Diet Update: Week 1
One week ago I weighed 251 pounds. Today I weighed myself mid-afternoon and the scale read 243.8.1I’m using a WiFi-enabled digital scale that automatically logs my weight to the WeightGurus website.
I know that seems impossible, barring surgery.
I’ve been really watching my caloric consumption for the last week and I’ve tried to exercise: a half hour on a stationary bike, a half hour on a treadmill, a couple of walks. Somehow it added up to precipitous weight loss.
I think the key is that I’ve been eating a high-protein diet (with some vegetables; I’m not insane) composed largely of things like MorningStar Farms meatless patties, Quorn patties, and so forth. They fill you up and they taste pretty good and consequently my body accepts getting only 1,600-1,900 calories or so a day.
It’s a bit easier to diet when I’m on the road for work - there’s no pantry full of snacks in my hotel room and I can control my intake by buying my meals at the grocery store one day at a time. I eat about 400 calories of some sort of ominous meat substitute for breakfast, skip lunch, and then have 1,200 calories or so of beans and meat substitute for dinner. (Skipping lunch sounds dangerous and scary, but the fact is, when I’m working I’m usually not hungry at lunchtime and I’ve been skipping lunch for over twenty years.) I would have liked to have gotten in more exercise after work, but one night I had dinner with my work teammates and another night I just plain wasn’t feeling well.
I am somewhat proud of myself for what I did the night we all went out to dinner. We wound up at an Italian restaurant and multiple cheesy appetizers got ordered. I kept passing the plates as they went by and didn’t indulge. Then people ordered big-ass plates of pasta and so on - I ordered a spinach salad. I knew that a few forkfuls of some giant cheesy pasta dish - or almost anything else on the menu - would have been more calories than I’d allotted for the entire day. When we were done and returned to our respective hotels, I topped off that spinach salad with some more Gardenburger-equivalent patties.
I was hoping to lose two pounds this week. I knew that to lose more, I’d have to do a lot more exercise than I wound up doing. And somehow I lost over seven pounds. The only explanation I can come up with is that some of that weight loss must have been water weight.
Ten years ago, when I last went on a huge diet and lost sixty pounds, I found that it was absolutely essential to track my caloric consumption meal by meal, food by food, using an app. And that’s what I’m doing again this time. If it goes in my mouth, I enter it in the MyFitnessPal app. If the food in question isn’t already in their database, I add it. It’s virtually impossible to enter the calories for a giant plate of restaurant food, so I tend to avoid restaurants while I’m trying to lose weight. (Well, that’s what I did last time I lost a ton of weight, ten years ago, and that’s what I’m trying to do again this time.)
This weekend Carole and I basically just ate meals from Blue Apron. Their meal kits supply reasonable portions and don’t give you the option of going back for seconds… and conveniently, they tend to already be listed in the MyFitnessPal food database. This coming week I’ve got another trip - all the way to Phoenix and back. The plan, again: calorie tracking, calorie tracking, calorie tracking. Lots of protein and foods with fiber. Exercise as often as I can manage it.
I don’t expect to be sitting here a week from now bragging about losing another six to seven pounds… but I do hope to be down at least two more. Wish me luck.
Footnotes [ + ]
1. ↑ I’m using a WiFi-enabled digital scale that automatically logs my weight to the WeightGurus website.