Ironically, one thing I cannot do, without caffeine, is expository writing.
Perhaps the only useful point of this post is that a) I need caffeine and b) it makes me hungrier, some hours later. Caffeine is no friend when dieting. That’s my conclusion. That, despite its direct effect on speeding up your metabolism. I find that it amps up feelings of hunger, later, relative to how hungry you would have felt, had you not consumed it in the first place. For me, in the context of dieting, that drawback outweighs any putative effect of speeding up metabolism.
The rest is just detail unlikely to apply to the typical reader.
If I can lose just 15 more pounds, I’ll be overweight.
Source: The Gummint. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmi_tbl2.htm
And that’s good news. Because it beats being obese, which is where I’ve been for roughly the past four decades. But that’s water over the dam. Today, counting from my highest-remembered weight (285?), to yesterday’s gym-dehydrated low (235), I’ve now lost about fifty pounds, in a little over ten months. BMI-wise (above), I’ve gone from the solid 37 charted above, leftwards on the chart, to be an aspiring 31 BMI.
Just two clicks away from merely being overweight. Huzzah.
For you, and you alone, I now reveal all my weight-loss secrets.
Alcohol
My weight loss mainly stems from failing to drink a thousand calories of ethanol nightly. That started in September of last year.
I can therefore recommend giving up heavy drinking, if and as applicable, in favor of abstinence, as a good starting point for weight loss. For me, weight loss simply ensued. There was a brief period of rapid “water weight” loss, followed by a slow but steady pace of “real” (i.e., fat etc.) weight loss.
I attribute the sustained, slow weight loss more to improved general health than to the direct effect of foregoing the alcohol calories. If nothing else, once I quit drinking, I ate more.
TMI.
Long and the short of it is that having one’s liver working well reduces one’s hunger pangs.
And that helps a lot if you’re trying to lose weight.
Who’d have guessed, given the central role of the liver in human metabolism. /s
Wheat
Wheat’s my frenemy.
(Rant: Just FYI, I took a dislike to the term only when I spelled it from its pieces (friend and enemy) — so, frienemy — and got the evil red underline of bad on-line spelling. I don’t grasp why spelling butchery is allowed to accompany creation of the portmanteau word. Allow stuff like this, and the next thing you know, kids will pronounce Bros. to rhyme with snows, instead of others.).
I used to crave (e.g.) pasta, even as pasta increasingly disagreed with me. Sometime between last September and this past January, it occurred to me that I should try saying adios to wheat.
So that’s what I did — mostly.
I guess the issue is how frequently the old me would resort to something like spaghetti or ramen as a meal in itself. That is, make a quick meal or snack almost purely from carbohydrate. Call that a starch bomb.
Metabolically, starch-bombing yourself has to knock you somewhat off-kilter. It may not be as extreme as eating candy bars to quiet a rumbling stomach, but it’s in the same family. It might be reasonable to expect some blowback down the road, in the form of increased hunger later.
My point being that any resulting weight loss attributable to abstaining from wheat may or may not be due to anything particular to wheat, it could be due simply to easier avoidance of starch-bomb meals. As, in the past, and for most of my life, my favorite quick meal was real pasta in any of its glorious forms.
While gluten-free pastas exist, they are at best an adequate substitute for real (wheat) pasta. They are food, but they do not do not exactly whisper “eat me”as I eye the pantry. They are food in the sense of being a source of calories. FWIW, my favorite gluten-free pasta is corn-based elbow macaroni from Barilla. It’s good when freshly cooked but does not refrigerate/reheat well once cooked, The 12-oz box if it rehydrates to roughly the same volume as the 16-oz package of real pasta, which in turn gives Barilla elbows a light “mouth feel”, which is a plus in a gluten-free pasta. In any case, it’s a quick meal of sorts, with red sauce and cheese.
At some level, it doesn’t much matter whether wheat has some undefined properties that something-something-something and boom, you’re fat. Or whether it’s just a case that a ban on wheat greatly reduces my consumption of high-starch meals. I may eat some wheat, but I won’t buy (e.g.) boxes of real (wheat) pasta, thus ensuring less opportunity and less temptation to go for a quick starch-bomb-type meal.
And that’s good. I think. Either way works for me.
That said, it’s a hassle to avoid wheat. Mostly when eating out. But I don’t have to avoid every bit of it, as if I had celiac disease. I just no longer make a meal of it.
Caffeine, the world’s favorite drug
Source: American Chemical Society
Finally, I stopped consuming caffeine somewhere around February of this year.
Caffeine is the joker in the deck. For me. YMMV.
It’s the lowest-common-denominator, drug-wise. It’s everywhere. For example, the recently-passed revised zoning regulations in the Town of Vienna, VA mandates that any redevelopment of retail space along the Maple Avenue corridor must contain at least one coffee shop for every 20,000 square feet of ground area.
/s (But we do have a lot of coffee shops, in what is nominally a town of population 16K.)
But caffeine, like its big brother speed, has some undesirable metabolic side-effects. At the very least, it can enable self-abusive behavior by being able to shock you awake chemically, despite being in a state of fatigue or generally poor mental or physical condition.
For sure, caffeine has direct effects that suggest it should help you lose weight. Caffeine revs up both your nervous system and your metabolism. Raises blood pressure. Lowers reaction times. Speeds digestion and elimination. The whole shootin’ match runs faster under the influence of caffeine. Or, at least, mine does. Which should (and I think does) mean that you burn more calories. (Pretty sure all of that is true, but I’m not going to check references.)
So what? Don’t people say your energy will rebound, a few days to a few weeks after you stop all caffeine? So, over the longer term, caffeine should make no difference one way or the other, for your metabolism. Shouldn’t it?
That’s what they say, and it may even be true for some.
Not for me, a 65-year-old man. Not if you mean “rebound back to your prior, caffeinated level”. My decaffeinated energy level did not return to my prior, caffeinated level.
Instead, I’m slower at all speeds, once I’m decaffeinated and past the detox period. Absent caffeine, all my gears, mental and physical, seem to have dropped down a notch.
But this may not be such a bad thing, for losing weight. Even if the main effect of caffeine is to speed up your metabolism (which should help you to lose weight), let me make the case for de-caffeination helping weight loss.
First, I don’t miss the post-caffeine hunger pangs I used to get. So all that “speed up your metabolism” jazz sounds great, until you realize that means that you’re just going to get that much hungrier, that much sooner, as your body burns through your short-term reserves faster under the influence of caffeine.
But more importantly, all my reactions are more muted when I’m de-caffeinated, including my reaction to being hungry. Absent caffeine, I don’t so much react to hunger as recognize it, and realize that I should eat something. Eventually.
I haven’t lost my appetite. But my hunger no longer screams at me. It’s more of a nag now.
I have no idea how long this blessed state will last. I can’t really say exactly what caused it. But if I could bottle and sell it, I’d be a billionaire.
In any case, weight loss without undue suffering is news to me, as an adult. Never experienced it before. (Without weight loss drugs, I mean. I have no experience of that.) I attribute the relative ease of weight loss, in part, to not being routinely strung out on caffeine, due to a general “dampening” of feelings of hunger that comes with being fully de-caffeinated.
Alternative, it might be due to a synergy or threshold effect from the combination of no alcohol and no caffeine.
Maybe the Mormons are onto something?
Or maybe it was Dick Gregory.
So there you have it: I’m uncomfortably numb.
I’m closing in on 50 pounds of weight loss. Give it another couple of weeks, and I’ll be there for real, and not just glimpsed at my dehydrated lightest.
So far so good. I don’t seem to be losing much muscle mass, based on the weight machines at the gym. And I feel better. Mostly stuff that one would expect. Think about taking off a 50-pound backpack, and you’ll get the gist of it.
Never drinking caffeine has some major downsides. I’m just plain dumber without caffeine. So I cheat. Or, more specifically, I drink some caffeine, occasionally. Mostly when I’m trying to write something. As now.
But the big unexpected upside to going caffeine-free (or nearly) seems to be reduced feelings of hunger. Turning that around, maybe, in hindsight, a caffeine-driven lifestyle adds to the likelihood of overeating. For some.
For sure, I do not consider caffeine to be a help to dieting, as is sometimes suggested. For me, it is a hindrance.
Back on task, if I lose fifteen pounds more, I’ll be classified as overweight, not obese, per my body-mass index (BMI).
But I do lot live and die by the BMI table. Mostly, that’s because I’d have to lose another 60 pounds to achieve normal weight, per BMI. Like that’s going to happen, absent widespread famine or terminal illness. For my height, “normal” BMI is less than I weighted when I graduated from high school.
Hey, I’m big-boned. I’ll settle for “not obese”.
In any case, the only way I can describe it is that this weight loss has been easy, so far. (I mean, after I got various addictions under control. After that, it’s been almost effortless.
I just eat “moderately” and I lose weight slowly. What a concept. I sure wish this had happened earlier, and I hope it never goes away. Weight loss without suffering. What a concept.
When I reach for explanations of this apparent sea-change in me, one explanation is that, when I gave up alcohol last year, something in my brain broke. I seem to have lost all sense of “craving”.
Not just craving for alcohol, which is fantastic. (Truly, if I hadn’t lost that craving, I would not have been able to achieve a prolonged period of abstinence.)
But in a classic case of baby and bath water, I seem to have tossed out any sense of “craving” in general.
This makes for a dull(er) life, but is a real asset when it comes to losing weight.
In any case, I seem to have ended up in a state of being … uncomfortably numb? I’m not blissed-out all the time. If nothing else, that would be hugely abnormal for me. Instead, I (e.g.) get hungry, but most of the time I can’t be bothered to do anything about it.
From a weight-loss perspective, that’s ideal.
While 90% of this change that is mental, surely the other half is physical. (With apologies to Yogi Berra).My metabolism is on a more even keel. That starts with a lack of ethanol calories, but proceeds from there to a ban on wheat-centered meals like ramen or pasta, leading to fewer starch-only or starch-heavy meals.
And ends with respecting caffeine for the drug that it is.
I do admit, however, that a potential alternative explanation for sustained, seemingly effortless weight loss would be some form of cancerous tumor. As opposed to my change in lifestyle.
But if so, hey, at least I’ll die thin.
Ba-da-bing.
It has been a bit weird, losing this much weight. I’ve changed clothing sizes, but that’s to be expected.
I didn’t expect to resize items that I would never have associated with being fat or thin. Things like my bicycle seat (the butt-to-pedal distance has changed?). The strap on my bike helmet (my head/chin now has a smaller circumference?) I’ve had to shorten my watch band. I didn’t even know I had wrist fat. Let alone lose enough of it to matter. But the steel watch strap does not lie.
And yet, this amount of weight loss has been surprisingly far from a life-changer. Some things are easier. Again, imagine taking off a 50-pound backpack. But on the whole, it’s been less of an improvement that you might think.
The biggest disappointment is my skin. I need to devote an entire post discussing the various snake oil treatments available for stretch marks.
/s. I think.
I feel lighter, yes. Younger, no. Guess I’ll have to settle for that.
I gotta go eat something.
