Reply to My humblebrag regarding weight loss

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[quote=jsteele]I know that when you get too big for your clothes we say that you have "outgrown" them. But, what do we say when you get too small? "Ingrown"? If so, I've ingrown my clothes several times over the past few months. In August I was wearing 36 inch waist jeans. In September I changed to 35 inch, in October to 34, and in December to 32. Now I am wearing 30 inch waist jeans, just like I wore in high school. The result is a big pile of barely worn but too large clothes.

That's the end of my humblebrag. The rest is an outright brag. Some posters have seen me mention my weight loss and suggested that I should post about it here. Now that I've hit an important (for me) milestone, I thought I would do that.

Of course, any weight loss is likely to come down to diet and exercise and my situation is no different. I'll cover each of these separately.

Exercise:

For reasons that I really can't explain, on August 18th I decided to start exercising as a way to lose weight. We already had a rowing machine and an exercise bike and I decided to start with the rower. The console on the machine said that I had last used it in January 2014, so by August 2017 I was pretty rusty and out of shape. I spent five minutes rowing and called it a day. I had already told myself that I would start slow and not expect immediate results. Over the next several days I increased time and distance so that by early September I was rowing 2000 meters in about 10 minutes. I also added 20 minutes on the exercise bike.

September 4 was a game-changer for me because I started using an Apple Watch. One of my sons had bought one, worn it for a while, and decided he didn't like it. I decided to give it a try. For those who don't know, the Apple Watch has three rings: one for exercise (30 minutes a day); one for standing (10 times in a day), and one for movement (and adjustable number of calories). You win achievements for closing the three rings daily. I immediately became obsessed with closing my rings.

Realizing that 10 minutes on the rower and 20 minutes on the bike were not going to get my "move" ring closed, I started taking our dog for a 2-mile walk each day. I also increased my rowing so that I was eventually doing 4000 meters in about 20 minutes. In late October, we bought a treadmill and my exercise routine basically became 20 minutes on the rower, 20 minutes on the bike, 20 minutes on the treadmill, and 40 minutes walking the dog. When we bought the treadmill, I had never actually run on one and thought I might do nothing but walk. However, I quickly started using it for running and routinely do 5k runs on it now.

In December, our exercise bike broke and we bought a new one. The new one had a built-in program called "Sprint 8". Not being an exercise guy or even knowing much about exercise, I had not been indoctrinated into the religion of high intensity interval training (HIIT). But, Sprint 8 made me a believer.  You do a warm up and a cool down on either end of alternating "sprints" -- 30 seconds of riding as hard and as intensely as you can -- and "active recovery" -- slow riding. This is extraordinarily good for weight loss. I had already been doing limited intervals on the treadmill, but I started to alternate between shorter interval programs and longer runs.

The Apple Watch tries to increase your move goal each week. Mine started at 640 calories and I occasionally let it increase to where it is now at 800 calories. In December I won an achievement for closing all rings 100 times. Since October, I only failed to close my rings twice. Both days we were traveling all day and I didn't have time to exercise. I can't emphasize enough how important the Apple Watch has been to keeping me motivated.

Diet:

Just as I am not an exercise expert, I am not a nutrition expert. It would not surprise me in the least if such experts suggest that the diet that I have followed is insane. I am not recommending it, but only describing what worked for me. As I have said, the Apple Watch was great for tracking the calories I worked off with exercise. Realizing how much effort it took to work off calories made me more interested in reducing the number of calories I put in. I found the "MyFitnessPal" app which is excellent for tracking the calories you eat and I started using that to help reduce my intake.

I eventually settled on variations of this routine:

First thing in the morning, eat a banana and drink 32 ounces of water. Why 32 ounces? I had a 16 ounce glass that I would fill twice. No other reason.

After my morning workout, I would eat one fried egg with salt and pepper.

Lunch depended on a lot of things. If we had some tasty food around (especially leftovers from the previous night's dinner that I had most likely skipped), I might eat that. But, this would only be true if the food in question was fairly light in calories. Otherwise, I tended to eat 2-3 tablespoons of hummus with celery. This meal was where I gave myself the most flexibility.

The rest of the day I would try to eat nothing but fruit, vegetables, and nuts (primarily cashews). Because nuts have a lot of calories, I limited these to a very small amount. But, they were good for stemming off hunger. My goal was to eat just enough to not feel overly hungry, so throughout the afternoon and evening I would eat small amounts. I essentially gave up dinner. Because I am a picky vegetable eater, my diet was heavily slanted toward fruit. Generally raspberries, blackberries, cherries, strawberries, and grapes. I've eaten huge amounts of these over the past few months.

I stopped consuming all alcohol, avoid processed foods, and avoid sweets (except my mom's cookies over Christmas). I drink a lot of water (basically I don't drink anything other than water).

Of course there were days when I went off my diet. Thanksgiving and Christmas both occurred during this time. I managed to make it through Thanksgiving with very little weight gain (just a pound), but I gained seven pounds over Christmas (which I lost again by the beginning of January).

I don't really know what weight I was back in August, just that it was over 190. I wasn't weighing myself regularly or consistently and I refused to enter my weight into my iPhone's Health app until it was below 190. As a result, the first entry in my phone's log is on September 16 for 189 lbs. But, I had been 2-4 pounds heavier than that. As much as I hoped it was otherwise, there was no avoiding the fact that this put me pretty solidly into "obese" BMI territory. Getting to simply "overweight" (which I did towards the end of October) was a big victory. On November 1, I was 178 and on December 1 I was 166. This roughly 10 pounds a month of weight loss kept up and on January 1 I was 157. Today I am 149 so weight loss has slowed a bit. But, I am now in "normal" BMI territory and more than 40 pounds less than I began.

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