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- Weight: 212 (-9 pounds)
- Body Fat %: 30% (no change)
Yesterday the scale read 211.6 and I didn’t believe it. So I was happy when I stepped on the scale this morning and it was almost the same. I lost 4 pounds this week–my most successful weight loss week since I’ve started.
Foodwise this week, I’ve caught myself making excellent choices on at least two occasions. Monday night, we ordered pizza and watched the drubbing of Ohio State. I love pizza but not the common pizza vegetables (olives, green peppers, and mushrooms are three veggies I won’t touch unless they’re hidden) and so I usually order a meaty pizza. This time, I stuck with the veggie pizza for my wife, and then…get this…didn’t eat ANY! Yep, that’s right, I ate a bowl of beans with a bit of cheddar cheese and some hot sauce instead! Then yesterday morning I went to the pancake place for breakfast with a couple of friends and our kids and…get this…ordered OATMEAL!
And so here I sit, lighter because of the food choices I’ve been making. It’s nice to see things pay off. I hope I can continue to do it.
On another note, my wife and I have been watching The Biggest Loser on NBC. In case you’ve never watched it, or never heard about it, it’s like Survivor for fat people. Talk about motivation. These people are morbidly obese and need to lose weight or they’re going to die. They’ve left their lives for 16 weeks to compete for the ultimate prize–health. The saddest thing about the show is that people who need to stay on because they need so much help end up getting kicked off. As we watched it last night, we both were crying at points. I’m going to write a post about the show later, because amazing things happen on it every time I see it.
J.D.
15 responses so far ↓
1 Leah // Jan 9, 2008 at 9:56 am
Congrats! You’re making great progress!
I love watching the Biggest Loser because these people are as real as you can get, and they are all working to get fit. Sure, they are also going for the money, but all of them tend to have great end results. (I actually use the Biggest Loser Workout 1 & 2 DVDs. I love that the contestants, who are a somewhat closer to my weight, are working out with you, not some slim, tiny, ridiculously muscular chick whose size I could never be in a million years).
I love the blog, and am really proud of you guys! I’m working on exercise and diet myself, and y’all are great examples for me. Keep up the hard work! (Sorry I wrote so much!)
2 metroknow // Jan 9, 2008 at 10:43 am
Beyond the inspirational points of that show my favorite segment so far was when they looked for a token that was baked inside a donut. In a room chock full of plates, bookshelves, tables, and boxes full of donuts.
Man if I could only have a lucid dream like that.
3 Joyce // Jan 9, 2008 at 11:40 am
Congratulations! You are my inspiration. Pizza? I will think of you next time and hope I can only eat two pieces. No, I am not ready to eat beans instead but, I usually eat so much I hurt. It’s my fav. food.
Good luck to you and thanks for sharing.
4 Bruno Figueiredo // Jan 9, 2008 at 1:29 pm
I was once 270 and went to 160 in 4 years, then I gained another 40 pounds. I lost the first 110 pounds through diet and exercise. The way I did it was by drastically cutting on some foods and exercising. My diet, if this is of interest to anyone was: Breakfast: milk with special K / yougurt and a piece of fruit; Lunch: Mixed salad with grillled fish or white meat; Dinner: Mixed fruit salad. Dinner should be a light meal since you’re just going to sleep. Two extra tips: once a week splash out on ONE meal (I mean, pizza, burger, whatever - otherwise you feel the diet to be a chore without rewards); get a scale and weight yourself daily.
5 Brigid // Jan 9, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Congrats on your weight loss and healthy choices!! Just bear in mind that you will probably not be able to keep up that pace idefinately. Not trying to be a Debbie-Downer, but I’ve seen a lot of people get discouraged when they get to the dreaded “plateau” phase and give up. I hate seeing that happen to anyone.
I’ve observed that most people who start a diet lose a lot of weight the first couple weeks. Some will say it’s just “water weight”, but I think it has more to do with your metabolism. Your body burns X amount of calories a day, partly based on the calories it’s used to. When you start consuming less calories, your body will start to compensate by slowing down. That’s why exercise is such an important part of the whole plan.
This also brings another issue to light about your friend that diets every other day. It helps to trick the body into thinking that it’s not on a diet because it’s confused.
Ultimately, focus on your healthy habits, not so much on your weight loss. The weight will come off in time, the habits are key - they will last you a lifetime.
6 Lauren Muney // Jan 9, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Congrats on the loss — and especially the new food choices! Now tell us - what did (do) you THINK about the new choices you made? How did/do they feel?
7 Brent // Jan 9, 2008 at 3:21 pm
I just found this site. I subscribe to the Get Rich Slowly blog, and just added this to my RSS reader. I turned 40 in October and tipped the scale at 230 lbs. Motivated to lose some weight, and also concerned about my long term health, I made some changes to my diet. As of today I am down to 202 lbs.
I recommend the Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman and the Nutrient Rich Blog. Also the TV show You Are What You Eat on BBCA is very motivational. I’ve pretty much avoided pizza, but a couple of times have gotten a pizza with no cheese and lots of veggies.
8 Emily // Jan 9, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Brent beat me to it! I came here to say that I am now addicted to You Are What You Eat on BBC America. I am about the same size as most of the people featured on that show, and it’s sad to admit, but there were times where I could eat like the people on the show. I am finally to the point that I can’t stand to look at myself, so at the start of the new year, I began Weight Watchers. Tomorrow will be my first weigh-in since joining. But I already feel better just by changing my diet! Good luck to you, it’s good to know that we’re not alone in a world of skinny people!
9 Eliza // Jan 9, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Have you seen The Biggest Loser Australia? If you can get a copy of it, I’d recommend watching that over the US version. The australia version is more “feel-good-understand-the-root-causes-and-its-effect-on-your-life” while, in my opinion, much of the US version’s theatrics are just cruelties.
(This true at least for the episodes I’ve seen from season 1 US and season 2 Australia)
10 Bev // Jan 9, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Way to go on losing 4 pounds!!
11 Bruno Figueiredo // Jan 10, 2008 at 3:31 am
Answering to Brigid, I think you’re right. We got fat because of poor food choices. It’s now 7 years since I started my “diet”. Now I eat lots of salads and fruit and very few rice/potatoes/pasta/bread. It’s a life choice. I know I can never go back to old habits if I want to stay this way.
12 Asithi // Jan 10, 2008 at 10:42 am
This year is the year for me as well. I am going to do it right and keep it off. We had a Biggest Loser Competition at work a while back too. The top two winners were men. The 3rd runner up was a woman. I think men do have an advantage when it comes to weight lose. My husband dropped10 pounds from Nov-Dec just by increasing the amount of time he spends in his woodworking.
I subscribe to your Get Rich Slowly blog as well.
13 dingbat // Jan 10, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I’ve never been more than 10 pounds overweight, give or take, but that has absolutely nothing to do with why I loooove The Biggest Loser. It’s a mental thing, a powerful motivational tool for me. If men and women carrying that much extra weight can exercise like maniacs and not die in the process, I can too. In fact, I can’t watch the show now without knowing that I’ve exercised regularly throughout the preceding week. Feeling like a slug while watching people work out and lose weight is no longer an option for me.
Also, the real trick they employ, diet-wise, is something very much like the South Beach Diet–it’s calorie counting, but almost exclusively lean meat/protein and loads of veggies, and no sugar during the time they want to lose weight most aggressively. I still revert to that if I’ve gone up a few pounds and need to knock them back off, and it works every time. Being a pasta-phile, though, I can’t do it consistently long-term.
14 Cammy // Jan 10, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Congrats on your success! It feels so good to have control, doesn’t it?
Happening upon a rerun marathon of Season 1 TBL last April is what started my lifestyle makeover. When I saw how hard they could work out, I knew I could do it, too. And I am.
15 greenman2001 // Jan 13, 2008 at 9:11 pm
I’m going to use me as an example: By the time I was 33, I had been happily eating pizza with meat toppings on it for 25 years. How do you think I felt about the prospect of eating beans with grated cheddar cheese every time we ordered in pizza for the next 47 years that I expected to live?
I know my limitations. I knew that if I turned every occasion of ordering in dinner into a contest between willpower and impulse that eventually I would lose. I needed a strategy that would enable me to make the right choice without thinking about it, let alone entering the arena as the underdog, with 25 years of very happy pepperoni pizza eating experience reinforcing my opponent’s odds.
I’m sure you already know what I’m going to say. The problem here isn’t dilemma of the food choice you were faced with; it’s the fact that you placed yourself at such risk for failure by ordering in dinner. When diet books talk about the essential need for lifestyle changes, this is the kind of change they mean, not whether you add cheese to the beans or allow yourself to “splurge” and eat pizza once a month as a “reward” for “good” eating. If your weight loss requires willpower, you — like me — are at an immediate disadvantage. Did you have to overcome any impulse to achieve 212 pounds at age 33? You, Mac, need a way of maintaining a healthy weight of 180 lbs just as automatically. That’s going to be tricky for us both, because we have 33 years of extremely effective unhealthy eating under our belts, literally.
So the question I had to ask myself was not, what do I eat instead of pizza tonight? It’s this: why am I living a life that forces me to order in my dinner at all? It’s THAT serious a lifestyle change. And in the meantime, to survive in the arena, I need to quickly eat a handful of cashew nuts and drink half a glass of orange juice before placing the pizza order for my wife, so that I’m not dialing while hungry: hunger is my enemy at any time I’m deciding what to eat.
I have a lot to say about THE BIGGEST LOSER, but here I’ll limit myself to one observation: the drama of the show comes from the contest between willpower and impulse. It’s nail-biting to watch, isn’t it? A show about losing weight slowly through automatic processes would be unbelievably boring.
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