This is me at 285 pounds or thereabout. For the past few months I’ve been fluctuating within a few pounds above or below 283. Actually, more like the past few years. I’ve occasionally dropped a few pounds, but I always came back to the 283 neighborhood, often hanging out around 285.
I haven’t been at 185 pounds since I was 18 and I had to lose some weight to get there. It’s been the battle of the bulge for most of my life for three simple reasons:
- I tend to inhale food.
- I tend to eat bigger portions than I need
- I like the feeling of a couch or desk chair against my butt (i.e. I don’t exercise nearly enough)
The goals of eat slower, eat less, and exercise more are simple. So they say. But the simplest things elude the best of us, and I’m far from the best. As the old saying goes, the best diet plan is the one you stick to.
These are the things my diet plan has to do:
- Be something where my diet meals can be adapted into non-diet meals for my wife and son with minor additions, so I don’t have to cook two separate meals. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. My son can’t eat eggs (we don’t have them in the house to prevent any cross contamination) and neither my wife or son like foods that are spicy hot (and a good tongue burn can make up for a lack of fat or carbs sometimes). Cooking two different dishes every shared mealtime is not sustainable.
- Be something where I can adapt on the fly. I’m not the best at keeping to a schedule, especially with a baby in the house, so the rules have to be simple and easy to apply in multiple places.
- Be a lifestyle change over the long haul rather than a short-term crazy way of eating that is unsustainable and will cause me to gain the weight right back.
For this reason. I chose the South Beach diet. I’m modifying it a bit. For example, in the recommended meal plan for “Phase I” of the diet, it has you eating eggs every single morning. No can do.
Basically, South Beach is Atkins with a more balanced approach to fats and carbs.
On Atkins, people have eaten stuff like hot dogs with cream cheese and bacon-wrapped pork chops. South Beach tries to cut down on or cut out saturated fat and trans fats, trying to get you to eat the “good fats” like fish oils, canola and olive oils, and other monounsaturated fats. Even then, bacon is not banned, but it is suggested that you eat bacon in moderation or try leaner cured/smoked meats like Canadian bacon.
TIP FROM GREG: If someone claims to be a foodie, ask them their opinion of Canadian bacon. If they can give it without laughing first, they’re an impostor and you need to run.
The more important thing about South Beach is that it defines carbs in two categories: good and bad. Good carbs are those intertwined with fiber and maybe locked up in more complex molecular structures so they release into your blood stream slowly and don’t jack up your body’s sugar response mechanisms. Bad carbs are the ones that enter your blood stream like a crowd of shoppers at a Wal Mart sale on the day after Thanksgiving.
Unlike Atkins where it feels like you’ve said goodbye to sandwiches for the rest of your life, with South Beach, sandwiches come back to the party much sooner than you might expect, and they’re not wearing that sawdust that passes for “low carb bread”. They’re just wearing whole grains through and through (some “whole grain” products wear them as a mask to hide lots of refined flour and/or high fructose corn syrup under the hood, so check those ingredients).
So, since I have 100 pounds to lose, I’m doing something that’s mostly South Beach, but we’re a little more tolerant of “bad fats”, at least in the beginning. That means no bacon-wrapped hotdogs with cream cheese on top, but we might be seeing those items appearing individually.
Add in some exercise and having to keep this blog to keep myself honest, I’m hoping to drop that 100 within a year or less.
Wish me luck… and stay tuned.
In a previous post, I said while I would not be specifically avoiding any artificial sweeteners like Equal or Splenda, I also wasn’t wild about using them to sweeten my tea or coffee. I also wasn’t wild about various sugar alcohols for various reasons, so I’d decided I was going to try some new stevia-based sweeteners, primarily Stevia Extract in the Raw from Cumberland and Truvia from Cargill.
Most diets recommend avoiding caffeinated beverages or cutting back on them because caffeine stimulates both appetite and insulin production. Generally, cutting back on caffeine isn’t a bad thing. But something that’s been even more on my mind is sweetened beverages.
When you’re just going to eat whatever you feel like, planning a menu and shopping in advance aren’t quite as important. I’ve always had an ability to look in the fridge and cupboard and figure out something I can throw together for a tasty meal. But when you’re planning to live the low carb lifestyle for a few weeks in a house with people who aren’t, the planning gets more complicated.
Entries (RSS)