How I got less fat
People in random places have been asking, so I thought I’d just post this up here so I can refer to it.
Step 1- be really fat. I was 330+ lbs at 5-8. It’s reasonably easy to lose weight when you’re morbidly obese. Now that I’m down to 257, it’s going a lot slower, a lot harder, and will require a lot more careful attention to diet.
Steps I took:
1- Eating a large, healthy breakfast. I have light yogurt (much lower cal than fat free or low fat, where they ramp up the sugar), a bowl of non sugar cereal, fruit, and some form of protein (I was doing peanut butter toast, I just switched to a protein shake). This is pretty huge, because 1- my old breakfast was violently unhealthy 2- It fulls you up and gets your metabolism working in the morning.
2- Good, healthy snacks throughout the day. I tend of have some fruit at about 10:00 and 3:00.
3- Drink a fuckton of water. Keeps you feeling full, is good for you anyway, and I just read that your body actually burns calories when it processes cold water.
4- Integrate activity into your standard day. I started losing weight because I moved to a place where I HAD to walk like ~2.5miles per day to and from work. That way even if I was bad about going to the gym (which I was), I was still getting some activity.
5- Cook your own food: Make easy, healthy choices for dinner. When I have a choice between a high fat meat and a lower fat option (say pork sausage vs. chicken sausage) I choose the lower fat option. I try to avoid having red meat more than once a day. I just started on a campaign of avoiding starches in for dinner to try and keep all my carb consumption to the morning. I don’t count calories, and I don’t try and cook super light, but I also avoid dinners that are super bad for me.
6- When you do cook, bring leftovers, don’t eat lunch out. It’s hard to eat healthy out, if you bring leftovers, you’ll eat better, you’ll save money, and eating dinner with the concept of leftovers in mind helps with portion control, which is a big problem of mine.
7- I used to have a massive sweet tooth, and I still kidna do. I solved that by having a smoothie made with frozen fruit, bananas, and whey protein after dinner. It’s actually good for you, and it’s low fat, low sugar, etc.
8- You have to make losing weight a big focus of your life. Right now that’s pretty much my only hobby. It dominates a ton of my time (about 2 hours per day on the days I’m at the gym, which is 4-5 days out of the week). It’s worth it, both in terms of how I feel and the whole “not being dead soon” thing. These days I don’t let myself do anything until I’ve been to the gym. It’s get home, change and go. No stopping to read email, go to the store anything like that. It all waits for me to hit the gym.
9- Make yourself accountable to people beyond yourself. I started posting pictures of my dinners so that my friends could see what I was eating and comment. I post on some message boards noting my progress. If I fall off, people will know, and let me know about it. This helps a lot.
I’ll maybe update this with more as I think of it. Also, I’m still some 60ish lbs away from my goal, and those will be much harder, so we’ll see what has to change. (I pretty much know I’m going to have to be much more aggressive about what I eat).
Here’s hoping this helps some people. If you have questions, ask me, but then also ask somebody who knows a ton more about this than I do.
