Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

Its been a little over one year since I have started my weight loss plan and I can't say that I could be more pleased. I started out at the end of January 2004 in the ball park of 250 lbs. Now 1 year later, I've dropped two pants sizes and 50 lbs. Here is what worked for me:

Wanting it
I've known for years that I needed to loose weight but didn't really do anything about it. All through high school I was fairly physically active but a lot of that stopped when I went to college. At school, I no longer was on any official atheltic teams and school work and parties kept me in a very sedentary lifestyle. As school went on, I found myself working during the day at my co-op job and going to school in the afternoons and evenings. This left virtually no time for exercise. After school, the same story was true except instead of parties, it was late night coding binges fueled by Mountain Dew. Only once in this 10 year stretch did I try to loose weight. It was my 2nd semester of my Junior year and I decided I needed to eat better and exercise. I was moderately successfully. I dropped about ten to twenty pounds and was feeling good about myself. I accomplished this by eating more salads (or more realisticly, lots of fat free salad dressing with some salad) and exercising during the 10pm - 11pm slot at the school gym. This all ended when summer came and the gym hours weren't so liberal. Soon I fell back on my old ways. So, you are right to be as surprised as I was when something inside of me clicked on in January 2004 that said, "I need to loose weight and I need to do it now".

Finding an exercise routine
The exercise i got that one semester in college was great but it failed me because I couldn't adapt to the lack of gym access in the summer when i wanted it. Finding a real, repeatable routine this second time around has been key for me. The word "routine" says it all. If it doesn't become part of your daily rituals then its something you are going to slack off of. For my exercise I have choosen walking/running to begin with and later added basketball to the mix. I choose the walking and running to start with because my wife has a treadmill. Being a scientificly minded person, I love the treadmill because it accurately measures things like speed, duration and distance. Its also a constant so the computer in there keeps you honest and doesn't let you slack off unless you explictly push the button to slow down. Angela has had this treadmill for over 3 or 4 years by this point and I had never used it beyond 5 minutes at a time goofing around. It was an old weak model that was a hand me down, so it wasn't surprising to find that I had burned out the motor within a few months of starting my exercise program.

It was hard going at first. I'd start in the 4MPH range and slowly work up to slightly faster speeds. It was very slow going at first and just the meer prospect of a speed like 6 MPH (that's a 10 minute mile) seemed scary fast. Now, I find 6 MPH to be a very nice, comfortable pace to start with. Now when I run, I try to do a minimum of 20 minutes with the average being 30 minutes. Ocassionally I will have the time to do a 60 minute session. For the longest time, I always thought runners were silly, silly people. Who could think of a more boring way to spend your time. Now, I look forward to my runs with anticipation. Its also nice that my after work runs coincide with decent television news programs so I am getting mind and body exercise all at the same time.

I added basketball to the mix about 2 months after the start of my exercise program. I was invited to a weekly pickup game that my friend James participates in. Its a good change of pace to do a different form of exercise espacially one with frequent starts and stops to simulate interval training. The best part of this routine is that I have someone to keep me honest. Many Thursdays nights, I'd rather stay home and cuddle on the couch with my wife than to go out and play basketball, but I know I have made a conmittment to go play and James keeps me honest. It certainly doesn't have to be basketball. Any activity you do with others on a regularly scheduled basis would work. I think that would be the best benefit of those walking and running groups you see around town. That brings me to my next point:

Peer Pressure
In addition to making sure I attend basketball, I have added additional peer pressure on myself. From about a week after I started my weight loss, I told everyone I came in contact with about my new exercise schemes and my weight loss goals. I knew that by making a commitment to my friends and relatives, I was forcing myself to perform or to loose face. As a testament to what good friends I have, they would periodically ask my progress and if they didn't I would give them the updates as I hit each little milestone (for example, each 5 lbs I lost). In addition to telling people about my weight loss, I put together a page with charts and a rss feed that tracks my weight. I have even found some co-workers and friends who use the page to keep tabs on my situation. Self-imposed peer pressure is such a wonderful technique that I hope to use it on other facets of my life, since it has worked so well for me. I have since learned this is a common technique used in 12 step programs and I can see why.

Measurement
Like I said before, I have a scientific bent, so naturally, measuring my progress has been key. To this end, I have been keeping track of various metrics during this whole progress. A particularly easy one has been pant size. When I started, I was wearing size 42 pants and I even owned a pair of 44's. Now I am comfortably fitting in 38's. I hope it won't be long before size 36 is something I can realisticly wear. Another metric is weight. I try to weigh myself everyone morning when I get up. I try to do it right before I hop in the shower, so that the conditions are similiar from day to day. I know that people don't suggest you weigh yourself this often because your weight can fluctuate wildly from day to day and espacially through the day. I realize this and don't freak out if the trend isn't always going in the right direction. The daily weighings are more ritual for me as it helps me to remember to do the task. If I only did it once a week, it would have been a much harder habit to start. With this data, I have produced some nice graphs. Lastly I informally keep track of my best 1 and 3 mile times. They are currently 8 and 27 minutes. I had originally intended to do an exercise log of sorts so that I could prepare charts of that activity as well, but I never did come up with a good way of comparing different workout styles I use.

Loose Clothes
Prehaps one of the best motivators of all is to find that your clothes are starting to feel loose. Its an almost intoxicating feeling to reverse trend on pant and shirt tightness. The downside to this is that I have had to start buying clothes again so that i can find some pants that stay up for more than a minute at a time. The positive of this is that I can actually buy attractive, flat front pants that look good. I was certainly in the pleated tan khaki rut for many years. Now I am branching out to cords, flat fronts and different colors. I feel like I am looking better from both a physical and style sense. A corollary to this is that people are noticing my new clothes and my new shape. It can be really weird to have people approach you at work to ask if you are loosing weight. These are people I rarely interact with so its doublly strange to have them approach me and strike up a conversation. It maybe awakward, but it certainly is a nice compliment and it does bring a smile to my face.

Diet
In addition to the exercise, changing my diet has been a big factor but in a way that most people don't expect. When I started this whole process, everyone wanted to know if I was on Atkins or South Beach or something else. I proudly told them that I was on the Mascolino diet. Here is what the Mascolino diet consists of:
*smaller portions
*lots of water
*replace soda pop with water (or at the very least diet soda)
*minimize snacking
*minimize fast food resturants purchases

That's the basics. When I cook I still use olive oil and heavy cream (I just don't use them in everything I eat). Besides the almost total elimination of soda, the big watchout is portion control. I'm of the school of thought that says you can eat almost anything you want if you don't eat too much of it. The way I have handled this is that I try to cook less food or in the worse case, I serve myself my portion and put the remainders away so that it is hassle to get into them. For example, its ok, to have some potato chips with my sandwhich but I get out what I want and put them on my plate and put the bag away in the closet. Bringing the bag to the table is a recipe for disaster.

Losing it slow and steady
One of the advantages of not being on one of the popular diets is that my weight loss has been relateively slow but steady. Averaged out for the year, I lost less than 1 pound per week. People on Atkins and Souh Beach often report weight loss in the 2 - 3 pound per week range. To me the slow and steady approach has been wonderful because I am slowly reseting my bodies internal govenors to be use to my new weight and appetitie. The weight chart is particularly illustrative of my body's attempt to come to terms with my new outlook. The chart looks very much like the stock market in reverse: lots of ups and downs but the graph is trending downward. This seems particularly normal and healthy as my body settles on its new weight. Even the spikes on the graphs aren't particularly bad when you can consider each of them was a special ocassion of some sort: a wedding, vacation, a big party and so on. Since these aren't things I do every week, the body quickly recovers and starts downward again.

I have found over time that I am naturally craving less food which is nice when I slack off on the exercise for a few days. The lower food intake doesn't cause my weight to soar if I stop exercising. I don't think my body would be that kind to me if I had lost the weight more rapidly.

Supportive spouse
I can't say enough about how supportive Angela has been through this whole process. It really helps when the person you share the most meels with as well is conscious about eating healthy along side of you. That certainly helps keep the temptations down. It also helps to get lots of positive reinforcements about the progress I am making.

Conclusion
This process hasn't been easy, but at the sametime, it wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. Getting started and establishing the exercise routine was the hardest bit. Almost everything else has been straightforward to implement. The results have been 50 lbs lost, clothes are fitting better, I am more physically fit and I am sleeping better. I still got a ways to go to hit my target weight, so wish me continued luck...