In terms of weight loss the most important thing to measure is the intake of food vs. expenditure of energy. Let’s make sure we understand what all of these things mean.

The dictionary defines food as “any substance your body can translate into energy.” By this definition water isn’t a food, but let’s say that it’s “anything you can eat or drink that supports your body’s energy needs.” Your body is a complex amalgam of many systems, but to simplify we’ll only be interested in the body as a mechanical and chemical system. To use a car analogy, your body needs fuel in order to function. The best part about food energy[1] is that it can be measured, so we can know (albeit sometimes with some difficulty) what’s going into our gas tanks (stomachs).

You’re probably familiar with the unit we use to measure the amount of energy in food when consumed. It’s listed on the back of every pre-packaged food item in the form of Calories.

Cal or kCal?

The Calories in food are actually kilocalories in the scientific sense. Sometimes these calories are divided into small calories and big (or large) Calories, and it’s customary to use a capital C when referring to that unit of measure, although I’ll probably use the lower-case more often because it’s less obnoxious to read that way.

Nutritionists’ calorie, kcal, or just Calorie, is the amount of energy needed to increase 1 kilogram of water by 1° C. While it’s a metric measurement, in scientific circles the use of the SI-unit “joule” is more common. In current usage the calorie almost always means the amount of energy in food, specifically.

Input / Output

How much energy does it take to burn a pound of body fat?

There are 453.6 grams per pound. You have to create a calorie deficit of 3,500 calories to burn one pound of fat. Dietary fat has nine calories per gram.

9 calories per gram × 453.6 grams = 4,082.4 calories.

Since burning a pound of body fat only takes a deficit of 3,500 calories, we can do some more simple math: 3,500 calories divided by 453.6 grams = 7.7 calories per gram of body fat, which is less than the 9 calories that we know fat to contain per gram. So why does it take fewer calories to burn the fat than it does to intake the same amount of fat?

The reason is because stored body fat, called “adipose tissue” by scientists, isn’t pure fat like the dietary fat you consume. Adipose tissue is comprised primarily of fat, but also contains protein and a lot of water. Protein only has four calories per gram as opposed to fat’s nine, and water doesn’t have any calories, so that’s why it’s biologically easier to burn body fat than to store a pound of fat due to an excess of food intake. Of course, it’s easier to sit on your ass watching TV and eating potato chips than it is to exercise, and calorie-dense & nutritionally vacant foods comprise far too much of the average diet, making losing weight harder from a psychological and practical standpoint than gaining weight is for most people. Nature is on your side, but Human Nature is against you.

Time To Lose

If you only created a calorie deficit of 100 calories per day it would take five weeks to lose a single pound of fat. To lose 1–2 pounds per week, which is the most you’ll want to lose safely (i.e. without causing harm to your body) you’ll need to create a deficit of 500–1,000 calories every day. You can do this with a combination of calorie restriction and exercise. Just keep in mind that exercise will only do so much. The 80/20 rule applies here: 80% of your weight loss will come from your diet, and 20% should come from exercise. Walking briskly only burns about 100 calories per mile. Since you’ll have to walk almost six miles to burn off one Big Mac, altering your diet will result in greater results than exercise. That doesn’t mean that exercise is useless, just that if your only goal is weight loss, exercise is less important than diet. One advantage of exercise, though, is that it increases your metabolism.

Metabolism is the way your body breaks down food, determines its constitution, and gets the right nutrients to the cells that need them. Your body burns energy all the time, even now while you’re reading this. The more physical exertion, the more energy it takes.

I was going to take some pictures of 100 calories of foods to show volumes of various foods that all have the same number of calories, but someone already beat me to it (with a gallery of what 200 calories of various foods looks like).

Take This To The Bank

Caloric intake is like having a per diem. Every day you get a certain budget, and then it resets for the next day while you sleep. The amount of calories you require on a daily basis varies from person to person, but the USDA’s guidelines for nutritional labeling of food items bases the amounts on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your needs may be more or less than that based on your weight, gender, or age. There are even variations in the metabolism of individuals, so any talk of measuring your intake vs. calories burned will be ballpark figures.

Calorie Density

Some foods are more calorie dense than others, meaning that you can eat larger amounts of some foods without taking as big of a hit in your daily budget.

Water, insoluble fiber, cholesterol, vitamins, and minerals don’t have any calories but provide other vital nutrients. Practically all foods contain some combination of the above constituents, and food calories are calculated based on the amount of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates that they contain.

How Much Of Each Nutrient Should I Eat Daily?

The Institute of Medicine provides a recommendation table called the acceptable macronutrient distribution range (AMDR) which specifies the percentages of each macronutrients (fat, protein, carbs, etc.) people should consume daily based on their age and gender. For adults, on average, you should base your percentage of macronutrient intakes on:

As you can see, the totals of the maximum range exceed 100%, so depending on your age and gender you’ll need more or less of each nutrient. Remember, however, that your body weight is a simple balance of caloric intake versus outtake. Calories are calories whether they come from fat, protein, or a jelly donut. You can get all of your calories from eating potato chips and still lose weight. You may die of malnutrition, but you’ll lose weight.

Free Energy

Your metabolism is working all the time, burning energy just to keep your vital functions working, your body heat constant, heart beating, and lungs breathing. The amount of energy needed to keep you alive is called your basal metabolic rate. BMR varies in individuals, but a good average figure is that your BMR constitutes about 60% of your total energy consumption. You also burn energy digesting food, and of course through activity.

The average woman burns 10 calories per pound, and men burn 11 calories per pound.

Let’s assume for example a 150 pound woman (because the math works out conveniently). Her BMR would result in a caloric consumption of 1,500 calories (150 lbs x 10 calories), which is 60% of a total of 2,500, which is the amount of calories she’d have to consume daily to maintain the same weight.

But like I said above, BMR varies based on a great number of factors, including genetics, body frame, height, weight, etc. It’s widely known that the BMR of overweight people is actually much greater than that of fit people since it takes more energy to keep more mass moving, and being overweight stresses the body causing an overweight person to burn more energy than if they weren’t carrying the extra weight. If you’re overweight, this is excellent news.

Your BMR constitutes about 60% of your daily caloric needs. Another 10% goes to digesting food and carrying nutrients to your organs. Only 30% of your daily caloric intake goes to powering your muscles to move your body around through activity. So it seems that you’d be well-served by figuring out how to increase your basal metabolic rate. Of course, to know how to increase it you’ll need to know how to calculate yours first.

Some fancy scales can determine your BMR by sending a small electrical current through your body (one foot to the other) and measuring the resistance caused by water in your cells. It’s a rough estimate. There are also handheld devices that can measure your body fat percentages so you can calculate your BMR more accurately. Your doctor can prescribe far more accurate tests that require expensive equipment, or by suspending you in a tank of water like Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back.

Personally, I base my intake on an 1800–2000 calorie diet and have been losing weight more rapidly than is recommended by my doctor. I’d have to recommend that you talk to your physician or dietitian to figure out how many calories you should be consuming daily, and what percentage of macronutrients you should target.

Raising Your Metabolism

Here are a few ways to boost your metabolism:

• Exercise – Not only does exercise help make you stronger and feel better, but you get a small metabolism bump that lasts hours after you’ve finished exercising. That’s why it’s better to work out in the morning rather than at night after work (if you have to choose).
• Build muscle – Every pound of muscle burns about 6 calories per day through general use, while each pound of fat only requires about 2 calories a day. While you can’t turn fat into muscle (they’re completely different tissues) you can increase your muscle mass through exercise and thus raise your metabolic rate slightly. The more muscle you have, the more energy you burn.
• Don’t starve yourself. – You burn excess fat by creating a calorie deficit, but if you create too much of a deficit your body thinks it’s starving and slows down your metabolism in order to keep you alive for as long as possible.
• Get enough sleep. – Sleep depravation slows down your metabolism. Even though you burn fewer calories while sleeping than while awake, you’ll burn fewer calories still if you don’t get enough sleep. Most adults need 7–9 hours of sleep per night.
• Eat smaller. – I don’t mean eat smaller portions (although you should do that too) but eat smaller meals more frequently. Your metabolism slows down when you’re done digesting food, so eating smaller amounts of food spread out throughout the day will actually keep your metabolism going stronger for longer.
• Eat more fish. – Especially those containing omega–3 fatty acids. Salmon, sardines, and other rich in omega–3 fish oils have been known to raise your metabolic burn by as much as an additional 400 calories per day.
• Spice it up. – Studies have shown that eating spicy foods actually raises your metabolism. Some diet pills actually contain pure capsaicin, the protein that makes food taste hot & spicy. Spices also have the added benefit of adding a tasty kick to some blander (but healthier) foods.
• Drink green tea. – Drinking green tea before a workout is said to increase the amount of calories you burn between 15 and 20%.
• Drink coffee – The caffeine in coffee is a stimulant and slightly raises your metabolism.
• Eat more protein. – Proteins take more energy to burn than fats or carbohydrates, which extends the amount of time you spend metabolizing your food between meals. Plus, protein is essential for promoting muscle growth, which also burns more calories.
• Be younger – Metabolism slows with age, so the best way to speed up your metabolism is to grown younger. Oh yeah, that’s impossible. I guess you’ll have to stick to eating right and working out, then.

OR WILL YOU?!??!?

Burning Calories Through Inactivity

Did you know that you burn calories all the time? Right now reading this is burning more calories than you’d burn if you were sleeping or just sitting still on the sofa. This is sometimes referred to as NEAT – non-exercise activity thermogenesis. This is the activity that you wouldn’t consider activity – fidgeting, shivering, pacing, talking – all of these things burn a small amount of calories.

No one is going to suggest that you replace your daily 30 minute workout with fidgeting on the sofa, but by keeping in mind that just about everything you do with your body burns calories you can make a game of it by trying to burn as many calories as you can per day.

The following figures are based on the Compendium of Physical Activity, a reference that assigns a MET value (defined as the ratio of activity to a standard resting metabolic rate) to various activities based on their intensity. Sitting still is the baseline of 1.0 METs per hour. The METs are considered an average over time, which is why gardening is higher than surfing – surfing may be higher intensity for brief intervals, but constant gardening beats out waiting for that perfect wave to come.

I’d argue that sexual activity is rated far too low in terms of physical intensity, but then I’d be bragging.

None of these things are generally considered “exercise” (except maybe bicycling, which I included because it’s not work if it’s fun, right?) yet all of these activities burn some calories. Cooking burns more calories than sitting. Reading burns slightly more calories than watching TV (I wonder if that’s because of the page turns). Walking tends to burn more calories the faster you walk, but the interesting part about walking/jogging/running is that you burn the same calories over the same distance no matter your intensity. So running one mile burns the same number of calories as slowly walking that same mile (although running will burn them faster).

So get out there and burn some calories. Or just sit here in front of your screen and burn slightly fewer calories.

Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.

– Salman Rushdie, Shame: A Novel

One of the hardest psychological stumbling blocks to overcome is a feeling of shame about your condition. Unlike alcoholism, cancer, depression, and other diseases & afflictions, anyone with eyes can see your weight problem. If you’re as grossly obese as I was, people can tell from pretty far away. “Oh look, there’s a fat person.” An overweight person’s body is a mark of shame that would make Hester Prynne blush.

Feelings of shame are manifested when trying to do common things in a world made for thin people. I had a difficult time fitting into most armchairs, theatre and airplane seats, putting a seat belt on in someone’s compact car, and so on. I’m also pretty tall, at 6’4″, which compounds the problem, but isn’t something I feel shame about, because I’m naturally tall – but I made myself fat.

Guilt vs. Shame

Guilt is the feeling of having done a wrong thing. Shame is the feeling of being a wrong thing. I see a lot of advertising for low(er)-calorie snack foods that come with the promise of being “guilt-free,” but I’ve never seen any foods as promising a release from shame.

What causes shame about our body-image?  While not being able to fit into small spaces itself can be embarrassing, most of my shame regarding my weight was related directly to food and eating.

I found that eating in public, especially if I was eating something less than healthy, made me particularly self-conscious. Most of the time I don’t really care about what other people think, but this in particular made me feel really uncomfortable. Maybe it fed into (excuse the pun) my already intensely negative feelings about my body. For me, eating something like an ice cream cone at a street faire or neighborhood festival is so unpleasant that I just stopped doing it. Granted, I shouldn’t be eating those things regularly anyway, but as someone who enjoys food the shame that I feel about my weight impacts my enjoyment.

While I have a pretty thick skin about most things, I am more sensitive about my body. To a certain extent I can take a fat joke – and they’re usually not very clever. Yeah, I’m fat. I get it. Har har. It can be especially hurtful when you hear friends or family members make a crack about your weight since these are the people you rely on for support, but I can’t be too hard on them. We live in a society that values super-thinness and derides the obese.

My friends have been very very supportive for the most part. They ask me how my progress is going. If they do see me eating something that doesn’t help me achieve my fitness goals, they may say something about it being “not exactly clean livin’, eh?”

One of my co-workers tells me that he hopes I lose weight, but not to the point where I get super-fit, because I’ll be insufferable about it. I tell him that being smug about having lost a lot of weight is one of my primary motivators. He’s put on some weight himself since he’s gotten married, and I joke with him that he’s my own personal Dorian Gray picture – he’s putting on the pounds that I’m losing. Every Monday morning I would tell him how much weight he gained last week based on how much I’d lost. So yes, even I am guilty of making light of other peoples’ weight, although if you knew this co-worker you’d encourage me to be crueler to him. He’s one of those people who talks smack about everything (but in a fun way – he’s actually a really good guy and a friend).

Finding Pride

This is the point where I’d usually offer a helpful tip or trick telling you how I overcame this problem, but the fact is, I haven’t. I still feel a little ashamed of my eating habits, especially if I eat something unhealthy in a public place. I don’t know if it’ll ever get better. The only thing I can tell you is that I try to use my shame as a tool to help keep myself on track. I may eat a cheeseburger and fries from time to time, but the people at the restaurant didn’t see me walk four and a half miles to get to there, or the 45 minutes of weight lifting I did that morning.

Shame isn’t always a bad thing as long as you can learn how to use it to help you meet your goals.

I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking. And I plan on finding out what that is.

– Ben Stiller, Zoolander

Imagine that you took the mind of an Olympic athlete like swimmer Michael Phelps and put his consciousness into my body.  After he was done screaming “Holy shit! What the fuck happened to my beautiful body? What have you done to my long-torsoed, dolphin-like physique?” – how long do you think it would take him to turn my overweight, atrophied, out of shape body back into a precision swimming machine?  Well, okay, probably a while.  But is there any doubt that he’d do it? (Hint: there is no doubt).

So if an athlete’s mind could get my body into good shape, my body isn’t really the problem.  The problem is that I was a fat guy, mentally, for a long time.  As a consequence, I shaped my body to match my mind.

The “trick” to weight loss and a healthy body isn’t a secret in and of itself: eat healthy foods, not too much of them, and get exercise.  That’s what you have to do.  What people don’t tell you is how to do it.

Here’s how.  The Secret – the key to getting healthy:

Become a healthy person, then act naturally.

Fitter, Happier, More Productive

How do you do that, then?  I wish I could tell you that it was easy, or that there was a secret elixer you could drink to become a thin person. It would be simple if you could go to the county faire and see the hypnotist. The truth is both simpler and more difficult than that.

You become a fit person by choosing to be one.  You have to make the choice every day, several times a day, at least at first.  After a while your new lifestyle becomes habit and it’s not as much of a chore. Every morning you’ll decide to exercise.  At every meal you have to choose to eat more healty foods, and in much smaller portions than you’re used to.  Why do you do this?  Because you have to.  Because you’re sick of being held back by a body that doesn’t work the way you want it to. Because to live another day as a fat person is unbearable and it’s stopping you from doing the things that you, as a healthy, fit person, want to do.

What kinds of things do I want to do?  At first I just wanted to be able to walk up a couple flights of steps without being out of breath and getting chest pain.  I wanted to be able to keep up with thin people when walking somewhere.  I wanted to be able to get up from a chair or pick up something that weighs more than five pounds without grunting a little.

In just a few weeks of eating right and exercising regularly, I was able to do those things, so I continue to re-assess and re-set my goals.  Now I’m feeling cocky and ambitious. I want to go hiking without feeling like I’m going to die.  I want to play tennis regularly.  I want to learn how to swim, which I’ve never done.  I want to run a 5K.  I want to run a marathon.  I want to run across an entire state.  I want to dance with the prettiest girl in the club (I do this already, truth be told) and I want her to want to have sex with me.  I want to wear shirts without sleeves to show off my massive guns.  I want to climb a fucking mountain.

Keep in mind that these are my short term goals.  Once I accomplish these I’ll come up with something more impressive.

So given my goals, why the hell would I eat a piece of cheesecake when it takes me a step back from them?  Why would I take a cab or ride the bus when I could walk somewhere?  Why wouldn’t I hit the gym most days when the gym helps me make my muscles bigger and makes me stronger?

But… HOW?

Okay, I know, I still haven’t said how to become a fit person with your mind. Some people have accused me of tricking myself. Fine, if that’s what you need to believe. The truth is that once I thought about what I was doing and how unhealthy my relationship with food was I changed instantly.  It was like I awoke from a dream, as though I were sleepwalking through my life up until that point and was now finally awake.  I had (Christ I cannot believe I’m going to say this) a moment of clarity. My thinking was so clear that I couldn’t believe that I ate the crap I used to eat and exercised as little as I did. In that instant I was transformed into a healthy person and emerged like a phoenix from the… well, you get the idea.

So all I can do is tell you how I arrived at my decision to be healthy, and how transformative that moment was for me.  I made a decision and the rest has been fairly easy.  You may not be able to make that decision, or not know how.  I bet that going through the motions will yield the same results that I’ve seen.  Why not give it a try?

Say Something Nice

Most people I know have been really helpful and encouraging.  Even complete strangers sometimes say nice things, like when I’m looking through books on nutrition and exercise at the book store, or walking on the treadmill looking unhappy (I find the treadmill to be dull as all hell and it gives me motion sickness a little).  Most of my friends have been extremely supportive.

Some people haven’t, though.  And some never will.  It’s okay that people will feel resentment that you’re making a change that they haven’t chosen to make for themselves, or wish they had the “willpower” or whatever excuse they come up with to not do the right thing.  They’ll tell you that your habits won’t last.  Or they’ll say something like “We’ll see” or “Oh, wouldn’t that be nice!” like your goals are an unattainable pipe dream.  Fuck those people.  They can pretty much die in a fire.

If they come around once they see you getting fitter, that’s great.  Everyone is welcome to come around and join Team Jough at any time, even if they’ve been jerks to me in the past about my newfound healthiness.  Some people may see you as an inspiration and start eating healthier and exercising themselves.  That’s totally cool.

I used to work with a guy who lives near where I work, and works near where I live, and I pass him from time to time when I walk the three miles to work (while he’s on his way to catch the bus). Sure, we stopped and talked the first time.  Then I just got a little wave.  Now he gives me this sheepish wave, or says something like “Walking to work again?” in a critical tone.  You bet I’m walking to work again.  And it’s okay that he’s taking the bus.  He doesn’t have to walk to work just because I’m walking a somewhat longer distance than he would have to.  Maybe he’ll start walking to work some day and feel better about his situation.  I don’t really let his unhappiness affect me.

After all, I delight in my condition.

Prior to my current healthy habits my relationship with food and eating could only be described as dysfunctional. It was a bad relationship – one I clung to and even nurtured despite how much it was hurting me.

I’d eat out of boredom or depression, to have something to do.  I ate things that were tremendously unhealthy almost all the time.  Many of the things I ate don’t even really taste all that good – but fried food, cookies, cakes, and meats slathered with barbecue sauce or covered in breading are satisfying in other ways. Foods that are high in fat or sugar actually affect your brain chemistry, making you feel happier. Recent studies show that the average fast food value meal is highly addictive.  It certainly explained my cravings.  I realized I was an addict, and that I’d have to break my addiction first before I could get on with getting healthy.

So I thought about addiction and the methods that have already been developed to help break addiction and get on the road to recovery.  I figured this was going to be difficult enough without me having to become a Magellan-like explorer, discovering new ground.  Perhaps there was even a process of some sort, or maybe a series of…

Twelve Steps

Narcotics Anonymous has a slogan that people in the program follow: just for today.  I like it better than Alcoholics Anonymous’s “one day at a time” because it’s more immediate.  For me it means “Yes, I can eat this piece of cake if I want to, but I don’t have to, and right now I won’t.”  Of course, for me cake isn’t much of a draw. My problem was savory fried foods, ribs, starchy food like pasta, french fries.

Anyway, it helped me to go back to the source, to Bill W. and his twelve steps that have kept many on the wagon. These are the original Twelve Steps as published by Alcoholics Anonymous:

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

One of the problems I have with this list is that it shuts the door on godless heathens like myself.  Without having ever read the actual steps I went from step one to four in a single day.  I recognized that I had a problem, and started to take inventory of myself, my life, and my bad decisions and actions during The Long Sunday when I decided to change.

In a way, this blog is my step five.  My exercise and diet program are making amends with myself.  I haven’t had a spiritual awakening yet, but I have had several mental breakthroughs and discoveries.

A problem that I have that someone in NA or AA doesn’t is that I can’t simply give up food cold turkey (or apparently food metaphors either). You can survive without any drugs or alcohol, but you have to eat, so it makes it that much harder to only eat those that are good for you. Also, while anyone can surely tell that broccoli is a healthier choice than fried chicken, if I switched to foods that were healthy but didn’t also taste good I’d never keep up with a healthier lifestyle.

Sizing Up My Diet

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure how much I should be eating. I used nutritional labels’ serving sizes to tell me how much a “serving” of something is supposed to be.  That’s what healthy people eat.  You can’t really go by restaurant serving sizes, because most American restaurants serve way too much food at one meal. I browsed diet books, web sites, advice from people, but just because a diet book says something doesn’t mean it’s true or right.  A guiding principle that helped me make choices was The Formula – consume fewer calories than you burn.

So, without a guide or plan I simply started recording what I ate into a fitness web site and tallied up what I ate every day.  Nutritional labels show percentages of daily nutrients based on a 2000 calorie diet, so that’s where I started.  I’d eat what I thought was a healthy breakfast – oatmeal, cereal with berries or a banana, yogurt and granola, etc.  I’d record it.  I’d eat a decent but reasonably healthy lunch, record it too, then plan my dinner based on how many calories I had left, like they were a daily budget.

When I go to sleep the counter resets – so I can’t bank up caloric credits for several days and then eat poorly all weekend.  Sure, the rules that I set up for myself are fairly arbitrary, but they’re better than not having any guidelines or principles to follow.

Here’s another guiding principle that I think about regularly:

“Nothing ever tastes as good as it feels to be thin.”
– Gov. Mike Huckabee in “Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork”

The truth is that so far it’s been really easy to do the right thing and eat right, be more active, go to the gym regularly, drink lots of water, drink very little alcohol, and be generally healthier.  It’s easy because I discovered a secret (at least, it was a revelation to me) that changed the way I looked at myself and my health.

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…