New Year, New Approach

January 2, 2011 @ 09:51 pm

Okay here we go again.

So I fell off the wagon. No surprise there. I could probably just recycle posts from the last few times and I'd have the blog equivalent of Men's Health magazine or something. Life's been nuts. Work got super-duper busy but felt mostly like spinning my wheels. I haven't felt like cooking much, and didn't feel like I had the time to even get to the gym. The Beau and I got a dog who's simply adorable, but created a bunch of changes in our lives. I walk more than I used to now, which is good, but it hasn't done anything for weight loss with all that I've been eating. For me its always food - I simply kill my efforts by eating like a mad man.

So here we go again, again. The demands on my time are not lightening at all in the next several months. Work is staying pretty busy for a while, so is my personal life. We're getting married in early April and we have a lot to do in the mean time. So since I don't have a lot of time to devote to cooking and all that jazz, and because I need a more controlled way of handling food, I've signed up for Nutrisystem.

Over the Christmas break I saw my cousin again who's been on Nutrisystem for a while without doing any exercise - and she looks phenomenal. It was clear evidence that the approach can work, so I'm going to try it. I have a tux and honeymoon coming up, obviously. I'm not going to lose 100 pounds, but it could help me get an edge for April, especially when combined with other supplements and especially exercise.

As far as my blog is concerned, I'm going to change my approach.

When I started blogging, I'd hoped to meet and join a community of other weight loss bloggers and other guys and maybe even other gay guys on this weight loss journey. I joined Twitter and tried to follow / comment on other blogs and all that, but nothing has really panned out. It seems like a somewhat insular community that's hard for an introvert like me to break into. That's okay. I've had a few regular readers and I hope to keep hearing from you because you're all awesome, but I'm not going to blog for the sake of being a blogger or even trying to join a blogger community of any kind. This is just my journal.

So no more regular weekly features or scientific facts or advice or anything. I'll post randomly with things I'm thinking, feeling, experiencing, learning, etc.

I'm feeling good about this next stage. No promises, no big goals, no heavy expectations. I'm just going to press forward with a new strategy and keep on going.

0 comments | Topics: nutrisystem, strategy-philosophy

No Such Thing As a Day Off

April 23, 2010 @ 10:09 am

I don't really get to take days off.  I run my own business and aside from always needing to be working on something, I could be essentially on call on any given day in case of a server meltdown ... or a client meltdown (though I don't really tolerate those). Sure I take it easier on the weekends and I love to travel and get away, but I'm never truly far from the office as long as my phone is in range of a cell-tower.

Similarly, I don't really believe in "cheat days" when it comes to my weight loss journey. I hear tell of diets and dieters who work hard to eat nutritiously five or six days out of the week and then go hog-wild on the weekend. I have a few problems with that notion (for me):

• Eating nutritiously is not a temporary hobby to lose weight. For me, I have no intention of going back to processed foods and weeks-worth of pasta and bread. I may loosen the reins a little bit - some day - but when I reach my goal weight I'm not going to go back to the way I used to eat. I love real food, I intend to keep eating and cooking real food.
• It's too easy to overdo it on the cheat day; you can have 800 net calories a day (net! including exercise) for five days, but then skip the gym and go out on the town and easily eat 3500 or 4500 calories a day on the weekend. The risk is to completely negate the whole notion of eating well the rest of the week ... it's merely treading water.
• Looking forward to cheat days subconsciously associates eating right with negative connotations. You have to cheat because "the diet" is so awful. That will just lead to more cheating during the week, and before you know it, the "diet" is blown and we're starting over again.
• Cheat days do make "the diet" awful. If you reserve every notion of sweetness and tastiness for one day a week, then you may be forcing yourself to live on bread crust and water during the week. Another recipe for failure.

I don't have cheat days, but I do vary my calorie intake. "Cheat days" are colloquialized versions of the science that we should vary our caloric intake over the course of a week. It's not good to subsist at very-low calorie intakes every day of every week, our bodies will flip into starvation mode. So instead, on some days we should eat more, but not a lot more, than the average to tell our bodies there isn't really a famine out there.

So that's what I try to do. Rather than "cheat" and gorge myself silly on ice cream and Starbucks (or ice cream WITH Starbucks) one day a week, I enjoy my little treats every so often on any given day. One or two days a week I eat more than the average, and I keep switching it up to keep my intake varied, but my overall weekly caloric deficit constant.

Anyway, a bit of my philosophy. And by the way, this applies to the gym, too. I will take days that are much lighter or even skip the gym, but it's because the body needs a rest day, and I tend to work really hard the rest of the week.

2 comments | Topics: exercise, food and eating, strategy-philosophy