DEMYSTIFY YOUR WEIGHT LOSS

Pay the Piper, and Just Get On With It

INTRODUCTION

I am not a doctor. I have not played one on TV, and while I’m pretty sure I’ve stayed at a Holiday Inn once, I can’t pinpoint when or where that was. I’m just this guy, but I’m a guy who lost 60 pounds the right way, without resorting to the “quick fix”. No pills, no surgeries, no pregnant-lady pee, no fad diets, not even a gym membership.

I’m 50 years old at the time of this writing, I’m in better shape now than I was at 30, and yes, even my doctor is impressed. I hike, cycle, and lift weights, none of which I could do a year ago, and my friends, family, and colleagues are still raving about my physical transformation to the point of embarrassment. So, what I’m going to do here is tell the story of how I took responsibility for my situation, paid the piper for my excesses, and got on with the business of losing weight in a way that was completely devoid of theatrics.

NOTE: If all you’re looking for is a menu and a workout plan, this may not be for you. Yes, I’ll talk about diet and exercise, but I’m also going to talk as much - if not more - about how to overcome the obstacles our culture puts in your way, and most important, how to set your resolve, square your shoulders, and calmly go about the business of making yourself healthy again. That’s because without a fully-developed and well-rounded approach to the problem that takes your head as much into account as your stomach, your chances of success are, unlike you at the moment, slim.

FIRST, SOME BACKGROUND

At the age of 49, I was headed for a wheelchair. Born with a pair of misshapen feet that required surgery at age 10, and the use of custom orthotics that I didn't submit to until age 24, a lifetime of wear and tear on the misaligned joints that resulted from those defects took its toll.

My hips and knees ached constantly, and those messed-up feet that were the cause of it all felt as brittle as glass. The older I got, the harder it became to walk, and the harder it was to walk, the heavier I got. Backing up a bit, I can pinpoint the moment at which my physical decline started in earnest, because it came during one of those once-in-a-lifetime events that stay with you forever.

In January of 2000, I hiked up the side of Mount Wellington, just outside of Hobart, Tasmania. It’s a low mountain by most standards, but it’s a long, steep hike up the trail to the summit. I made it an even longer hike by losing the trail, and finding myself climbing up a field of boulders, hopping from one to the next like a mountain goat, all the way to the top.

It was an exhilarating climb, but by the time I reached the summit, I was exhausted. Now, Australians are some of the friendliest, most accommodating people in the world, and the right thing to have done at that moment was to have approached someone who was going to his car outside the visitor’s center and asked for a ride down. I had in fact done that very favor for a couple of young women the day before, when I’d driven to the top for a look around. But sadly, I suffered from a mild case of social anxiety at that point in life, so I opted instead to walk back down the road to the base of the mountain, a seven-mile, downhill trek, all on pavement.

For the next three days, I was in so much  pain that I could barely walk, and my poor, trashed feet never really recovered. The level of sustained activity that I was able to perform plummeted after that, and my weight problems began forthwith.

While still in his 30s, my father developed the severe coronary artery disease that would eventually kill him, and he instilled in me a preference for healthy food. The problem was, when I remembered to be astute about eating it, I ate it by the truckload. And I drank. A lot. Not enough to be considered an alcoholic, but close enough at one low point to realize I had to either cut back, or lose the privilege altogether.

Over time, as my activity level fell and my rate of consumption stayed constant, my waistline grew. I’m a six-foot tall, broad-shouldered man, so I carried it well, looking more burly than obese through the end of my 30s and into my 40s. I was a Blues singer in nightclubs, I worked a meaningful day job, and I married a lovely woman.

I also became more and more sedentary. Growing up, I’d always gotten my exercise by engaging in organized activities. Sports through my mid-teens, followed by manual labor on moving trucks from the age of 17 and on through college, so while I held a series of gym memberships as my adulthood progressed, my use of them was inconsistent at best, accustomed as I was to activity that was more goal-directed. I got by, though, until 2007, when I did something that brought all of my frailties into sharp relief: I moved from suburban Dallas to New York City.

In the suburbs you drive, and in the city you walk, that’s just how it goes. Trouble was, as a newly-minted New Yorker, my feet couldn’t tolerate more than a mile and a half or so of walking under the weight of the bulk I was lugging around. Searing pain would torch my feet, knees, hips, and back, and once it did, my day was ruined. It wasn’t just my own quality of life that was ruined, either, since I don’t exist in a vacuum. I dragged my wife down along with me, since she had to accommodate my need for rest every 20 minutes or so once I’d hit my limit, and listen to me whine about the pain I was in until we got home.

The experience I’m describing could be a separate blog in and of itself, so I’ll stop here and get to the point: By 2013, I weighed 256 pounds. Where once I was an active, athletic young stud-muffin, I was now a chunky monkey approaching middle age, in brutal pain in most of my joints, using a walking stick more and more to get around while pretending it wasn’t a cane, and starting to eye actual canes as the strain of getting around on the walking stick began aggravating the bursitis in my shoulder.

I was terrified. If I was eyeing canes at 49, how was I going to get around at 59? At 69? Would I be on a walker? In a scooter? I imagined myself wheeling around the neighborhood, a flabby, atrophied mess, panting as I heaved myself onto the sofa, and my beautiful, vibrant wife reduced to the role of caretaker. I saw myself down at the bottom of the hole dug by what passes for healthcare in America, a system so corrupt as to be rendered altogether evil in places, on an endless cycle of medications and surgeries designed to treat but not heal, turning me into an ATM for the pharmaceutical and hospital industries before being left for dead when the money ran out.

It’s been said, over and over, that an alcoholic or drug addict must reach rock bottom before he can get better. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t, but that’s how it seems to work out most of the time, and in 2013, that’s where I found myself. From where I sat there was nowhere to go but up, and I resolved to do something about it. I wasn't sure how yet, but I was going to get that weight off me come hell or high water.

After vetting a few of them, I found a doctor I felt I could trust to not try and shove me down the gaping maw of Big Pharma, and after sending me for x-rays and a stress test, he delivered some bad news and some good news: The bad news was that I was shot through with arthritis in my feet, hips, knees, and probably an area of my spine. The good news was that my heart was as healthy as that of a man many years my junior, thanks to my affinity for healthy food. No blockages, and my blood pressure was normal, albeit a tad toward the high end.

Instead of prescribing anti-inflammatories or other pain medications for my arthritis, my doctor challenged me to ease the load on my aching feet and joints by losing 40 pounds. It was a tall order, no doubt, but instead of feeling overwhelmed, I felt energized, and as I walked back to the subway, a thought entered my mind that would change my life completely: “40 pounds, huh? That’s setting the bar kind of low, ain't it?”

I love a good challenge, and I felt the gauntlet had been thrown. I took it, I blew past the goal my doctor set for me, and now I’m going to share with you how I did it.

HERE’S WHERE I LOSE HALF OF YOU

The principles by which I dropped a shit-ton of weight and gained a new lease on life are breathtakingly simple – move more, eat less – but in their application take plenty of hard work and rigorous discipline, and it’s not going to go quickly… OK, that clicking sound you hear right now is a bunch of people navigating away from this page, so let’s pause for a second and let ‘em go. I’m going to go pour myself a cup of coffee, and meet you back here in a minute…

Are they gone? Great, now let me tell you the real deal: This is not that  freakin’ hard. Yes, it takes some work, yes, it takes some discipline, and yes, it takes some patience, but you’re still going to live the life you’re accustomed to, just minus the food-gorging and the sofa-surfing. If you’re still reading this, then I assume it means you get that what you've been doing up to now isn't working. You're not looking to lose weight because you know you should, but because you know you have to. That it's imperative, and you're out of excuses for not doing it. I just wanted to run off those folks who are looking for a quick fix, the magic wand (or pill) that will make it all go away overnight, since everything I write after this is totally not for them.

Look, I am not an evangelist. I'm concerned for my old friends from high school and college as I watch them bloat their way to an early grave like I was doing, but I’m not chasing them around or hectoring them, either. Sure, I’m posting this blog online for them and the whole world to see, but in real time, I’m only saying this once. I work for a living, and can’t sit around all day talking weight loss at the expense of the people who sign my paycheck.

This is important stuff, though, so if I can help even one person shed their extra poundage, enhance their quality of life, and dance circles around everybody else at their grandchildren’s weddings, then my brief time on this Earth will have some added meaning. It’s really as simple as that.

Ready? If you’re still here, then I guess you are, so…

LET’S GET STARTED

I’m going to assume that you’ve been to your doctor, been checked out, and cleared to engage in some vigorous exercise. If you haven’t, then go get that done before you start this. If you run off half-cocked and drop dead on the sidewalk from a heart condition that could’ve been easily identified and treated, but you couldn’t take the time to address it properly, then that is on you, my friend. ¿Comprendes?

The first thing you do is download an app to your phone that my doctor recommended, called MyFitnessPal. I am not a paid spokesman (not yet, anyway, hint-hint!) for this app, just someone who found it highly useful. There's also an accompanying website you can log into for ease of viewing. What you do there is input your pertinent details, like age, current weight, current lifestyle, and weight-loss goals, and it calculates a daily maximum of calorie intake for you that will be conducive to your burning off more than you take in. From there, you input every bit of exercise you do, every serving of food you consume, and every weigh-in you record, and the app does all the math for you, tracking your progress..

MyFitnessPal (“MFP” from here on out) is a great resource, as its search feature delivers the approximate calorie count of nearly every kind of food imaginable, and the calories burned from most forms of exercise, right to the app and rolls them into your running daily total. All it takes from you is honesty. No omissions, no creative editing, just a faithful tracking of everything you put in your mouth, and every minute you spend exercising.

When setting your goals, you’ll notice that the fastest rate of weight-loss you can set it to is for two pounds per week. That’s because two pounds per week has been shown in study after replicated study to be the most you should lose. Otherwise, it’s all coming back again when you’ve completed your program, and it’s bringing more weight with it than what you started with. There’s a reason for that which we’ll get into shortly, but I want to take a moment here to address the time issue in a section called…

PAYING THE PIPER

There are outliers to every rule, but if you’re an average person like me, starting off where I did, you’re anywhere between 30 and 70 pounds overweight, and you didn’t get this way overnight. You were just making your way through life, doing that voodoo that you do, working for a living, raising a family and whatnot, and all of sudden you reached that “holy crap” moment when you realized that, while you weren’t paying attention, you blew up into something way more than what you were to start with.

Again, if you’re at all like me, it took you 20 years or more to get this way, and if you’re going to get it off you and keep it off, it’s going to take some time. Your results may vary, but it took me eight months to lose 60 pounds, so use that as your reference point.

Paying the Piper is the concept I used to quit smoking, cut down on my alcohol consumption, and eventually, lose the weight that was literally holding me down. It’s an important concept in my estimation, because I’ll submit that the most effective way to extinguish a bad habit for life is to experience every moment of what it takes to kick it. Nicotine patches, Valium, and liposuction do provide quick and easy ways out of the consequences of your compulsive behaviors - that is, addiction and obesity - but they don’t extinguish the behaviors themselves because kicking your habits that way costs you nothing but your insurance co-pay and deductible. If it’s too easy, I can all but guarantee it won’t stick, because there’s no incentive not to backslide, no sense of “Jesus, I don’t ever want to go through that again.”

To truly move your life over to a healthy place, you need to put some significant skin in the game. You have to feel those nicotine fits, you need to feel those creepy-crawlies when you don’t get your three nightcaps, and you need to feel the burn of atrophied muscles returning to full strength, not only so you can feel the accomplishment from having reached your objective, but also so that the very idea of wasting that effort and having to go through it all over again seems utterly insane.

In that regard, the absence of discomfort is counterproductive. Believe it or not, I actually said those words – mouthful that they are – to myself over and over again as I marched through the snow, in single-digit temperatures in the middle of a New York City winter, sweating away under my parka, determined to do whatever I could do to get where I needed to be, and stay there.

ONE MORE WORD ABOUT MINDSET

As I mentioned earlier, I had to hit a personal rock-bottom in order to get my butt in gear. I hope you don’t have to reach that point yourself, but there’s a good chance that that’s exactly where you are as you read these words, and you’re ready to take decisive action.

That’s fine. Here, though, is where I’m going to diverge from others who write on this topic. Please, in the name of all that is holy, spare yourself and everybody else around you the sweeping, public proclamations. Believe it or not, very few people want to watch your Scarlett O’Hara, “God is my witness” moment. Not once, and certainly not over and over. It’s annoying, and quite frankly, when you run around exclaiming! and proclaiming! you set a very high bar for yourself. You put the idea in your own head that you have to maintain that very high level of intensity if you’re going to make this whole thing work.

That’s just patently false, and totally unsustainable, so here’s what I suggest you do, instead: Take it down a notch, and simply treat yourself like an adult who made a mistake. You let your guard down, time and lifestyle caught up with you, and you got heavy. Well, OK. You’re very sorry, and you know you have to fix it now, but rather than beat yourself up about it, or make a public specatcle of yourself, you’re just going to put on your big-boy or big-girl britches, pay the piper, and be done with it.

Also, keep it off of Facebook as much as possible. You know how annoyed you get when one of your friends - or worse, one of your “friends” - crowds everyone else out of your news feed with blow-by-blow accounts of their weight-loss efforts, or even more aggravating, their Herculean workouts? Well, just because you understand them better now, that’s no excuse to become one of them. If you’re needing encouragement and support, go on the MFP website, where they have message boards you can get onto and chat about weight loss to your heart’s content with people who are right there where you are.

That’s not to say I was totally private about my own efforts. Everybody likes to get their props, and I'm no different. I just kept it to a minimum. As the heavy globs of fat encasing my body and distending my abdomen melted away, and the load they placed on my brittle, sensitive feet diminished, the things that used to leave me whimpering in pain became more and more like simple, everyday activities I could take for granted like everyone else. I was utterly elated by that, and wanted to share my good fortune. So, every 10 pounds, I'd post something about how one of those now-everyday activities - running for a bus, climbing the steps from the subway, walking a mile in wingtips - seemed that much easier since losing those extra 20, 30, 40 pounds. But, at roughly two pounds a week, that meant I was only posting about it once every five weeks or so.

I got a few likes here, a "you go, boy" there, but no one threw me a parade, and I wasn't asking for one. Only when I quit shying away from the camera and started showing up in photos did my physical change become a topic of lively discussion. What I had done was let my friends discover my transformation for themselves, and their expressions of shock and awe were sincere, coming as they did from the heart, rather than because I'd demanded it of them.

GETTING THE MOST FROM MFP

Now, getting back to where we left off, I’m going to share a technique for getting the most out of MyFitnessPal, something that just came to me one day and ended up working.

As I mentioned earlier, MFP combines your personal data with your desired outcome and gives you a maximum number of calories you can consume in a day in order to reach your goals. If you only follow that, controlling your diet without adding exercise, you will not only fail, you’ll be miserable while you do it. Exercise is the key, since every calorie you burn is a calorie you can add to your food total.

I’d tried using MFP back in 2011, and didn’t get anywhere with it. I realized this time that one reason – although certainly not the only reason – it didn’t work is because I was going right up to my calorie limit every day, sometimes going over it, and that was with the assumption that all the calorie information I was receiving with regard to my food consumption was 100 percent accurate.

The second time around, my epiphany came when, after lunch one day, I accidentally hit the button at the bottom of the page saying I was done for that date. The app scolded me in blood-red font that by failing to exceed 1,200 calories that day, I was at risk of putting my body in starvation mode, whereupon my metabolism would slow down to conserve what calories I was taking in, which would in turn cause me to in fact gain weight when my caloric intake went back up again.

Now that I understood that I had to take in a minimum of 1,200 net calories per day, but keep it under 1,500 (my max allowable at the beginning) gross calories, I resolved to finish each day 700 to 900 calories under my maximum allowable gross as a hedge against any inaccuracies in MFP’s database. Doing this with exercise, I stayed spot on my target of two pounds a week for most of my program, right up until I hit the wall with 10 pounds to go.

I got past that, but let’s not jump too far ahead. Instead, let’s start looking at the diet and exercise components, starting with the diet piece. First of all…

STOP SAYING “ÐIET”

I freakin’ hate that word. In and of itself, it’s just a word, but over the decades, and in this context, it’s come to connote people doing stupid stuff to lose weight, and either failing, gaining it all back and then some when it’s over, or simply getting themselves sick. No need for me to list off all the dumb diets people have gone on over the years, you know what I’m talking about, so let’s just establish this precept: If the diet has a name, avoid it. A diet with a name implies something you’re only doing temporarily, when in fact what you’re going to be doing over these next few months is developing habits that are going to last a lifetime.

Are you going to eat nothing but grapefruit for the rest of your life? Nothing but meat? Goji berries, maybe? Yeah, didn’t think so. You’re going to eat like a normal person, so that’s what you’re going to do here, too. The only difference is that you’re going to eat like what is in fact a normal person, and not the gluttonous hog the restaurant chains would like you to be.

ON THE WHOLE, KEEP IT WHOLE

We’re hearing a lot about processed food lately, and for good reason: The stuff is poison. When it comes to mass-produced, corporate food, I’ve actually stopped calling it “food”. Or, if I do call it “food”, I’m always sure to include the scare quotes, because in my view at least, food is supposed to nourish us, sustain us, and keep us healthy, strong, and viable. What big business is putting in front of us in the grocery store now, though, is what I’ve come to call “feed”. Yes, you can eat it, but what it actually consists of is anyone’s guess, and its health benefits are suspect, at best.

We’re talking about weight loss here and not debating the merits of corporate control of the food supply, so I’ll simply say this: The things they put in mass-produced, processed foods are going to work against your efforts to drop the pounds. They’re loaded with sugar to make ‘em taste all yummy, and keep you craving more (and more!). They’re also loaded with whatever hormones and antibiotics they were giving the livestock, which has been shown to contribute to weight gain in humans, plus pesticides and fertilizers in the feed they give to that livestock, as well as the veggies you’re eating in your effort to eat healthy.

So, if they’re available to you, try to shop in smaller stores or farmer’s markets that you’re able to vet for authenticity. If not, then just try to stay away from the crap in the gaudy packages, since they may be a big part of the problem you’ve found yourself facing. Stick to fresh vegetables as much as you can, and lean meats that aren’t massive hunks of carcass. A good rule to live by is to keep your meat portions between four and six ounces. That's going to seem awfully small at first, but that's only because the servings you've been enjoying up to now have been awfully large.

That last thing I said gets us into the topic of portion size, so let’s go there...

THE THREE MOST INSIDIOUS WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

... are “clean your plate”. They were already bad enough on their own, but with ever-increasing portion sizes, those words have become deadly. The amount of food we’re cramming into our guts has reached absurd proportions, and our aforementioned guts are following in kind. Maybe you’ve seen this meme on the Internet, with the 1893 poster of the circus fat man who simply looks like today’s average suburban fattie. We got to be - OK, some of us got to be - that freakishly large because we’re still cleaning plates that someone filled with a backhoe.

Corporate food producers – or “Big Feed” as I like to call them as of about eight minutes ago – are in business to sell as much food as possible, and our bodies are growing right along with their shareholder value. We're happily obliging them in their demand that we eat more and more, and even our simple acquiescence isn’t enough. As I said earlier, the amount of sugar they’re dumping into their products alters our brain chemistry to make us crave even more of what they’re serving up, so in other words, what you're fighting here is both your ingrained habit of eating everything that’s put in front of you (“or no dessert for you, young lady!”), and the neurological tweaking you’ve been given by people who have someone’s best interests (i.e., their shareholders) in mind, just not yours.

If you take away nothing else of value from this post, make sure you take this: Studies have proven conclusively that a meal half the size of what you’ve become accustomed to is every bit as satisfying as the mountains of food (or feed) you’ve been gobbling. All you have to do is clean your plate of that half-sized portion, walk away, and within 20 minutes your brain will take care of the rest. That’s because 20 minutes is the amount of time your brain takes to realize the rest of your body has been fed.

Eating slowly helps, too. Take a bite, put your fork down, chew your food, swallow, and then take another bite. Maybe you're surprised that I feel I have to say that, but keep track of it at your next meal, and see if that's really what you've been doing.

Finally, the more you stick to smaller portions, the more your appetite will reset itself to accommodate them. Here’s the study that talks about it, but just wait. Sooner or later you’ll eat a meal that’s larger than what you’ve become accustomed to having over the months you’ve been doing this, and even though it’s only as large as the one you may have just had at the chain restaurant last night, it’ll feel as though you just ate a horse, hooves and all.

So, go back and click on that link if you skipped it just now. Take time to read it, then put it in practice. It will take a little getting used to, but getting used to new things comes part and parcel with paying the piper.

We’re going to move on to the exercise portion in a minute, but let me give you a sample menu. This is exactly what I was eating when I was dropping 60 pounds and adding years back onto my life, and it’s pretty much what I still eat today in any number of variations and permutations…

BREAKFAST

Two slices, whole rye or pumpernickel toast

1 slice, cheddar cheese

1 egg, cooked over hard in olive oil

2-4 tablespoons, avocado mixed with Sriracha, Tiger, or other sauce

The rye bread I buy is 100 percent whole, and the label is almost completely in Russian. I buy it because it contains no wheat flour at all, which I avoid because the carbohydrates derived from wheat burn off in no time, leaving you tired and hungry. Rye, on the other hand, is a grass, and its carbs burn much more slowly, leaving me feeling full for much longer into the day. I get it, though. What’s available in New York isn’t always available elsewhere in the United States, so if you can’t find whole rye bread where you are, pumpernickel is a good compromise.

The egg and the cheese both provide protein, the olive oil and the avocado both contain omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, and whatever sauce you mix in just makes the avocado that much more awesome.

250 – 260 calories

MID-MORNING SNACK I

Half a granola bar

Right off the bat, two things will jump out at you. First, half a granola bar doesn’t seem like much, but remember the 20 minute rule. Let it sit, and you’ll realize you’re not hungry anymore. The second thing, if you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, is that there are granola bars out there that are so loaded up with added sugar that they’re basically candy bars with a few good ingredients in them. You wouldn’t call a Snickers bar a healthy snack because it’s got peanuts in it, right?

Luckily, there are some brands out there that aren’t so bad. You just have to read the label. Ingredients are listed by concentration in the products, so if sugar is listed first, second, or third on the side of  the box, then put it back on the shelf and back away slowly.

What I did during my program was buy boxes of granola bars with not-too-terrible amounts of sugar in them, cut each bar in half, and store them in a plastic container. When I got hungry mid-morning, I’d pop a half in my mouth and carry on about my business.

60 – 90 calories per half bar

MID-MORNING SNACK II

Frozen berries

I love me some frozen berries. Not frozen fruit, mind you, but frozen berries. I buy the Cherry Berry Blend from Trader Joe’s. Berries are great because not only are they sweet, tasty, and refreshing in summer, but they’re low on the glycemic index, making them a great option even for diabetics (I learned this from an actual diabetic). Fruit, on the other hand, is loaded with sugar, and even though it’s “natural”, sugar is still sugar, and therefore counterproductive to what you’re trying to do here.

Approximately 90 calories per cup

LUNCH

Pretty much whatever… within reason

You were expecting maybe some long list of restrictions? Nah. Lunch is the hardest meal to regulate. You’re at the office, you’re out with a colleague or a client, and there’s a better than 50/50 chance you’re going to end up in a restaurant at lunchtime. You just have to use common sense. If you’re there with people who aren’t going to be annoyed by you playing with your phone at the table, go ahead and find what you want on the menu and search in on MFP, and let that influence your food choice.

If they are going to be annoyed, then don’t do it. Just make your choice based on what you know is going to be on your plate. Skip the Alfredo sauce, is what I’m sayin’, and go with a nice, grilled chicken breast with some steamed vegetables on the side. Leave some behind if you can, and remember that you’ve still got about another 11 hours left in your waking day to burn that meal off, and we haven’t even gotten to the exercise part of this thing yet.

Another thing I started doing when I got into this program was making a big tub of salad at the beginning of the week, enough to last me through at least Thursday. I have the luxury of telecommuting from an office I set up at home, but even if you have to go in every day and don’t mind eating in the break room, you can still bring a lunch-sized tub of that salad to work with you, along with maybe a chicken breast, or other kind of protein you prepared the night before.

MID-AFTERNOON SNACK

Another half a granola bar

DINNER

That big salad in the tub can also come in handy at dinnertime. One of my favorite things is to grill up about a four- to six-ounce piece of meat – beef, chicken, pork, etc. – slice it up, and serve it on top of that green salad.

(Approximately 250 calories)

DESSERT

Mixed berries, Greek yogurt

(Approximately 260 calories)

Remember, all of what you just read above is just a sampling of my larger meal plan. Once you get the hang of it, your options are pretty much limitless. It’s not a matter of what you eat (within reason), it’s a matter of how much of it you eat!

A NOTE ABOUT “REWARDS”

Something I heard a lot of from others who were working on getting their weight down was, “I’m good all week, so on the weekends I reward myself by letting my dietary freak flag fly” (or words to that effect). You know what those people all have in common? They all failed!

If you want to make this work, you have to rethink the meaning of the word “reward”. To undo a week’s worth of good, hard work by diving headlong into the feeding trough and rolling around in it from Friday to Sunday is not a reward. All you’re doing besides running backwards is reinforcing the idea that this whole weight-loss regimen you’re on is just a temporary thing that, once it’s over, will give way to your old habits… you know, the habits that got you where you are right now: Heavy. Weak. Lethargic. Sickly. Achy.

In fact, since we’re talking about it, let’s just let go of the term, “weight-loss regimen” altogether. This is a new chapter of life you’re entering. It’s the admission that your old eating and exercise habits have failed you, and the developing of new habits that are not only going to extend your life, but put you in such good condition that you’ll enjoy that extra time tenfold beyond what you were headed for.

So, here’s the way you’ll want think about “rewards” going forward: Your reward for taking on this new way of living is your renewed good health. It’s the praise and admiration you receive from your friends, family, and colleagues as the pounds and the years melt away, and it’s the way your doctor grins and shakes your hand when he or she sees you for the first time in six months, and finds you transformed. It’s the way your children or your significant other smile when they look at you, knowing you’ll be around and healthy for a long, long time.

Those are your rewards. Not the all-you-can-eat buffet. If you still think the all-you-can-eat buffet is your reward after reading the last paragraph, then this program is not for you. Now, having expounded on diet for the last few sections, let’s move on to the other key component of this lifestyle change…

THE PART ABOUT EXERCISE

You cannot pull this off without exercise, period. If you try to keep your daily calorie count on MFP down below the limit it sets for you on diet alone, you are going to miserable, and you’re going to give up. And you should in that case, because why be even more miserable than you are now? This does not have to be – and should not be – torture. What regular, daily exercise will do is give you the freedom to eat until you’re satisfied, and never go hungry.

As I mentioned at the beginning, you can achieve your objective without going crazy with the workout gear, or even a gym membership. You can do this with two easily-accessible resources you have attached to you (I’m assuming) this very moment: Your feet.

Over and over again, it’s been demonstrated that walking can be every bit as effective as jogging when it comes to burning calories, and it’s certainly easier on the joints. Ask your doctor, and he or she may also tell you that it’s not such a great idea to take up running when you’re still overweight. That was never a consideration for me, so I didn’t bother asking mine. Ask yours, though, and see what they say.

Since running wasn’t an option for me, I have nothing to say about that here, and will instead stick to talking about walking. When I was heavy, I figured out that I could walk about 50 minutes nonstop before the pain in my feet would reach the point where they were right on the verge of killing my entire day. So, when I set out to lose my weight once and for all, and use walking as a major component of my exercise routine, I decided to break my walking trips into 30-minute sessions.

Full disclosure: I’m fortunate to have benefitted from some favorable topography. I live on the Northern end of New York City, right below the Westchester County line, where the landscape is very, very hilly. That means a 30-minute fast walk through my neighborhood might be the equivalent of a 45-minute fast walk on flat ground, so you might want to take that into account when you go out in your own neighborhood.

Go and get yourself a good pair of walking shoes. My preferred brand is the New Balance Mw759. Sturdy enough for rough pavement and hiking trails, yet lightweight and cool enough to provide maximum comfort, and I wore out three pairs of them getting from 256 to 196, and reaching the point where I now hike five to six miles at a time.

Here’s the technique I used, and I encourage you to try it for yourself: Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, and so on. Got it?

Of course, cycling is also a great, low-impact way to get your exercise in and add those available calories back into your daily total. If you’ve got a safe neighborhood to do that in, with bike lanes or quiet streets, then by all means, go for it! I cycle around my neighborhood every other day or so now, I just wasn’t doing it for most of the time I was losing my weight because it was too freaking cold at the time, and again, my local topography worked to my advantage.

(Recently, I biked from the Bronx to Battery Park in Lower Manhattan and back again, and that 25-mile round trip on mostly flat ground didn’t leave me significantly more tired than the five or six miles I ride around my hilly neighborhood. So, take that into account when you’re planning your own route.)

The first few times the temperatures here in New York dipped into the low double- or single digits last year, I bundled up like Nanook of the North and marched out into the cold anyway. My thought process then was that if I could manage my power walks in those conditions, I’d have no excuse not to do them when April rolled around. Soon, though, I wised up and began running up and down the stairs of my apartment building, where I live on the sixth floor, whenever there was a blizzard or a severe cold snap.

The point is that there are a lot of low-impact ways to get your work in, without going overboard, burning yourself out, or worse, hurting yourself, and setting your progress back so far that you simply throw up your hands and give up.

HERE’S WHERE YOU START OBJECTING

How about we say it all together, and get it out there:

“I’m too busy!”

“I don’t have time!”

“I have too much stuff going on!”

Well, yes, you’re busy. We’re all busy, but if we’re serious about this thing, we have to make time. It’s all part of paying the piper. You sat around, pigging down on whatever and getting fat for x-number of years, and now part or your penance is that you’re going to have to carve out the necessary time to address this issue and get the full extent of your life back.

Years ago, while tapering down from, and finally off of cigarettes, I discovered that it’s best to become a creature of habit during these times. Get up at the same time every morning, and go to bed at the same time every night, or at least as close to the same time as you can realistically manage. That way, it becomes easier to block out those portions of your day you’re going to reserve for exercise, and stick to it. So, for instance, if you resolve that you’re going to start your day with a 30-minute power walk, you’ll need to consider setting your alarm for as much as an hour earlier.

Why that much more time? That’s another facet of the thing I talked about earlier, the fact that it takes at least 20 minutes for your brain to register the fact that you’ve eaten. I learned from an endocrinologist I went to see in Dallas that if you run out the door and engage in vigorous exercise before your brain knows you’ve been fed, your brain – which for those 20 minutes still believes you haven’t eaten since maybe 8:00 the night before – will send your body into starvation mode. Your metabolism will slow down to conserve the calories it knows for sure it has, and you’ll end up not losing weight at best, actually gaining weight at worst.

So, get up in the morning, drink a big glass of water to get yourself hydrated, eat the breakfast I suggested earlier, rich in protein and slow-burning carbs, wait 20-30 minutes, and then get out there and get your work in.

SPEAKING OF WORK…

That’s your next objection, isn’t it? “Dude, I work for a living, and can’t go running off to exercise.”

Are you saying you don’t get a lunch hour? If not, then maybe what you need to be doing instead of reading this is updating your resume. If you're allowed to go to lunch, then that’s your opportunity to get some more exercise in. Bring your walking shoes with you, even some comfy clothes to slip into if you can get away with it. You don’t need to wait that 20-30 minute interval this time. Eat your lunch, and get out the door for half an hour.

There are a lot of different ways to work your exercise needs into your work schedule. I travel a fair amount for my job, and if for some reason the hotel I’m in doesn’t have a fitness center with a treadmill, or the equipment’s out of order, I’ll simply walk out the front door, pick a direction, and go hoofing off in it. 15 minutes in, I’ll turn around and walk back. Boom, 30 minutes.

Here’s a funny story. Kind of. At least, I think it is. I had a trade show to go and work in Las Vegas about six months into my program. On our first night in town, once we’d set up our booth, my colleagues and I gathered in my boss’ suite and started having drinks. I’d lost close to 50 pounds at that point, and hadn’t done a lot of drinking during that period (and yes, my friends, we are going to touch on that topic in a moment), so I thought, hey, what the hell.

We’re talking three salesmen in Vegas, OK? We were at the Cosmopolitan, with no plans whatsoever to leave the premises, so we started on our own booze, crashed somebody’s party and drank theirs, then hung around the bar for a couple of hours after that. I fell into bed at some ungodly hour, but the following morning – at 4:30 a.m., because I was still operating on East Coast time – I had breakfast in the casino amid the high-priced hookers on their big push for their last johns of the night, then made my way to the fitness center. I realized as I chugged away on the elliptical machine, watching the sun come up over the mountains before heading off to work the trade show, that I was still loaded from the night before.

Obviously, that’s not something I’d ever want to repeat, and I certainly don’t recommend that to anyone else, but the point is that I was so habituated to exercise before work by then that the idea of not exercising never even entered my mind, even when I’d overindulged the night before to a degree I hadn’t achieved since way before I embarked on this journey. That’s the good news here. However much this routine is going to feel like a slog in the early going, however much it feels like a major disruption, before long it’s going to be a habit that you won’t want to put down.

Before moving on, I should say something about the after-dinner stroll: Do that, too. Aids digestion, is relaxing, and if walking is the only exercise you're doing, will round out your calorie burn for the day, and keep your net intake where it needs to be.

NOW, ABOUT ALCOHOL...

Sorry, but the story above notwithstanding, you’re going to have to cut your consumption for a while. That’s because it’s been proven in recent years that a calorie is not just a calorie. They’re not all the same. The kind of calories you consume from normal, whole foods are one kind of calorie, and the kind of calories you get from sugar-based products are different animals altogether. And man-oh-man, alcohol is the nuclear warhead of calorie delivery systems.

I like bourbon. Good bourbon, like Bulleit and Woodford Reserve. I like it neat, in a highball glass I can swirl it around in, and watch the light filter through it, and feel all warm and cozy as I sip from it. But when I was coming down from 256 pounds to 196, I had to put it down for the most part. Gone was the highball glass on any given night, replaced by shot glass on a Friday night. Not to slam shots from, mind you, but to sip from as though enjoying an aperitif.

I got my taste of good bourbon, but in a low enough quantity as to not affect my progress. And yes, it does affect your progress, as I found out the hard way. Every time I suffered a setback, every time I gained or flatlined instead of lost since the previous, weekly weigh-in, it was always because I’d thought I could get away with “just a few drinks” at some gathering or other (I broke even on the Vegas trip, by the way. Nothing gained, but nothing lost, either).

If you must drink – and look, there are going to be those times, and no one is telling you in this space to live the life of an ascetic – follow what I just this second decided to call the “Rule of Translucence”: if light can’t pass through it, don’t drink it. No Margaritas, no Daiquiris, no Mudslides, no Colorado Bulldogs, and sorry, Lebowski, no White Russians. Those and other, similar party drinks are so loaded with sugar-derived calories that if you're going to drink those, you might as well not bother with a weight-loss program.

If you appreciate good liquor, you shouldn’t ruin it by pouring stuff in it, anyway. But if you must mix, stick to drinks like vodka and cranberry juice (approximately 130 calories per cocktail), or gin and tonic (roughly 140 calories per drink), or a real, honest-to-god martini without any silly stuff in it (about 125 calories). Clear liquor has got the lowest calorie count of any of the drinks you might imbibe, so stick to that, limit yourself to two at the most, don’t do even that more than once every couple of weeks, and never right before a weigh-in.

I can't emphasize this enough: alcohol is one of your greatest obstacles to success, especially in the early stages of your program. If cutting your alcohol consumption down to nearly nil while you're shedding weight is something you can’t pull off, you need to look long and hard at that before you worry about your waistline.

Where am I now with alcohol, you may be asking? Well, it's pretty clear that I'm an admirer of the time-honored crafts of brewing and distilling. And yes, now that I've achieved my goal, I'm back to enjoying the products of those endeavors in adult-sized servings. A glass of wine with a meal, a pint among friends, a late-evening bourbon as I unwind. It's also true, though, that my rate of consumption will never again approach what it was when I was a younger man. While I might indulge mid-week at the occasional business or social event, or "just because", the great majority of my alcohol intake is on the weekends, and never more than three drinks over the course of a day, whether I start at noon, or at 9:00 p.m.

Having paid the piper, I wish to never again find myself overweight. Not from from overeating, not from sloth, and not from overindulgence in alcohol. Our vices are a privilege. If we abuse them, we lose them (or, they kill us). So, enjoy them when the time is right, but always be mindful of where you came from, and what role those vices may have played in putting you there.

A WORD ABOUT RESTAURANTS

Restaurants present the other great obstacle to you reaching your goal. Not only do the big chains, especially, load your plate with so much food they probably needed earth-moving equipment to do it, the food itself is loaded with butter and salt to give it the most intense flavor they can manage. I’m fortunate to live in a city that requires national chains to post calorie counts alongside their menu items, allowing us to make informed choices, but the rest of you may not have that luxury.

MFP is your best friend in this situation. The app’s database appears to have every menu item from every chain restaurant stored there. If you’re out with your friends or significant other, you should have already asked for their forgiveness in advance for the fact that you’re going to be looking at your phone at the table, so you can sit there with it out, inputting the dishes you’re thinking of having to make sure they’re not something totally off the charts. And believe me, most of what they’re putting in front of you is so off the charts that you’re going to be amazed, and any question as to why you’re lumbering around under all those extra pounds will be answered immediately.

A simple trick you can employ when you’re in a restaurant is to share, if you can. My wife and I eat breakfast out every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Before I started my program, I insisted on getting my own meal, since a) our tastes differ in many ways, and b) it’s mine. Mine, you hear me? Grr. She convinced me to start sharing, though, ordering a breakfast we could both enjoy, and splitting it right down the middle. When we started doing that, the results were twofold: I found myself satisfied on half my previous consumption, and we came out better off in the pocketbook for having done it.

If you’re out with clients, or people you don’t know well enough to want to share information about your personal life – or a meal – with, just use common sense. I said this earlier, but it bears repeating: Get something that you know intuitively isn’t going to be that bad, all things considered – grilled fish or chicken versus fried, grilled or steamed veggies versus something in a casserole – and do your best not to eat all of it. Take some away in a doggie bag, or just plain leave it. You can always go back to MFP later, see where you ended up, and see how much, if any, exercise you need to do to make up for it. Remember, if you use your basic common sense, you may not have to do anything extra at all!

THIS IS HABIT-FORMING

I touched on this earlier, and now I’m going to emphasize it. What you’re doing here is not a “diet”. It’s not even a weight-loss program, per se, because what you’re doing here is not temporary. You’re developing new habits that are going to last a lifetime. If you’re smart, you’ve given up the deadly dreck foisted upon you by Big Feed in the form of their processed, mass-produced foodlike substances. And whatever you do eat, you’re eating a lot less of it now than you did previously, and feeling satisfied.

Somewhere along the way, you crossed over into a brand-new world. You’re in a routine that's as unconscious as having that first pee in the morning. It’s just something you do without having to force yourself. If anything, not exercising is now the chore. You might even find yourself needing fewer hours of sleep than you did before, because your metabolism is now humming along at a faster, more youthful rate.

When you’re at the point where what was once a “routine” is now a way of life, you’ll find yourself marveling at the amount of food people cram down their gullets, and shake your head at the memory of when you were one of them. Way out in suburbia, you’ll feel like a fleet-footed gazelle, zipping around the big, wallowing hippos at the watering hole. Try not to stare, though. It’s rude, and you’ll look like a dick.

HITTING THE WALL

So, here you are. You’ve been eating less, eating smarter, and exercising each and every day, seven days a week for months. You’ve been faithfully and truthfully logging every calorie taken in and burned off in MyFitnessPal, taking care to come in above 1,200 calories gross, and well below your net goal. The weight’s been melting off of you slowly but surely, at an average rate of two pounds a week until you’re 30, 40 pounds below your starting point. You feel unstoppable. You've paid the piper, and you’re counting off the weeks on a calendar until you can do your victory dance.

And then it happens: Wham! You hit a wall. Your weight loss slows, then stops. Weigh-in after weigh-in, you’re coming in right around the same number. It’s a hell of a lot better than the one started with, but it’s still not the one you want to end up with, and that end number is right! There! So tantalizingly close, and yet you just can’t reach it.

See, what you may have figured out by now is that the human body is kind of dumb. Yes, there’s a brain on top of it that has sent men to the moon, but its ability to communicate with the rest of the system it controls is spotty, at best. It knows you’ve been performing marvelously, doing everything right in your quest to make your body healthy again, but all the body understands is that it’s been given an increasingly limited amount of resources to work with, and is dealing with ever-increasing demands placed upon it by the amount of exercising you’re doing.

So now, your body has shifted reflexively into conservation mode. Your metabolism has begun to slow again as a means of holding onto the caloric resources it has to work with, and what’s been working so well for you up to now in terms of your diet and exercise is simply not cutting it anymore.

Time to shake things up.

Whatever you do, don’t cut your food intake. By now, MFP has got you down to as close to 1,200 calories a day as is reasonable to adhere to, so leave that alone and look at the ways in which you’re getting your exercise. If you’ve been doing the same thing over and over for months, it’s time to mix things up, and add things your body has not become accustomed to. If you’ve been walking, try mixing in some jogging if you can (because now you're in good enough condition to pick up the pace), or cycling if you haven’t been doing that. Run up and down stairwells or stadium steps if they’re available to you. Swim laps in an Olympic-sized pool, if there’s one nearby.

I was doing all of the above with the exception of jogging (which I can’t do) and swimming (since I don’t have access to a big pool) so I was in a bit of a panic when I hit my wall, and started hovering around 210. Then a friend suggested weight-lifting, and that ended up getting me back on track.

You do not need to join a gym, or fill your garage with a bunch of expensive equipment. I went to the sporting goods store, bought two 20-pound kettlebells, and found a good workout routine online. The 20-pounders were, in reality, too heavy for me to start with, but living spaces are small in New York City, and I didn’t want to clutter up mine with a whole set of hand weights. So, I simply started off slowly and gently, gradually building strength to the point that 20 pounds in each hand was not a problem anymore.

Next, I got on board with the new trend and converted my computer workstation into a standing desk. Standing, it turns out, burns a surprising number of calories per hour, to the point that you can even drop one of your walking (or other exercise) sessions. When I implemented these two things, the weights and the standing up to work, I kicked my system back in gear, lost five pent-up pounds in one burst, and got on the home stretch to the finish line.

CONCLUSION

There you have it. Two simple principles – eat less, exercise more – requiring a fair amount of discipline in the early going that gives way to habit as you progress. Who’d-a thunk it, right? Whole industries have sprung up around people’s desire to be healthier, and isn’t it odd that even when they work in the short term, they fail to stick, and people’s weight comes roaring back, shooting right past their original starting points?

Two things cause those unfortunate results, in my personal opinion. First, there are those eager-to-please programs that cater to people’s desire to get the weight off fast! Like, now! Sure, they do, but the results are achieved so quickly, so radically, and in ways that a person would not even consider sticking to for life, that when they’re done, their bodies are deep in starvation or conservation mode, their metabolisms have slowed so much, that when they resume their previous lifestyles the caloric intake is nothing short of overload, and whoomph! fat again in a few months, and fatter than ever.

As to the more “involved” methods of weight loss, the reason I believe they fail is that they’re meant to. I’m not going to mention any names here, but if I run a company that makes its money by getting people to eat my packaged meals day in and day out, what am I doing besides putting myself out of business if I teach people how to shop for, cook at home, or order meals out that don’t involve my products?

If I keep people in the dark on how to make the right decisions for themselves, and convince them that my perfectly-measured meals are the only way to keep themselves trim and healthy, I’m as effective as any tobacco company in keeping my pigeons coming back again and again, totally dependent upon what I’m offering. People might get sick of eating my tasteless, frozen crap day in and day out, and go back to what they used to eat with no new knowledge of how to manage it, but back they'll come a few months later, tail between their chafing legs, ready to start over again.

But, what do you know? You just got all this advice for nothing, and if any medical professional wants to challenge or add to anything I’ve said here, I will be more than happy to make the update. Go on now, get out there and drop that weight without doing anything silly, and feel free to share your results in the comments section!

POSTSCRIPT TO MY FELLOW OLDSTERS

You know that saying, “age is just a number”? Well, guess what, age is a number, but not “just” a number. When that number is less than 30, we don’t have much to worry about yet in terms of our lifelong battle against the very same gravity that keeps us from flying off the planet. We’re strong, we’re resilient, and there’s very little we can do in the way of self-abuse, short of using heroin, cocaine, or meth, or becoming alcoholics, to lose the upper hand in that fight.

When the number is between 30 and 40, we’re likely in a state of equilibrium with nature. We’re neither winning nor losing, and we can mostly coast on what we’ve been doing so far, unless of course we’ve been going to extremes.

Beyond 40, our decline begins. We’ve been fighting gravity, and dumping toxic matter into our systems for decades, and now the effects are starting to show. Our waistlines expand, our blood pressure starts to rise, we start to get those little aches and pains in the morning, and we can’t keep up in the bars the way we used to.

50 is the break point. The number 50 is now an alarm, telling you it's time to go on the offensive against nature's onslaught. It's all downhill for us now, but we still have a choice: Do we want to go over a cliff and go splat, with all of the pain, medical expense, and heartache to our families that that entails, climaxing in our early demise? Or, would we rather wring some extra decades out of this one life we've got, and travel down a gentle slope that allows us to get the most out of our newly-won extra time?

I know what my choice was. What's yours?