Yeah, I’ve been silent for a while. This last couple of
weeks have been a struggle to get back into the discipline of dieting, during
which I had to re-think the decision I made last month to decrease my Lose It!
budget adjustment. First, though, let’s get to the weekly numbers:
Starting
Weight:
|
236.2
|
Original Target*:
|
250.4
|
Adjusted Target:
|
234.4
|
Actual Weight:
|
237.4
|
Loss/Gain:
|
+
1.2
|
Total Loss:
|
65.2
|
% of Goal:
|
47.0%
|
Avg. Loss/Wk.:
|
–
2.2
|
*Original target calculated from a
starting weight of 302.6 lbs. and an average loss/wk. of 1.8 lbs.
|
|
Since Aug. 11, I’ve only lost 2.4 pounds. Obviously, I
missed my goal of ≤
233.2 by Sept. 1, which by itself is disappointing. However, more frustrating
is the fact that I’m almost four pounds over the plan month target line and
will have to lose 5.6 pounds in the next week to get back on track. Not
impossible, but improbable because difficult without some degree of intentional
starvation, which after several months’ consideration I’m not inclined to
support even if we call it “fasting.”
I’m still 13 pounds ahead of where I’d originally planned to
be, which is good; as I’ve said before, the point is not so much to lose N pounds
by D date as it is just to lose the N pounds. But I don’t want the
program to sputter to a halt because I lost focus and/or discipline. The first
couple of weeks were excusable due to the circumstances of my mother’s death and
funeral. Not so the last couple of weeks; in all honesty, I can’t even call it
a “plateau.” “It’ll take as long as it takes” is meant to encourage patience,
not to rationalize dicking off.
Here’s one problem I face: When I was taking care of my
mother, my brother was home for dinner as often as not. So it was easy to
control my total calorie intake by taking responsibility for planning and preparing
family meals. Since Mom’s death, the majority of my meals had have been prepared
or purchased by other people, making it much harder to track nutritional values
and portion sizes.
On the other hand, it’s been over two decades since I
regularly had to prepare meals just for myself. At that time, much of my diet consisted
of things I could prepare quickly and easily, which usually meant things like sandwiches,
rice, ramen noodles, and boxed macaroni and cheese — high carb counts. Once in
a while, I’d fix some sort of favorite greasy-spoon dish. For instance, I would
bake a meatloaf and live off meatloaf sandwiches for a few days, or I’d fry up
a couple of butterfly-cut pork chops and some potatoes O’Brien. The rest of the
time, especially when I worked in the quick-service restaurant industry, I’d
live off fast food.
In other words, my young-bachelor diet was a nutritionist’s
nightmare.
Well, I’m still a bachelor, but I’m no longer young; my body
is suffering the effect of many years’ gastric mistreatment. At least some of
that diet was dictated by living at or below the poverty line, but more of it
was driven by inattention, ignorance (O the irony!), and gluttony. At one
point, I thought about pitching a concept to Food Network about a show centered
on meal prep for one or two people, which I’d given the working title Single
Servings, but hadn’t thought it completely through.
I believe the challenge now is to develop the Single
Servings idea further by taking as many of my favorite recipes as I can,
especially the light recipes, and resizing them for one or two servings. (Whether
or not I ever pitch the idea to a producer is not important.) There are
probably already books and websites devoted to the topic, so I’ll have to do
some research. Also, Home Chef provides a reasonably-priced alternative to fast
food that almost always fits within my calorie budget; Kroger’s offers the kits
in their stores down here. But like most people, I have favorite dishes, so the
bulk of the challenge is reducing their recipes to feed just myself.
Another concern: When, at the beginning of August, I scaled
my budget adjustment back to what I thought was a more realistic level, I had
forgotten the old maxim: “If’n it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”
Over the previous five months, I lost an average of 8.2 lbs./month,
or about 1.9 lbs./week, which was a little better than I’d planned for but not
so much that I really needed to concern myself about starving. Taking out the
250 calories and adjusting according to my actual activity (as recorded by
Samsung Health) allowed me to better gauge how much I needed to eat to feel
satisfied yet continue to lose weight. You can always trust your body’s
judgment of when you need to eat; but when you have the “scarcity mindset”
of a glutton, you have to retrain your judgment of how much you must eat
to satisfy that need.
(Sidebar: The way the Lose It! app works is, when you enter
in your activity — say, 2.89 miles of walking in 1:03 hours — it will estimate
the number of calories you burned doing it — say, 264 kcal — and subtract it
from your total intake, essentially pretending you didn’t eat as much food as
you really did. Hey, it works.)
I’d also forgotten that all the numbers we’re given are
averages and estimates. Even the NIH’s
recommendation of 1,500 – 1,800 kcal/day for men (1,200 – 1,500 kcal/day
for women) is an estimate, though I take seriously the warning that you shouldn’t
attempt less than 800 kcal/day without medical supervision. I’m the kind of guy
who gets into the left-hand lane of a major road as soon as I get on to it even
though the left turn I need to make isn’t for several blocks or even miles. I
sometimes create problems for myself in the present by trying to avoid future
problems.
At this point, so long as I continue to adjust for activity,
I really don’t have to worry about eating less than 1,500 kcal/day for some months
yet; and, with the exception of next Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, I should never
have to worry about eating less than 800 kcal/day. My doctor is happy with my numbers;
I have no medical issues which would warn against pursuing further weight loss.
And I have a new phone with a strong battery, so I don’t have to worry about
the Samsung Health app losing track of my day’s activity.
So I’m back to a base budget of less than 1,600 kcal/day. And
I have a plan of action to work my program into my new reality as a man now
mostly cooking just for himself. Will a book or a TV show come out of it? Let’s
see how well I can do it first.
Don’t look too far ahead.
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you — you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (Matthew 6:25-34 NRSVCE)
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