becomes Nestle Quik.
After entering just one meal, I knew I could keep it up without quitting. I knew I was all in.
For me, the key was making the process quantitative instead of qualitative. “Avoid fatty foods… exercise more… don’t drink too much… don’t order appetizers….” That foggy hand-waving advice is not effective. What worked for me was planning my meals with the quantitative knowledge that a Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Filet is 470 calories, their small chili is 220, an average beer bottle is 150, running 5 km will save me 535, and my budget for the day is 2114. A value like “628” is much more useful, much more actionable, than the vague concept of “less.” If you live your life trying to uphold the vague admonishment of “less,” you guarantee nothing. Whereas if you enter in your foods, and don’t lie to the app, and stay under your budget every day, You Will Undoubtedly Lose Weight.
In fact, I lost a lot more than those 1.5 pounds per week, on average. Either the app is using conservative math, or my living-and-breathing baseline expends more calories than the app estimates. I’m not complaining.
So the budget and formulas Will Work. You’re going to lose weight - if you don’t quit. That’s the hard part. It’s annoying to enter every meal every day without skipping. It’s tempting to lie by intentionally underestimating, say, the number of Doritos you just ate, two at a time every minute or two for 45 minutes. It sucks to restrict yourself to just one beer when you used to have three plus a shot. And it sucks to be hungrier than you’re used to. (I was afraid I’d be in a stomach-growling state for the first two weeks, but it lasted just three or four days, thankfully.) But I somehow got and kept religion about it. Again, the process becoming quantitative was what made the difference. Thoughts of “Oh, sure, why not have one more slice” are much easier to defeat when you know the quantitative severity of what you’re doing. “Try to do better and eat less” is once again unhelpful. After all, one extra slice is better than two extra slices.
Here’s what I’ve found and what I’ve decided:
• People say “You gotta let yourself relax once in a while, give yourself a vacation every ten days or so.” Nope! Even though it wouldn’t be the end of the world, I don’t ever break my daily budget unless I absolutely need to. (And if you have to wonder about it, then the answer is no, you don’t absolutely need to.) Look, one pound corresponds to about 3500 calories. For every pound per week, you are eating 500 calories per day below your maintenance level. So if you cheat by 500 calories one day, that’s not the end of the world. On a 1.5 slope, I could cheat by 500 calories every single day, and the worst that would happen is I lose 0.5 that week instead of 1.5. But here’s why you shouldn’t even do it once. If you declare occasional cheating acceptable, then that’s one more temptation you have to wrestle with every single day. For me at least, it’s so much easier to tame myself if I’ve declared cheating off the table entirely. The question of how best to allocate my scarce calorie budget is much easier than the challenge of not abandoning the budget in the first place.
• People say “You still shouldn’t eat so much fast food.” Too bad. Factors like cholesterol, sodium, et cetera… those are secondary concerns, far in the distance. My primary concern is calories. A calorie is a calorie is a calorie. If a fancy all-natural wholesome dish “costs” the same as one greasy Whopper without mayo, then I’m going to choose based on personal preference alone. It’s hard enough to keep religion on the calorie front. I don’t also need to fight the war on the sodium front. The skinny have that luxury but not the fat. In fact, I suspect a lot of people, when they decide to diet, choose to focus on those secondary concerns because those are an easier substitute, a cop-out. Fighting calories full-bore and ignoring cholesterol is actually harder, and requires more discipline, than fighting both with reduced intensity.
• I skip breakfasts. When I started, my budget was 300 calories more than it is now. (A heavier person starts off with a higher baseline, just because living takes more energy.) Back then I could have a small breakfast - in fact, I started by having a Snickers (280 calories) some mornings! But now my budget is under 1900 calories and I just can’t afford to waste 200-300 before noon. That would put me in skimping mode for the remaining two meals, and I’d rather avoid that, even if it means being kinda hungry in the morning. People say, “You shouldn’t skip breakfast. You actually eat less if you have breakfast than if you skip it.” That’s empirically true, but only for people who aren’t on a quantitative diet, and are just eating when and what they feel like. Maybe N calories at breakfast results in you unconsciously desiring >N fewer calories at dinner. But me, I’m on a budget, and I know damn well how many calories I’m eating at dinner. My 1900 calories won’t magically make me fatter when I eat them in two meals as opposed to three.
• Likewise, I find it’s easier to go hungry for a while in the evening and have a late dinner, then eat at six and run the risk of hunger at bedtime. If that happens and I’ve exhausted my budget, I’m in trouble. I can’t fall asleep with my stomach growling. I probably have to cheat. I’d rather save a few hundred calories until late, just in case. People say “You shouldn’t eat just before going to bed.” This advice, like the breakfast complaint, does not apply to me. Once again, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. N calories at midnight counts no more and no less than N calories at noon.
• Diet sodas. I chug liters every day. Each 20-ounce bottle buys me a half hour to an hour before my stomach realizes it’s been had. Water is fine too, obviously, but diet sodas are more pleasurable. People say “You shouldn’t drink so much diet soda - those chemicals are bad for you.” That concern is beneath even secondary ones like cholesterol. Anything that gets me through the day more pleasantly, I’m drinking, regardless of whether a mouse once got cancer after 100,000 times my daily dose of it.
• If I have calories to spare at the end of the day, even if I’m not hungry, you know what I do? I eat them! People say “You shouldn’t eat if you’re not hungry.” First of all: Oh, but I WANT to! Why do you think I skipped breakfast, if not to enjoy my dinner more? But more importantly: This is a conscious decision I’ve made, and a very important one. I try not to allow myself “rollover minutes.” Sometimes if it’s Thursday, and I’m not hungry, and the weekend is coming up, and I know I’ll want to drink a lot, then I’ll let myself stay, say, 400 calories under budget, so I can go 400 over on Saturday night with a clean conscience. But I don’t make a habit of that. “Rollover minutes” would actually cause more stress, not less. Every meal, regardless of circumstance, would become a dilemma: If I eat N more calories on Tuesday, that’s N more I won’t have available on Wednesday, or the following Monday, or next Christmas. I can’t deal with that. I stick to a daily budget, not weekly or monthly. And if I get to the end of the day with calories to spare, I eat them. I take rollover minutes out of the equation, and by removing them as a possible option, I save my sanity at every other mealtime.
• I don’t bother entering tiny things, like salsa, or a peppermint from the secretary’s bowl. As long as you’re not making return trips when she’s away from her desk.
• The LoseIt app underestimates running, I want to think. I compared the app, the readout from a treadmill (which takes your weight into account), and the results from typing “running 3.1 miles in 25 minutes, 205 lbs” into WolframAlpha.com. The latter two give similar numbers. LoseIt gives less. So when I go running, I use WolframAlpha to find a calorie value, and then in the app, I make up time and speed numbers until the app thinks I burned the same amount.
• In the last six months I have found myself choosing chain restaurants over individual restaurants. Why? Because chain restaurants - some of them, at any rate - have calorie information online. I have a folder of bookmarks in my phone’s browser for everything from McDonald’s to the Capital Grille. Some chains publish them on their own websites. Some don’t call attention to them, but they do business in New York or California where they’re forced to supply calorie numbers, and someone on the Internet has posted a PDF of their menu from there. And some chains just have calorie information supplied at third-party sites without attribution. Like, you can go to “myfitnesspal.com” or some place, and they allegedly have information for some menu items from Legal Test Kitchen, but don’t say how they got those values. I don’t really trust those sites to be accurate. I’m just mentioning it because you’ll encounter this.
• There are only a few foods I’ve nearly given up entirely. Pizza is one. That was a hard goodbye. Pizza is so, so good. But each 1/8 slice of a pizza is anywhere from 400 to 650 calories depending on radius and toppings. If you order by the slice, a pizza place will give you 1/6 or even 1/4 of a gigantic pie; and if you order by the pie, the slices are smaller but you sure ain’t stopping at just one. It’s just too many calories, and too hard to resist. French fries are another. They just don’t offer enough satisfaction and/or satiation for how fattening they are. If I have 1000 calories to kill, instead of a Whopper and fries, I have a Whopper and another kind of burger! Seriously, a burger is tastier than fries to begin with (that’s why burgers come with fries and not the other way around) and most chains’ junior burgers have fewer calories than all but the smallest size fries. It’s win-win.
• Wendy’s chili rules. A small chili tastes good, feels heavy in your stomach, takes several pleasurable minutes to eat, and has only 220 calories. Whereas a medium fries vanishes in sixty seconds and has twice that many calories despite not even filling you up. I eat a Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich with chili several times a week. It’s a great lunch, full of that indulgent fast food taste, but only 680 calories. Or even better, the grilled chicken saves you 90 calories and fills you up just as much as the fried one.
Jen (Costumes Jen) was the first to notice, since she’s the one who would dress me in my corset as Brad Majors. She noticed in only two weeks. My parents - whom I did tell - claimed to notice after about a month and a half. Everyone else started noticing about three months later.
Tonight, I’m meeting some football officials to study some rules questions before meetings and testing begin. None of my fellow officials has seen me since 52 pounds ago. I’m going to be so impressive.
I’m not going to quit keeping track of my calories, or even quit losing more weight. But I’ve been on this for six months, and tonight is one of the main reasons why.