Tag: weight loss

Post #2005: 55 pounds and still a loser. Maybe boring is good.

 

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.

Post #1985: Some comments on decaffeination and weight loss.

 

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.