So I’d decided to lose weight. Now what?
I needed a plan. A good plan. A sustainable plan. ”Sustainable”
had to be the key. A lot of people want to go on diets that are, at best, short
term solutions. This is why I don’t like diet shake plans. They are so expensive
and you’re not going to do shakes forever. Are you? Going to just drink shakes
until you’re eighty? No, you aren’t. You can’t. If I was going to do this I
wanted a plan that I could stick to for the rest of my life. So here’s what I
did.
I watched what I ate and changed my diet. Duh. At first I
just sort of asked my wife about what I could eat on the Keto diet. “Can I have
this?” “No.” “Damn it!” “What about this?” “No” “DAMN IT!” So what was I not
having? Grains, cereal, rice, potatoes, sugar, starch, candy, etc. It was
pretty much everything that I’d lived on for most of my life. So what could I
have? Meat, cheese, dairy, vegetables, nuts…wait vegetables? Oh gosh…
Honestly, our weapon of choice those first few months was a
wonderful cookbook called The Primal Low-Carb Kitchen by Kyndra Holley. We ate out of this almost exclusively
for a couple months. It’s got a lot of great recipes for stuff like mashed
cauliflower, almond flour biscuits, lemon chia-seed pancakes…great stuff to
replace what I was eating at the time. The best part… it tastes pretty good. We
also utilized Google extensively for low-carb options of our favorite foods,
like pizza. These were smaller portions too. I was often hungry still, but I’ll
get to dealing with hunger later.
Eating differently meant we had to shop differently. We had
to replace all of our frozen stuff with fresh. We had to stop spending money on
two boxes of cereal a week as well as bread and a bag of ciabatta rolls. The
good news is that we didn’t really spend more than normal. All that frozen
pizza adds up and swapping it out for actual ingredients didn’t bust our
budget. (But yes, we are cooking more – which can be a challenge, I admit. We’ll
get to that later too)
Probably the most important thing I did was put my eating on
a schedule. I would eat three meals a day and one “snack” or “desert.” Breakfast
would be around seven or seven-thirty in the morning. Lunch was promptly at
noon. Dinner was then at five. I let myself have a bowl of low-carb ice cream
for desert sometime during the day. Snacking was cut out almost completely save
a small handful of peanuts or a cheese stick. I didn’t let my crazy work
schedule interfere with my eating schedule.
The schedule was so important because I was grazer. I would
eat almost every hour on the hour. I did not eat healthy, either. I would eat
breakfast, then an hour later a bowl of cereal. An hour after that I might have
a small bag of chips and so on. I was programming my body to think it needed food every hour. So, naturally, my stomach told my brain I had to eat. My
body was using all of the food I shoveled in my mouth and not any of the fat on
my body. I had to get control of my appetite.
I did not allow myself any “cheat” days. Changing your
lifestyle is a lot like breaking an addiction. You have to make a clean break. I
recommend that a person stick to a new eating plan as closely, as ruthlessly as
possible. Get that self control. Get to know how your body processes what you
eat. Get that into the habit of saying “no” to all the extra crap. Break the
control that sugar has on your body and mind. Once you know yourself and can
control yourself you can loosen the reigns a bit, but give it a good two or
three months first. I'm at the point now where some days I'll eat breakfast, a really late lunch at two or three in the afternoon, and no dinner whatsoever. This allows me some wiggle room with what I eat.
I saw results almost immediately. The number on that scale
would plummet every week I weighed myself. It was a great motivator to keep
going. There were some harder weeks (we’ll get to that as well) but overall I
had the proof – which they say is in the pudding. And I’ve had a lot of
pudding, ya’ll.
Next time: Redefining Hunger
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