I have yo-yo’d between 190 and 230 for the last 5-7 years and I decided to face reality and do something about it.
I am otherwise healthy but I’d like to stay that way, and there is no way around it, being that size for me is not beneficial and it’s not sustainable. It turns out correcting this issue was not nearly as complicated as I thought.
Here’s where I’m starting: I eat clean, I’m not super active but I’m also not sedentary. I don’t smoke, drink alcohol, or take any prescription drugs. I was baffled, why am I so fat? I was making a few mistakes.
1: Eating too much, my portions were too large but snacking was also a big problem.
2: I opted for sort of a paleo approach to foods – not really – but I favored whole fat options, fatty steaks, and chicken thighs.
I also learned a few things.
1: Our bodies are efficient at storing fat. If you over eat, your body uses carbohydrates for fuel and stores excess body fat. The body has demand for fat, some systems prefer it for fuel. Therefore, about 25-30% of your calories should come from fat, but not much more. On top of that, if you do have a few lean days, your body burns glycogen stored primarily in the liver before touching fat.
2: If you keep excess fat intake low, you have a larger margin of safety if you overeat protein or carbohydrate. Protein can be converted to carbohydrate, and carbohydrate can be converted to fat – the process is very metabolically expensive and doesn’t happen under normal conditions very often. Instead excess carbohydrate is stored as glycogen – a precursor to ATP.
So here’s how I’m fixing it. I heard about a company called Dawg Food. They make bags of cooked chicken and veg, minus any seasonings. This makes it easy to eat lean – you can scoop a cup out, pop it in the microwave, add a sauce or a seasoning and be good to go.
I’m not completely helpless and decided to just make it myself. I grilled chicken breast, K made extra lean Turkey meatballs, and then we flash froze them and bagged them up. I bought some frozen veg, like stir fry mix, broccoli, corn, sweet potato and butternut squash. When I am hungry, I scoop a cup, nuke it, season it and I’m good to. One cup has about 50g of protein and maybe 5-10g of fat.
I also switched my diet to skim milk products. I make the same bowl every morning with 100g of blueberries, 3 tbsp of chia seeds, 15g of maple syrup and 170g of Greek yogurt. It makes everything simple.
Finally I decided to just use a freaking app. I downloaded MyNetDiary. It has some smart features and I turned them on (autopilot). It syncs with my health metrics, steps, weight etc and figured out how many calories I can eat per day. As I lose weight and my maintenance calories decrease it decreases my daily allotment until I am back to a healthy weight at a healthy amount of food energy.
So far it’s been 18 days and I’ve lost about 9 pounds. Most of this rapid weight loss is excess water weight. My target is 170, which would put my BMI at 24, however, I have a lot of muscle and I’m not sure I can reach 170 without giving up some of it. I’d love to put on an extra 10-15 pounds of muscle once I get rid of this fat.
The goal is to be reached by mid April, from there I’ll start working on seriously building muscle.