Had a weigh in for the competition recently and I’m down 30 lbs. total. 30 lbs in two months and I haven’t done anything unhealthy to lose it. I’m getting positive comments on my weight daily. Chuck and I finally got to run his neighborhood again this weekend and challenge the monster hill of doom. End result: 5 ½ miles and one conquered hill.
At the risk of going all Tony Robbins, I want to share how I’ve been able to achieve all of this in such a short time. I was completely and utterly disgusted with myself but now I’m confident that someday I’ll be able to achieve my goals. So read on, and see how you too can achieve what I have.
Give yourself multiple pieces of motivation.
If you read my last post, my weight loss kicked off with a bet. A sizable chunk of money ($180) was waiting for the winner. And that money was great motivation to start. But once the contest was over, what then? I wanted to make a serious life change. Short term goals might get you moving, but changing the way I ate in the long term meant I needed long term motivation.
My first motivation was running a marathon. I knew I couldn’t get in that much shape during the three short months of the challenge. I also knew that in order to run a marathon, I had to get down to where carrying my weight wouldn’t be too huge a burden on my legs.
My second motivation was to get more, ahem, “attention� from my wife. My wife is into tall, skinny, gay guys out of Japanese comics. I fit in only one of those categories, the least I could do is fit into two.
Just to be clear, the two categories are tall and skinny.
My third motivation is this tight knit turtleneck sweater that I’d look bad ass in if I didn’t have a gut.
There will be pain, but it won’t last.
Biggest and best thing I did was cut soda out of my diet. A bottle of soda is two servings, and you run some 180-260 calories per serving. One soda is a meal! All I used to drink was soda. And beer. Mmmmmm… beer.
Anyway, stopping the soda intake meant stopping the caffeine intake. Which meant withdrawal. Which meant three solid days of splitting headaches. But doing it that way was better than the alternatve. One of my fellow competitiors slowly weaned himself off of Mountain Dew, and put himself through two weeks of mild headaches. I’m a get over it and get going kind of guy.
The other pain was the hunger. This too will pass. The American Obesity diet plan is all about big portions that you don’t need. Your primitive survival instincts always want to pack on fat because you don’t know if your tribe will be able to find a berry patch or hunt down a wildebeest tomorrow. So when you cut your calorie intake below what you burn in an average day (which is the only way to lose weight), your body starts to look to replenish its fat stores. Don’t give in. It takes about ten days to get used to the smaller portions.
You have to break down to rebuild.
I didn’t realize I was on the
Fat Smash Diet until I browsed through the book three weeks in. Much to my surprise, I was following the same program they do on
Celebrity Fit Club. Fat Smash is a diet in the scientific sense… you don’t go on it and then off it, you make it your diet for life. Much better then destroying your kidneys on Atkins, or starving yourself on the new fad diet and then gaining it back when your done.
To start off I cut my calories way down, ate pretty much purely healthy stuff. Total fruits and vegetables, no red meat. Did I get rid of carbs? NO! Carbs are energy. I hate this low carb culture we’ve created. It’s bullshit. I ate subway A LOT. That bread has a lot of carbs. Here I am, 30 pounds later.
I ate 1000-1200 calories a day for about two weeks. Spark People, a free diet website was a huge help during that time period. I really suggest you give them a shot. The amount of calories is not good long term, but I had no intention of staying there. It was a purging. I was so used to consuming 1000 calorie meals, that just to cut some food here or there would never work. But using that as a base got me used to portion control, and when I slowly built up to a safe 1600-1800 I felt like I was endulging myself.
I am dead serious here about YOU MUST WORK UP TO A HEALTHY INTAKE. It actually helps you lose weight. When you stay at that low a level, your body goes into starvation defense, kills your energy level, and throws on as much fat as it can because it thinks it needs to keep you alive.
Water is your best friend.
Remember how I stopped drinking soda. Well I started drinking water. Non stop. And I used to hate water. I also used to have the driest, most cracked skin in the worl. Now girls ask me how much I moisturizer I use to get my baby botttom smoothness.
Water is awesome on so many levels. It has 0 calories. It is is vital for metabolizing fat into energy… in other words, the more you drink, the more fat you burn off. It keeps your skin healthy. It cools you down. You MUST drink at least 8 cups a day. Do better. Drink 10. Make that 12.
Yes, you will pee every hour on the hour. Make it a game. If you don’t pee clear, you didn’t drink enough water. If you’re thirsty, you aren’t drinking enough water.
I got up in the middle of that last sentence to drink more water.
On a side note, drink tap water. Don’t fall for the bottled water is cleaner scam. The water coming out of your tap is monitored by local, state, and federal organizations. It has all sorts of rules. Bottled water falls under a loophole that considers it on the same level of soda and does not have the same stringent codes. So in the best case, they filled it out of the same tap you did, and only ripped you off by charging you $2.00 for a plastic bottle that cost them half a cent. In the worse case you are drinking spring water that was downstream from where the bears crap… and the bears have dysentery.
Eat a breakfast of Champions
I never ate breakfast. I had diarrhea about three times a week. Coincidence? Not really. Eating a high fiber breakfast every day is great on so many levels. Every morning I pour Post Raisin Bran into a measuring cup. Pour said cup into a bowl. Fill measuring cup halfway with soy milk (8
th Continent or Silk). Pour said cup into bowl. Voila. This plus eating takes me five minutes and destroys my old “I don’t have time for breakfast argument�. I love Raisin Bran. The fiber does two things. First,it jump starts my metabolism. Second, it keeps me regular. I haven’t been regular for years… probably since my Mom stopped making me eat breakfast. Total caloric intake at breakfast: under 300. Several times a week I throw in a banana and make it 350.
So that just about covers my diet. Next time I’ll discuss my exercise plan. Good Luck!
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