15 Pounds

Posted on November 2, 2007 One Comments

Middle of October, while experimenting with DietTv, I decided it was time for a spur of the moment diet. While I’ve been very diligently working out many times a week, I was also slowly but steadily gaining weight.

Arguably muscle weighs more, right? That’s what I like to tell myself ;-) But still, I can’t say that I dug what the numbers on the scale were showing regardless of how much more I can lift this month.

Since that point, as of this morning, I’ve lost 15 pounds. Not bad considering last weekend’s family visitors and activities had me relapse 5 pounds! I hate re-losing weight, don’t you?

I think I can point to three key contributors:

Log everything that goes into my mouth
Change workout routines to focus more on weight loss as opposed to cardio and strength training
Massive portion control

Logging

No matter how easy or quick I try to make it, there’s just no ducking around the fact that logging all food is a pain in the butt. There is no more powerful deterent to eating than pondering an item and realizing that I’ll have to look it up (I highly recommend CalorieKing’s search) and then log it.

Everything I eat (currently) goes into a spreadsheet with the associated values for calories, fats (total) and protein. Calories burned from workouts get logged as well. I’m pretty content if my net cals (after I subtract workout, of course) end up between 1 and 1.5k.

Workout

Most of last year and this year I was focused on cardio and strength. Problem is, cardio’s not so great for fat burning. By spending more time on the treadmill and cross-trainers and keeping my pulse lower, I’m finding weight is much easier to drop.

I haven’t entirely stopped strength training, but I’ve cut it back dramatically. I’m also trying take more of a lower weight / higher reps approach. No need to keep bulking up.

Portion Control

I still haven’t figured out my real targets for daily cals, fats and protein, but logging foods has forced me to pay much more attention to the actual portions — if I don’t know the portion, I can’t log it, right? A side effect of that has me more aware of portions in general. I’m realizing that it really doesn’t take as much to fill up on as I thought.

A cereal serving shouldn’t fill the entire cereal bowl (unless you happen to have some small bowls). If it does, properly estimate that portion and log real numbers, not the values for a server size that’s half of what was consumed.

Deja Vu

Feels like I’ve been down this road before.

About 5 years ago I reached an insane weight. Over the next 18 months I slowly and steadily shed 70 pounds. It seems to have crept back. Fortunately, I’m not nearly that far gone this time around, but I’d like to be a lot closer to that previous end weight than I am now!

I realize it’ll slow down, but right now I’m enjoying an avg loss of .88 lbs/day. Isn’t that nuts?

I’d write more, but it’s time to head to the gym