Weight: 223.8 (-7.4)
Fat: 35.2% (-4.1%)
Meals: Not available
Exercise: Cardio (Treadmill 36:00 WL3 - 342 calories, 2.16 miles)
Pictures: Front/Side/Back

Yesterday, I discussed what makes up an ideal diet and came to the conclusion that my ideal meal plan would include the following four elements: flexibile, filling, satisfying and easy. Today I'm going to examine past diets and how they fit into those ideas.

Boot Camp/Fit-For-Life

One of my most successful attempts to lose weight was a local boot camp, which more or less followed the nutritional advice of the Body for Life program. The advice was sane and helpful and made up of the following rules of the thumb:

  • Eat six meals a day
  • Pay attention to serving sizes
  • Each meal should have protein and carbs
  • Drink lots of water

With one exception I found this to be excellent advice. I think water is particularly important and my habit of carrying around a water bottle with me to frequently sip from started there. I could tell a huge difference in hydration during workouts. If I'd had plenty of water the workouts seemed to go so much smoother. And when I'd had very little to drink I seemed to crash pretty early and have to slog my way through.

Adding protein to my meals was also a pretty good idea. I'm not a huge fan of strict macronutrient guidelines, but I'll be the first to concede that my diet probably is too carb heavy. Considering that I like meat, protein is hardly an unknown for me, but particularly when I was "grazing", I would focus purely on carbs. Making sure that I got proteins helped balance out my diet and also taught me to be aware of what I was eating, which isn't a bad thing.

Serving sizes were a bit more difficult to accept. Back when I realized that a 20oz bottle of Coke has 2.5 servings, any respect I had for proper serving sizes was out the window. I'm sure you can think of plenty of other examples of absurd servings sizes. Ironically, it's our attitude towards serving sizes that has contributed to our obesity. Paying more attention to this number might help you realize just how much you're eating or overeating.

So overall, this "diet" was pretty good and easy to deal with. Why haven't I kept it up or at the very least, started it again when I started this website? Six meals a day. This was hammered home frequently, the necessity of eating six meals a day. By grazing all day long you increase your metabolism. Stop skipping meals, make sure you eat breakfast, eat every 2-3 hours. Eat eat eat.

The idea of eating more is somewhat appealing. I don't like starving and so many diets are about denial; being encouraged to eat is a welcome change from that. At first glance anyway. There are a number of problems however that made it miserable for me.

Firstly, I was constantly thinking about food. I had to eat all the time. I could only go a couple hours without eating, so it was a constant struggle of "get more food, prepare food, eat food, clean up, worry about next meal". I knew I needed to be more aware of what I was eating, but it seems like that was all I was doing, eating or getting ready to eat. This was completely unsustainable for me. Needless to say this fails my "Easy" criteria.

Secondly, I never felt hungry, but I never felt full either. I felt like I was no longer able to get any feedback from my body and that really sucked. You could say this met my filling criteria, but failed miserably on the satisfying front. Any real pleasure I got out of eating was taken away. Which honestly isn't that big a problem, until you combine it with constantly worrying about eating. More worry, less enjoyment is a bad combination.

Third and last, was the math. We didn't track calories, but you can assume I wasn't eating more than 3000 day. To eat 6 meals, that means each meal could be no more than 500 calories. A more realistic weight loss/maintenance goal was more along the lines of 2400 calories a day or 400 per meal. Trying to eat a balanced meal in that number of calories restricts my diet choices a lot, making it that much more difficult to plan meals. The temptation was to just eat protein bars.

If I were a woman who was trying to lose weight this would have been an even bigger issue though. As I mentioned the other day, 1200 calories daily is the floor for women trying to lose weight. Splitting that into six meals would be just 200 calories per meal. That's... insane.

Calorie Counting

There are a number of calorie counting websites out there that will help you track what you eat. I've used FitDay and The Daily Plate, but Daily Burn looks pretty good too. And they really do work. Last time I tried calorie counting using one of these websites I was able to lose somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 pounds.

The problem is, as I rambled on about in my Diets Don't Work post, this wasn't so much a permanent change as an attempt to lose weight by restricting calories. The principle is sound and it worked, but only as long as I kept up my tracking. Even worse, without a realistic sense of how to maintain my metabolism, and with a desire to see the pounds drop away, I pushed my calorie intake too low.

For the first couple weeks, it was fun entering everything, pulling up charts, being able to track it all. There's a certain geeky aspect that appealed to me and I didn't mind doing it. Even better, it encouraged me not to snack or eat too much because I knew I'd have to go back and enter those foods. In terms of resisting temptation it was great.

And it certainly met my flexibility requirements. I could eat whatever I wanted, as long as I entered it into the system and stayed under my calorie targets for the day. And it was satisfying in that manner as well, I could eat my favorite foods and indulge in my cravings. But since I didn't make any serious changes to my diet I ended up starving myself to meet my calorie deficit goals. Filling it was not.

The real issue though was with the "easy" part. As much as I enjoyed those first few weeks of entering foods, it was a serious burden to constantly log in to update my foods. And god forbid I ate out at a place that didn't have calorie information. I was stressing a lot about finding out the correct information, I didn't trust the information that other people had entered - The Daily Plate in particular would have several variations of fast food, with different information. This made it necessary to enter all my own information.

After a while the burden was just too much and I'd start writing down information to enter later at the computer. And then I'd lose my notes. If you stop entering the information and tracking what you eat, the entire system falls apart. Having an iPhone now would help enormously as I'm always carrying it around, and if the site doesn't have an app, I can always access the website. At the very least I can at least make a note for later.

The Wendy's Diet

Remember those commercials with Jared, the guy who lost 240 pounds eating at Subway every day? He managed to lose 100 pounds in his first 3 months just by eating Subway subs... and exercising and walking everywhere. He's since put on about 40 of those 240 pounds, but it's still a pretty remarkable story.

I confess I like eating at Wendy's. It's fast, cheap and convenient and although I'm embarassed at admitting it, it remains a staple of my diet. And so when I first read about the whole calories in, calories out idea I decided to put the idea to the test by eating just at Wendy's. Instead of worrying about relearning how to eat overnight, I would simply limit myself to 2 meals at Wendy's that were both satifying and within my budget.

My regular order was a double quarter pounder meal, plain but with cheese. Fries and a diet coke rounded out the combo. I can't imagine the number of people cringing at the plan, and nutritionally it's not that good. I'm of the opinion that it's not nearly as bad as some folks make it out to be, but that's the subject of another post I suppose. Either way, it was roughly 1000 calories for a meal, so eating there twice a day would give me 2000 calories.

And it worked. I wish I'd tracked my measurements, but I dropped something like 10 pounds eating fast food, burger and fries, every single day. It was easy and it was satisfying. It wasn't very flexible in terms of what I was eating, but it was usually easy to find a Wendy's, and if I were away from home I didn't need to make special plans. Filling... well, the meals themselves were pretty filling. But I would find myself getting hungry later in the day.

I experimented with adding more food, Biggie size and such. And in going more frequently but getting a smaller meal. Being a night owl, a midnight snack was always tempting and so a Hot Pocket or such to tide me over became the norm. And thus the diet fell apart.

My future meal plan

I've been terrified of the six meals a day ever since I started this. I'd encountered the idea so often I figured that it was just something I'd have to adjust to. The problem is, the benefits are a myth. There's a number of eating myths out there: breakfast is the most important meal of the day, eating six meals a day boosts your metabolism, skipping a meal will cause you to enter starvation mode, eating food before bed turns to fat overnight. They're simply not true.

There's evidence that it's all bunk. Your body doesn't enter starvation mode for at least 72 hours after your last meal (or at least until you started to restrict them severely). It doesn't matter when you eat, but how much you eat. I was going to include a bunch of links to the evidence, but I strongly encourage you to Google it yourself.

Ultimately it comes down to personal preference. Some people find that frequent meals, eating every 2-3 hours, six times a day, helps them regulate their intake. Instead of having an enormous meal that pushes their calorie count way over the top, constantly grazing helps them find a happy place where they're satisfied and not tempted to overinduldge. If you go long between meals and feel the need or urge to binge, this plan probably helps you.

For other folks like me, trying to constantly shove food in my face makes it too difficult and I'm more likely to give up eating that way. I have no problems going hours without food and I prefer to get absorbed in what I'm doing. Because of these myths, well meaning people in my life have encouraged me to eat more, to avoid skipping meals. "You need to eat." Either I stress about eating frequent small meals, or I end up just adding calories to a budget that is already too high.

It was a huge relief to find this information and that it's still perfectly valid to eat a few big meals. The problem is, how to restrict calories and not feel so damn hungry between meals? Without tracking I feel I'm doing a pretty good job right now. I get hungry, but I also feel full. I'm not denying myself, but I'm losing weight. I know I need to do some more work, especially nutrition wise with my food choices, but making big changes to my diet might well throw things out of whack. I need something easy, that works well for me.

And I believe I may have found it. Tomorrow I'll post what it is and what I've learned so far.