Okay, I am not happy. In fact, I’m borderline depressed. I’m sure it will pass but a lot of it is due to my new diet.
And it’s only Day Two.
For years I’ve been wanting to do something about my weight. When I got married in 1993 I weighed 192 pounds. Now my 3PS weight (post poop – pre shower) is always between 220 and 230, usually hovering around 225. The lowest number I can honestly remember seeing on the scale is 218, and that was a couple of summers ago when I was eating a lot of vegetables and working outside on the farm. This summer, right after our annual OpenNMS Dev-Jam conference in Minneapolis I weighed in at 230 and change.
Last year I had my annual physical and my doctor was very pleased with the results. My blood work is stellar, and he even said that he was going to stop pestering me about my weight since it hasn’t significantly changed in 10 years, which is the period of time I’ve been seeing him.
But I’m still not happy about my weight. While in the right clothes I can look okay, usually pictures show that my gut “done lopped” over my belt. While I am not a nutritionist, I can only assume that if I could lose the weight I wouldn’t have to change my current diet much to maintain it.
The next question is to determine what my weight should be. One measure is a value called the Body Mass Index, or BMI. It’s based on weight and height.
I tell people I’m 6 foot, two inches tall, but I think I’m just slightly short of that, so to be conservative if I use 6′ 1″ as my height at 225 I have a BMI of 29.7 and at 230 it’s 30.3. Obese is 30.
Overweight starts at 25, so to get below that I need to weigh 189. That is pretty good psychologically, at it is both below what I weighed when I got married and it is below 190. To be in the middle of the “normal” range I’d have to weight 170, which I think is a little aggressive, so I plan to shoot for 175 – an even 50 pound weight loss.
The next decision was how to do it. There have been a number of studies that show that large weight loss is not possible with just exercise alone, plus I really don’t have the time to exercise. I hate exercise for exercise sake. I don’t mind physical activity, which is why I lose weight in the summer (usually), but I don’t crave it for its own sake.
My friend David is really into health, and he likes the Atkin’s style low carbohydrate diet. He’s in good shape but he’s also a 20+ year veteran of the National Guard, an avid golfer and he runs 8K a couple of times a week.
I don’t do that.
Plus, I just can’t buy that the Atkin’s diet is healthy. Any diet that considers fried pork rinds as a health food is somehow fundamentally flowed.
Now another friend of mine, Ben, started a diet based on the book “Eat to Live” by Dr. Joel Fuhrman. This diet emphasizes leafy greens and pretty much a vegan diet. He’s lost over 40 pounds since the end of July, and he claims that he didn’t have to starve himself to do it.
So this year I decided to change my diet, adopting the food choices outlined in this book. I started on January 3rd.
It’s day two.
The book itself is a little bit of an oversell. I’m through about six chapters and it presents a lot of evidence for why one should eat this way. Look, I’m sold. What I need is some plan for making delicious meals that make me forget about things like meat. And chips. And chocolate. And bread. And cheese – oh my, lovely, lovely cheese. What other spoiled food taste so wonderful, say, combined with bread, some tomato sauce and pepperoni?
(sigh)
And I miss hot food. I like my meals hot. Fuhrman is big on salads, usually raw. He recommends that one eat the equivalent of a head of Ramaine lettuce a day. I love Romaine, especially covered in dressing and parmesan cheese. But the whole raw, cold salad thing has me a little depressed.
Which is how I started this post.
On the upside, my PPPS weight was 224.8 on Monday morning and it’s 221.7 today. Not that it means much as I can drop 5 pounds with a good bowel movement, but it’s a start.
As the old Asian said, the journey of 10,000 miles begins with a single step. Or a depair.com says, the journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly.