One of the best things about learning more about nutrition and eating a smaller quantity but greater variety of foods each day is that when you start paying attention to what goes into your mouth you tend to want to make each bite count.  If I felt that every day was suffering I’d never have kept up with my healthier diet.  I figured I’d have to give up some foods that I like to eat, and that most of what I’d be eating, at least for a while, would be bland and unsatisfying.

As it happens, I found that the opposite was true. The foods I’m eating now are not only healthier than the junk food I was eating before, but they also taste much better. For one thing, fresh ingredients just tend to taste better than processed, dried, frozen, or otherwise manipulated ones. But that’s not the trick.  The trick is to sneak a little extra deliciousness into everything you eat so that it’s full of flavour.

The trick to getting more deliciousness into your diet has to do with umami, the relatively recently discovered fifth taste (along with sweetness, bitterness, sourness, and saltiness).  It’s the savoury taste, that deliciousness that you get from protein-heavy foods like meat and cheese, especially when browning them (the maillard reaction is a powerful flavour-enhancer).  I actually bought a counter-top grill/panini press for the purpose of taking low-fat meats and making them more delicious (not to mention more convenient to cook).

So my trick is to plan a balanced meal and then “save” some of my calories for things that have very intense and delicious umami, like bacon and cheese.

Here are some things you can sprinkle on a salad to make it 10x more delicious and only slightly less nutritious (and even most of these things have some nutritional value):

• crumbled bacon (but NOT that fake Bac-Os salty soy crap)
• grated parmesan cheese (get the shredded rather than the salty dust, or better yet, grate your own from a wedge)
• mild banana pepper rings (I like the tangy mild ones better than the hot)
• crushed red pepper flakes
• crushed walnuts
• slivers of almonds
• crumbled feta or blue cheese (you can get these in resealable tubs now and a little pinch goes a long way)
• kalamata (Greek) olives
• sunflower seeds
• sliced strawberries (yes, in a garden salad)
• other peppers, cheeses, or fruits

Tired of bland boneless chicken breast?  Grill it or pan fry it in a cast iron skillet (I like to use a spray can of olive oil to just barely oil the pan) and make a sauce from Greek yogurt (which is more like sour cream than the yogurt we’re used to eating as a breakfast or dessert – I like the Fage brand which I can get at pretty much any supermarket), dill, and a little lemon juice.  Cut up the cooked chicken breast, mix it with a little of the yogurt sauce, and put it in a whole wheat wrap with some lettuce, onions, and bell peppers for a very low calorie dinner.

Fish is generally pretty healthy and depending on what kind you eat can be really healthy.  Stick with tuna and salmon which are high in Omega-3 fatty acids and you get a nice combination of healthy and delicious. Even shrimp, which I always thought were supposed to be bad for you, are almost completely fat-free (albeit high in cholesterol), cook fast, and the peeled and frozen bags of uncooked shrimp actually aren’t too bad when they’re thawed and keep for weeks in the freezer.  Granted, you shouldn’t eat the whole bag in one sitting, but 8-10 large shrimp (about 3.5oz) are only a hundred calories or so, and are good along with some vegetables or a salad.

Losing weight and getting healthy is hard enough as it is.  Don’t punish yourself by eating food without any umami.  A regular diet of food that is just absolutely fucking delicious isn’t a diet you tend to slip, you know?

Calories In < Calories Out = Weight Loss

Yes, it’s really that simple.  Calories are a unit of energy, and your body literally burns calories to power itself.  Most of your caloric expenditure is spent keeping your body at a constant ~98.6F temperature. The rest is used to move your muscles, fuel your organs, etc.  Thinking deeply about something burns more calories than passively watching TV or listening to music. The first time I played in a chess tournament (I’m not all that good, but the tournaments are fun) I was surprised by how physically exhausting it was.

Certain foods take more calories of energy to consume than others. Fat happens to be a really efficient means of storing calories for use later, which is why you get fat if you take in more calories than you need.  Your body simply stores it for a time when it may need that extra energy later, like a squirrel collects a cache of nuts for the winter. Why is it so hard and take so long to lose weight?  Because one pound of fat takes about 3,500 calories to burn, so you have to create a deficit of 500 calories per day (on average) to lose one pound of fat per week.  Of course, when you’re overweight, your body has to work harder just to maintain itself, so if you follow a 1900-2100 calorie plan (like I am) you’re probably taking in only half to a third of the calories you burn, and the fat will come off pretty quickly.  There may be such a thing as too quickly, too. I can’t stress enough that you should talk to a doctor before getting started on any kind of diet or fitness plan.

People are asking me what I’m doing to lose weight. I tell them I’m eating better and exercising (go figure). I’m not following any particular diet plan. Diets suck and are hard to follow, especially if you live in the world and want to go out and do things with people, so I was pretty sure when I started that I didn’t want to follow anything as strict and dull as Atkins, “The South Beach Diet,” “The Jolly Bean Diet,” the “Feel Miserable The Entire Time You’re On the Diet Until You Go Off The Plan And Put All The Weight You Lost (Plus BONUS Pounds!) Diet,” &c.  I really needed to change my lifestyle, and my relationship with food (more on that abusive relationship later).

The Art of Losing Isn’t Hard to Master

The real truth about dieting that any nutritionist will tell you, is that it almost doesn’t matter what you eat if weight loss is your only goal. As long as you keep the calories you consume below the threshold of the calories your body needs every day, you’ll lose weight. Yes, by eating more nutritious and healthier foods you’ll be able to eat more for a lower amount of total calories, feel better, and perhaps be happier in your weight loss (as I am), but you could probably eat a Big Mac three meals a day, and you could still lose weight if your body needs more than 1800 calories a day (as mine likely does).  So if you really love fast food, there’s probably a plan you could follow to eat at your favourite take-out place every single day if you wanted, albeit probably in smaller portions than to which you’re accustomed.

Part of the problem is that I like to taste things that are delicious. I love cooking.  I love going out and spending time with friends and loved ones. So rather than limiting myself to certain foods, I’m developing a strategy for eating.  It only took a few weeks to feel comfortable with it, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that lately I’ve been eating more delicious foods than I was when I was getting delivery 3-4 days a week.  I mean, I love pizza, but it’s not the most flavourful food on the planet.

One thing’s for certain: pre-packaged highly-processed food costs a whole lot less than fresh stuff. Go to the supermarket and you probably have more fresh vegetable and meat choices than ever before in history. Multiculturalism is in, too, so it’s now pretty easy to find some of my new favourite foods, like Greek yogurt, hummus, various low-cal Asian sauces and marinades, &c. However, this stuff isn’t as cheap as say, a box of macaroni and cheese, but it sure tastes better and leaves me feeling better, both physically and emotionally.

So I feel better, and I feel better. For each of my personal fitness vectors, the eating-better part is the easiest. I almost never feel like I’m depriving myself of anything because I’m eating things with lots of flavour and I’m finding that a balanced meal (or at least a balanced daily diet, even if I don’t perfectly balance every meal) is far more satisfying than most of the junk food I consumed en masse.  Personal Fitness Vectors sounds pretty technical, but it just means I’m waging the war on several fronts (maybe I should pick a metaphor that doesn’t sound like I’m attacking myself). In addition to eating better, I’m also studying nutrition and fitness, biology, the science of how my body processes food and nutrients, how the body burns fat, why it stores fat in the first place, etc.

Working Out Is Hard To Do

I don’t have a regular exercise routine either (although I am lifting weights and am meeting with a personal trainer twice a week). Exercise is important to keeping a healthy body and feeling better. Being active will mean you don’t have to be as strict with counting calories, but you’ve never seriously exercised before, you may be as dismayed as I was to learn that exercise has a nominal impact on weight loss.  You can pedal your heart out for a solid hour on an exercise bike until you’re out of breath and sweating profusely and you might burn a thousand calories (if you’re my size, height, and age).  That’s about the equivalent of a medium sized value meal at a fast food restaurant, which is actually not bad – if you can exercise at high-intensity for an hour straight without passing out or dying.

In reality, I’m generally burning only a few hundred calories an hour.  Exercise also raises your metabolic rate, but it raises it so little as to be insignificant to helping with weight loss (although every little bit helps, right?).  Another potential weight loss benefit – exercise may curb your appetite (I know it does mine) by increasing a protein in your blood called BDNF, which lowers your blood pressure and suppresses the hunger reflex.

Of course, my goal it to be fit and healthy, not simply to lose weight as fast as I can, so I’m getting other benefits from working out, too. More muscle means you’re increasing your body’s caloric requirements – those muscles need energy to move – and getting stronger from exercise means that it’ll get easier over time, and more enjoyable. It’s already nice to be able to keep up with healthy people when walking.  Previously I had a hard time keeping up with friends and coworkers who all walk at a pretty swift pace.  Now they have a hard time keeping up with me.

Actually, my legs have been getting much stronger and much faster than anything else.  Granted, most of the leg exercises I’m doing are just using my own body weight as resistance (gravity is a harsh mistress) but I’m already seeing marked improvement.

Overall, I’ve been happy with my progress so far, albeit impatient with the speed at which I’m improving.  But I’m only in week ten, and I expect I have another 150 or so weeks to go before I’m even close to being fit.  In the meantime, I’m getting in progressively better shape.

“Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
– Stephen King

I first realized I was dying in the Spring of 2006. I don’t mean in the zen sense – such as how from the moment we’re born we begin to die – but rather in the actual, keel over suddenly and prematurely sense.

I had just turned 30, which itself isn’t such a big deal, but for someone as introspective as me, it was a good opportunity to reëvaluate my life. I felt awful all the time. Any kind of exercise left me out of breath and feeling run-down. I was thinking about this for a few weeks before I did anything about it. Then I started eating better (subjectively) and started walking. I couldn’t do much at first, but little by little, week after week, I could walk a little longer and farther, and I started to lose weight.

Actually, I lost a lot of weight – over 70 pounds in just under five months.  Then I moved to Chicago, and while I was still doing a lot of walking, I also started eating poorly. I switched from doing freelance work where I could set my own schedule to working a 9-to-5 job where I had to work (and eat) on someone else’s schedule.  I still did okay with my weight until February 2007 when the weather stayed below 10F for a solid month.  Walking wasn’t an option. I started taking cabs both to and from work.  When the summer came, my train stop was closed for construction work, and I kept up the cab habit.  I also started to get bone spurs in both of my heels which made walking painful at the time (I still have the problem – it’s just not as bad now).

Of course, there was more to not exercising and not eating right other than just laziness. By the end of the work day I’d just want to get home and do other things (some of those “other things” are just more work sometimes) and taking a fifteen minute cab ride and having someone cook and deliver food gave me an hour or two (at least) of extra time every day.  However, in a little over a year I not only put the 70 pounds I’d lost back on, but I also added on another 40-50 lbs of extra weight on top of it.

Eating at work was a problem too. The office buys a lot of food for us, which is great, but they always stock Pop Tarts and lots and lots of candy and other junk food. There are candy dishes everywhere around the office, and it’s really easy to just pick at it all afternoon. Also, the fridge is always stocked with lots of Coke, and there’s always coffee. So in my average work day I’d eat or drink:

• 3-5 cups of coffee in the morning
• 2 Pop Tarts (usually the brown sugar ones – without the pretense of fruit, although ironically they’re lower in calories than the fruit variations)
• A lunch of pasta or fried foods, along with a large fountain Coke
• 4-6 cans of Coke in the afternoon
• Various “fun size” candies – maybe 3-4 a day
• A cappuccino or iced sugary Frappuccino during an afternoon Starbucks run

  (aside – the afternoon coffee run where a few of us would leave the building to go somewhere to get a drink – is pretty essential to the work day and makes those last few hours of work far more productive then if I’d just sit at my desk and get more sluggish and brain-addled by the hour)

• On some days, birthday cake for someone in the office, sometimes in addition to my morning Pop Tarts

A nutritionist would call my daily eating habits a “target-rich environment” since there were so many possible areas for change.  It’s no wonder I’d get out of breath getting up from my chair. And that list doesn’t even count the crap I’d eat when I got home (or often, went out after work).

My Kind of Town

Chicago is a fantastic city, and I think it has more bars per capita than any other city on the planet [citation needed].  You can get beer and wine at any convenience store. The local drug store has a champagne aisle. Even some movie theatres here have a liquor license.  As I met people and started to do more social things in town, I started to drink a lot.  Back in Philly, where I grew up, I hardly drank at all.  Actually, I didn’t drink at all until I was in college, and even then I’d just have a little wine from time to time (excepting a few times that I got shamefully drunk that I can count on one hand).

I don’t think I’m an alcoholic – I would probably count myself as an Extreme Social Drinker (I could’ve had a show on ESPN.  I was actually considering joining the U.S. Olympic Drinking Team for a time…) I was drinking in excess – and I’m being kind by calling it merely “excess” – at least 3-4 nights a week. Some of my friends outpace me, too, so clearly we’re all a bunch of lushes.

Then in early June I flew back to Philadelphia to attend my Nana’s funeral.  My mother died when I was 11 so Nana was for all intents and purposes my surrogate mother. Her death hit me pretty hard.  After I got back to Chicago I went to a friend’s party (there is always a friend’s party to go – I didn’t go to parties this much when I was in college) and drank about as much as I could swallow. Actually, I met up with some other friends who were going to the party before that and got pretty smashed before we even went to the party.

Three hours after I got home and tried to sleep I woke up and felt that “dying” feeling again. Something was very, very wrong. I got dressed, somehow managed to walk downstairs, got into a cab, and went to the emergency room.

Now, a Saturday night (or really, very early Sunday morning) in a downtown Chicago hospital is quite an experience. I was competing with gun shot victims for attention. I actually ended up falling asleep, or perhaps unconscious, in the ER waiting room.  When I finally saw a doctor it was too late to pump my stomach (probably just as well), they took some blood, told me to stay awake as long as I could, gave me a cup of coffee and some aspirin, and sent me on my way.

The Long Sunday

I called my dad later that day to wish him a happy Father’s Day. I didn’t tell him about my binge drinking. Otherwise I spent the rest of the day thinking a lot about my life, my weight, and what I could do about it. Since I’d lost a lot of weight before I knew I could do it. It was just a matter of actually doing it.

I had actually been thinking about getting back into better shape for a long while. A month or two prior I bought a scale that went up to 450lbs so I could weigh myself. The only problem – when I got the scale I couldn’t weigh myself. I weighed more than four fucking hundred and fucking fifty pounds. I think I may have actually said “Holy shit!” out loud.

So when The Long Sunday came I was ready to make a change. There was never any question that I needed to make some major changes in my life. This was just the initiating incident that prompted that change.

Bloomsday

The next day was Bloomsday, 16 June 2008. It seemed a fitting day to make a major change toward healthiness. I didn’t immediately start eating better, but just about. I started to walk a bit, which was a chore at first but I started to see some major improvements in my capabilities after just two weeks. I transitioned into eating more healthily at the same time. I started using the fitness center in my apartment building (it’s been there since I moved in a year and a half ago – I just never really used it before) and started walking more. Rather than finding ways to get somewhere with the least amount of walking, I started finding excuses to walk, adding in an extra walk somewhere throughout the day.

Then I decided to up the ante even further, to remove any possible excuses for not working out, and joined the $90/month fitness center in my office building. Their facilities are only so-so, but they have all of the equipment I’ll need, and a nice locker room with showers. Even without working out it’s nice to have a place to change and take a shower at the office so I don’t have to go home first if I’m going out somewhere after work.

I also hired a personal trainer through the center with whom I’m meeting twice a week (to start, then I’ll probably switch to once a week). It’s expensive, but once I reclaimed the money I’d previously spent on take-out, alcohol, and taxis, I think I’m actually saving money by paying for the gym membership and training sessions. My trainer is pretty much kicking my ass, but I’m really seeing improvements already after only a short time, so it’s encouraging.

I’m currently finishing up Week 6 and it’s been pretty easy so far. Sure, it’s a lot of work, and a lot of extra time to walk to the train, then walk from the train to my apartment, then cook dinner, clean up from cooking dinner, etc. Things that used to take twenty minutes are taking two hours, but I’m more active and Chicago is pretty much paradise in the summer. I’m getting out more and enjoying what the city has to offer (other than alcohol).

I do worry about the upcoming holidays and extreme Winter cold. We had an especially nasty Winter this year and I probably won’t have nearly as much fun walking outside when it’s dangerously cold out. I know that’s why I have the gym memberships, but the treadmill isn’t nearly as enjoyable as just walking somewhere, seeing more of the city, people watching, etc.

However, by that time I expect my workouts and eating better will be habits (if they aren’t already – they say it only takes 21 days to form a new habit – and it’s been twice that already) so maybe I’ll be okay.

Everyone has been really supportive so far – friends, family, coworkers, strangers posting comments to the healthy foods I’m posting on Flickr – so I’m grateful for that support because it makes getting healthier a lot easier.

This is the story of how I lost over two hundred pounds and got into fighting shape by making incremental adjustments to my lifestyle.  Within I will reveal what I’ve learned about fitness, nutrition, exercise, and the various industries centered on helping you get fit or fat.  I’m looking at fitness and health as a new hobby, and whenever I develop a new interest I tend to turn my innate geekiness toward learning as much as I can about things in which I’m interested.  I’m reading the books and blogs, talking to experts, specialists, and trying to coalesce as much knowledge as possible down to its essence.  While this is my personal story, I expect there are many more people like me who may benefit from my efforts.

I started this site because my personal trainer suggested that I start a log of my goals, progress, feelings about exercise, dieting, food, &c., and I thought it would be easier to type it than write it, and easier to keep it on the Internet then tied to a particular computer or location.  As I started writing, I thought I’d keep myself more honest by making it public so anyone reading could view my progress and comment on my findings.

My goal is not simply to be thin, or generally fit, but also healthy, athletic, strong, agile, active, and (most importantly), to look great naked. To achieve my fitness goals I’m also changing other habits (slowly) and taking this opportunity to foster overall self-improvement.  I’m not just losing weight, I’m trying to be a better person.  It isn’t easy, but little that is worthwhile ever is.

However, if you’re trying to get fit in modern society, you’re fighting an uphill battle.  The deck is stacked against you, and getting fit can be made a whole lot easier and more fun than most diet specialists make it sound.
Here we go…