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 If you’ve known me for a while, you have seen me quite heavy and quite skinny. Between my sweet tooth and my low metabolism (efficient body), I am naturally overweight without taking any corrective measures.

More than a decade ago, I did a training and diet regimen that made me lose about 60 pounds, from 223 to 165 (I pretty much looked sick at that point).  Then I moved into a rural area, started a new job, stopped working out and gained everything back in the following years.

Then I did the weight loss thing again in 2002 with success. But since then my weight have followed a roller coaster. After a while, either a vacation time or a period with frequent business trips will trigger a slip and I let myself go for a while. In the period till 2007, I have been good at catching myself up before it was too late and bring it back down. But since, I completely lost it and recently reached my heaviest state to date, last December: 228 lbs. Here is a graph of my weight from 2002 to early January. Did somebody say “saw tooth”!

CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION

For the last year I’ve been saying to myself that I needed to do something but without acting on it. Last December I went to Mexico…
  

 … and came back really sick for a couple of weeks. That triggered an unintentional 8 lbs weight loss. During the holiday break, I was not feeling fantastic either, so I did not eat much. Therefore I decided to capitalize on it and go back to my diet and training regimen this January.

The good news is that it is easy once I started. By ‘easy’ I do not mean pain-free or effortless.  I mean that I know exactly what to do, as I’ve done it many times in the past with success.  What I will have to be more careful in the future is the maintenance phase.

For the weight loss phase, the only thing that works for me is the combination of both physical training AND dieting. If I do only one of the 2, then motivation drops after a while. That’s the reason for the ‘ups’ in the curve: stopping the training. The one thing prevents me to cheat at the other thing. If I passed 45 minutes on a stair climbing machine to see I only spent a few hundred calories doing so, it makes me think twice (or more) before eating anything I should not!

BASE PRINCIPLE

The basic principle is very simple. It does not follow any of the mainstream extreme diet plans such as Atkins or other similar thing. I’ll call it the “Engineer’s Diet”.

The principle is the following: you must burn more energy than the amount you intake by eating/drinking.  It is physics: the body has no other choice than to go to its stored energy reserves (read FAT among other things) for fuel.

Ok.. there is a little more to it to make it right, but it still goes back to this principle at the root. Here are some more details on the plan I use.

OBJECTIVE

It’s important to have an objective and to monitor progress.  There is no better motivation than to see results in the right direction.  Daily weighting is a must.

I am targeting the 175 lbs area. That means a total of 53 lbs to lose. From previous experience, it is relatively easy to achieve a 2 to 2.5 lbs loss/week.  That means it is going to take 4-6 months to do depending on how many setbacks I have (vacation, business trips, slip-ups).

TRAINING PLAN

For the training part, I combine cardio training with weight lifting. I usually do 3 sessions of weight lifting in a week, for 45-60 minutes each, plus 3-5 sessions of cardio training (30-60 minutes) per week. Some of the cardio is done before and after each weight training session.

For the cardio training, I use a heart rate monitor to make sure that I train as hard as I safely can for the entire duration of the workout, to maximize energy expenditure.

I will adjust the resistance/intensity of my activity so that my heart rate does not fall much below 148 and do not exceed 165 [beats/minute] for the length of the workout.  I can’t use a threadmill because of my knees, but I’ll use the StairMaster machines, elliptic machines and exercise cycles. In the summer, there is nothing like rollerblading on the side of the river.

DIETING PLAN

As per the basic principle, the caloric intake must be reduced. However, it must be done the right way.
In my first programs, I was a bit excessive. The first time, I think I had no bread, no rice, no pasta, no butter, no beef, no margarine, no mayo, no potatoes, no deep fried food, etc  for as long as 6 months to avoid carbs and fat. I am not that extreme anymore, but I will be very careful with the quantity I eat of any of these things.

Now, I am no expert in dietetic, so take it for what it’s worth, but here are the principles I successfully apply.
Main rules:

• I target for 1200 – 1600 calories per day, without counting them religiously. I will read the labels of what I buy and eat. For the things that do not have a label, THIS LINK  is very helpful to have a good idea on many products.
• Never skip a meal. While ‘not eating’ obviously reduces caloric intake, but it throws your body in shock and will reduce its metabolism even further so that energy reserves can last even longer. That’s the opposite of our goal.
• Therefore, I eat something every 3 hours. That means a small snack between each meal, totaling 6 SMALL meals throughout the day. Once your body knows something is constantly coming, it does not need to store as much energy, and after a while your metabolism kicks up.
• Without trying to avoid them completely from my diet, I try to reduce to the maximum carbohydrates (around 5 cal/gram) and especially fat (around 10 cal/gram). A little more carbs on training days is not only OK but preferable.
• I try to have as much lean protein as possible. It also helps to build muscle. That means a lot of white chicken, lean turkey, fish, tuna,  1% cottage cheese, low fat yogurt,  etc. I make sure there is a large proportion of protein in each of the main meal. In the summer, I barbecue a lot to avoid using cooking oil (or else).
• I do not want to be hungry. So I eat a lot of food for which the ratio (volume/caloric content) is very high. This includes almost all fruits and vegetables. You can eat these in large quantity.
• For the reason above, I will avoid juice.  It contains too much calories and it does not fill you. I’ll go for an apple rather than apple juice.
• Drink a lot. Water preferably. I must confess I drink a lot of diet Pepsi. It’s not very healthy, but it has no calories and it cuts appetite for a while when needed.
• Always go for the whole, unprocessed food. This means 
  •  Whole wheat bread
  •  Brown rice
  •  Brown pasta
• If oil must be used for something (dressing, cooking),  use Olive Oil (healthy) in small amount;
• EAT SLOWLY. Then you have a chance to get the message from your body when you are full.
• In contradiction with how we were brought up, YOU DO NOT NEED TO FINISH YOUR PLATE. Stop when you are not hungry anymore. Even better: make yourself smaller plates. Takes seconds only if you are 100% sure you are still hungry. (of course you can still eat as much vegetables as you want, within reason).
• No fast food, burgers, fries, hot dogs, etc. Also, no butter, no mayo and almost no margarine.
• Be careful with dairy products. I eat only very small amounts of cheese and have either 1% or skimmed milk in my cereals. Speaking of cereals, KASHI “Go Lean” are very good for breakfast because they contain a huge amount of proteins.
• I do not trust anything I did not cook or prepare myself.  Avoid restaurants as much as possible. 
• Going for a salad in a restaurant is not a safe choice guarantee in itself: there’s often more fat in the dressing alone than in a regular meal you would have chosen otherwise. The salad is still the way to go, but make sure to ask for the dressing on the side. Go for low-fat dressing if available. Then use the smallest amount you can.
• Another good choice in restaurants is to go with either fish or grilled chicken with steamed vegetables.
• Avoid alcool. If you do cheat, go for a glass of wine or a light beer.
• Avoid temptations: if you do not have the “evil stuff” at home, then you can’t cheat when you have a weak moment. Therefore we have no chips, cookies, chocolates, etc.  in the cupboards.
• Before cheating in a weak moment, remember how much you “suffered” at your last cardio training session.

That’s the main points of my “action plan”. As I said, it worked fine for me in the past, so I plan to use it again! I’ll post updates in the coming weeks.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 8:46 am and is filed under Weight Loss, Our news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.