diet – savemaple.org

Introductory alcoholic ramble

This is the lowest of common denominators, a blog post about my experiences dieting.

I guess these days, with easy access to effective diet drugs, this is useless information. But, FWIW this is all old-school. Eat less. Exercise more.

Some things that might make this post worth reading are that:

I’ve lost a bit over 55 pounds so far, from a starting point of 285, eleven months ago. Little over a pound a week, at a steady pace.
My wife is, completely independently, also losing copious amounts of weight, and has decided that she likes bicycling as a form of vigorous exercise.
- I’ve said “check for pods” enough times now that it is no longer even remotely funny. (That is, this behavior is unlike the woman I thought I knew.)
- We have been acting independently on the diet front. Each to his or her own. But doing something at the same time makes things a lot easier, for both of us.
In addition, things get a little weird with that much weight loss. Particularly when you’re old (I’m a 65-year-old man.) Stretch marks ain’t the half of it. OTOH, I can now look down and see something other than my gut.
And yet, I’m still obese, so I should keep doing this. Pretty much permanently. And even if I hit some ultimate target weight, that just buys me a few hundred extra calories a day (from the lack of a need to lose additional weight.)
Surprisingly, that is not a bitter pill to swallow. That’s new. I had accepted this outcome intellectually long ago, but I feel that I have now accepted it into my heart. So to speak.
And that’s all bound up with other lifestyle changes.
- T-totaling after a lifetime of heavy drinking.
- But also correcting some other bad eating habits.

I’ve had a remarkably easy time of it. It’s like something in my head broke last September, and in a (mostly) good way. Cravings of all kinds died. To the point, my sense of hunger has died down. On a good day, I’ll reach a point in the day where I feel that I should eat, but I will only have the mildest of sensations of hunger.

If that’s how you experience hunger, dieting is a snap. I just never had that happen before.

I am hardly the first to have noted that this can happen. I recall renowned magician Penn Jillette (like the razor, but with a J) talking about the potato diet, specifically, how he lost certain types of food cravings.

But, in my case, near as I can tell, loss of cravings was a gift. I didn’t do anything to earn it. Maybe I’ve done a bit not to screw it up, for example, avoiding high-starch high-calorie meals. But where this came from in the first place, I have not a clue.

Best I can say, I seem to have gone through a change-of-life experience, almost a year ago. I don’t want to say I “hit rock bottom”, because that borrows from the gravity of those whose lives were destroyed by alcoholism, who then went on to sobriety. But I think I may have had its kinder-gentler cousin, simple straight-up and reasonably immanent fear of an early grave. That seems to have done the trick for me. YMMV.

I should probably write up some notes on the transition from being a heavy drinker to sobriety.

But, as with the rest of my life, it’s boring and logical. No DTs for me.

Alcohol is a sedative. Remove the sedative, and you catch some wicked insomnia on the rebound. The story being that, when subject to chronic sedation, your brain fights back by growing more “stay awake” nerve centers. The insomnia then ebbs slowly, because it requires your brain to un-wire all that. I only had a night or two of straight-up total insomnia, followed by months of disturbed sleep. I am now at the stage where I merely wake up to pee, which, for a guy my age, is unremarkable.

But a lingering effect is that I’m up for the day at a comically early hour. Like 4 AM. Not much I can do about that, and that might just be normal aging.

Did I mention that alcohol is a poison? Remove the daily dose of poison, and if you’re lucky, and haven’t pushed it too far, your innards will eventually heal. Mostly. As with the disturbed sleep, it kind of asymptotes its way to a new normal over many more months that you would have thought plausible.

As for all the rest of the promises of lifestyle change — your energy will be up, and you’ll always look on the bright side of life — well, that hasn’t happened to me. I’m not holding out hope that it will.

Source: Tom Paxton, “Hand my down my jogging shoes today”.

It’s easier to get around, because I’m lighter. That’s about it. Occasionally I’ll do something and realize that, pre-weight-loss, that was a chore, and now it’s not. That’s a kick.

Where was I?

Ah, diet.

Just to prove this post isn’t like any other dieting post you’ve ever read, I’m starting off with some math.

I have to eat how much protein a day?

I’m used to eating a certain mix of foods. Nothing extreme. Not meat-heavy, but not vegetarian either. Boring, middle-of-the-road eating. If you’re old enough, you’ll recall being taught to eat “a balanced diet”. That’s kinda the idea.

Vegetables, meats, grains, fruits, roots, shoots — it’s all good. That results in a “usual mix” of protein, starch, and fat in my diet, and it suits me fine.

A balanced diet — in terms of the fraction of calories from protein, carbs, and fat — gets screwed up when you restrict calories. That’s because, at a given weight, you simultaneously cut back your calories, and increase the amount of protein you should consume (if you lift weights regularly to try to minimize loss of muscle mass in dieting.)

As a matter of math, I end up with an unpleasantly large share of calories coming from the proteins in my diet.

Example of 100 grams of protein a day

For the sake of argument, assume that I should ideally eat 100 grams of protein a day. Recommendations vary a lot, even from seemingly reliable sources. But that’s ballpark for a guy my size and age, trying to maintain muscle mass with regular weightlifting.

What’s the big deal? That 100 grams is roughly four ounces.

Four ounces of pure protein.

My first mistake was in thinking that raw meat was mostly protein. Actually, raw meat is mostly water.

Below, if I obtain that 100 grams of protein a day from lean ground beef, with the fat broiled out of it, I need to eat 1.25 pounds of lean ground beef a day. Five quarter-pounders a day, of beef patties. Like so, via the USDA.

Obviously, I can get that protein from other sources. I could, alternatively, eat 16 hard-boiled eggs a day.

Or beans. I’ve been told since childhood that they are good for the heart. I could eat just shy of a half-gallon of cooked navy beans a day.

The problem is, I’d like to keep total dietary calories somewhere around 1700 per day. That results in diet in which most of what I eat — the majority of my food calories — is in the mandatory load of high-protein foods.

Heck, look at the bean line. If my only protein source is beans, it’s an overdetermined system of equations. I can’t satisfy both the calorie maximum and the protein minimum, because the protein in beans comes with a lot of starch attached. If I ate nothing but boiled beans for protein, I’d exceed my current daily calorie target.

The result is that meat-fish-eggs comprises a much larger fraction of my dietary calories, compared to what I was used to all my life. Not because I’m trying to eat paleo or go into ketosis. Just because I’m trying to meet (what I think is) a reasonable daily protein target, under a calorie cap well below calories required to maintain weight.

Like the USDA food pyramid, on its head.

Too-many-proteins sounds OK, until you’ve had to eat that way for a few months. Everything about the diet just says “way too much meat”. As a fraction of the diet.

A solution to this overdetermined system of equations.

There are a handful of all-protein or nearly-all-protein foods that you can use. Nonfat dairy products are high on the list. And they’re OK. But most of them (e.g., yoghurt) are mostly water.

But there are at least two types of all-protein isolates readily available that give you pure dry protein, extracted from some source. One of which is whey protein isolate, from milk (I think), and favored by body-builders. Shown above. (Another common one is textured vegetable protein (TVP), from soy, favored by the cheap, and survivalists. There are, of course, others, for example, plant-based protein powders.)

Today I broke down and took a trip to my local Vitamin Shoppe. The place is weirdly well-stocked, despite the near-total absence of customers any time I’ve been there. I picked up a big jug of whey protein isolate. This gives me 25 grams of protein — more than in a quarter-pound (raw) broiled hamburger patty, for 100 calories, and essentially zero fat or cholesterol.

(It’s also modestly cheaper than lean hamburger as a source of protein. That $80 jug above contains as much protein as 16 pounds of 93% lean ground beef.)

You’re well-advised to disguise it as best you can before you eat it. Accordingly, almost all of this stuff is sold sweetened and flavored, to make a stand-alone protein drink. My take on it is that it’s such a cutthroat market, the flavorings are sub-par.

So I bought the plain stuff, and I’m dumping it in my morning coffee, with some cocoa powder. It’s … edible … that way. And it gives me one-quarter of my daily minimum of protein.

I feel as if I’ve just re-invented Carnation Instant Breakfast (now renamed Breakfast Essentials), but my wife informs me that putting protein powder in your morning coffee was a hot new wellness trend in 2020, courtesy of Google Search. So I’m just four years late to this hip new version of Instant Breakfast.

At any rate, this slug of fat-free protein should, in turn, should free up some calories that I can use to eat something other than meat and eggs. It’s a way to dodge an otherwise overdetermined system of dietary equations.

I’ll save the rest of my observations on weight loss, such as they are, for another post.