Weight: 230.4 (-0.8)
Fat: 36.3%
Meals: Not available
Exercise: Light Cardio (Treadmill WL3 - 283 calories, 1.75 miles)
Pictures: Front/Side/Back
First off, I set the treadmill incorrectly today and worked out a bit harder than I had intended. This wasn't a bad thing necessarily and I felt like I had a better workout, but it's important to me to stick with my plan and pace myself properly. Burning out early is not what I want.
Now with that out of the way, I wanted to talk about the importance of water. I'm cheating a little bit here because with one exception I've been drinking pure water for several months now. That was in response to the giant potato head of mine that I posted in Day 0. I made a promise to myself that I wasn't allowed to drink anything but pure water until either I slipped below 200 pounds or the year 2011.
This was part punishment, part strategy. Punishment is pretty easy to understand. I love sweet drinks. Obviously, so does the rest of America. But did I deserve that kind of treat when I had no control over my weight?
As for strategy, well, I'm sure soda helped me pack on much of my extra weight. Sweet tea, my more recent addiction, was helping me keep it on.
I grew up on Coca-Cola. I remember drinking 16oz bottles every day for most of my childhood. I remember when they switched to "New Coke" and was greatly relieved when "Classic Coke" became available. When they discontinued the 16oz glass bottles I believe I switched to the 12oz cans. At one point I even developed a certain snobbery about it, insisting on 8oz glass bottles because so many aficionados said it was the best.
Later on I experimented with flavors. Vanilla Coke, Cherry Coke and then other sodas. Mountain Dew (Mello Yello was much harder to find but better in my opinion) turned into a staple. I'm sure the doubled caffeine content had something to do with that, for someone glued to computers all day. I even started to enjoy grape sodas.
After my weight started to grow and grow I realized that all those sodas were a problem. My beloved Coca Cola has 140 calories in a 12oz can and at times I was polishing off a six pack every day. That's 840 calories without even including the food I was eating! Mountain Dew bumped that 12oz calorie count up to 180 (or 1080 calories per 6 pack) and that innocent grape soda (how can anything fruit flavored be unhealthy... it's fruity!) was 190 calories per 12oz can (or a whopping 1140 per 6).
Depending on my soda intake, I was drinking enough calories to put on a pound of fat every 3-5 days. Pretty easy to understand how I ballooned from 127 at 16 all the way up to 230 something by age 30.
In response, I did something I swore I'd never do: I started to drink diet soda. The artificial sweeteners had a horrible aftertaste and I really had to work to drink it, much less enjoy it. But over time I did exactly that. I was proud of weening myself off that sugar water for something much healthier and I really expected to see a big change in my weight and my waistline.
I didn't. I suspect now that since I wasn't paying any attention to my portion sizes, how many meals and snacks I was eating, etc, that I replaced the calories from my drinks with calories from food. It's pretty common if you're not paying attention.
Discouraged by my lack of weight loss after this big change, I would occasionally indulge in sweet tea. That indulgence turned into a full blown sweet tea habit. Those dollar sweet teas at McDonalds were just too tempting and I often went through the drive-through just for one of those cups of empty calories.
So in essence what I'd managed to do was ween myself off of soda, replacing those calories with more food. And once I'd upped my food intake, I started drinking more calories in the form of sweet tea. In hindsight this is all obvious, "what were you thinking?" stuff. But it just goes to show how easy it is to lose control of your weight and how important it is for me to stay on top of it.
Now, it's all water for me. I have 2 water bottles that I really like and I carry them around with me all the time. I sometimes miss my sugar water, but every time I sip my water I know that I'm making a healthier change in my life and that if I stick to it I'll meet my goals. And an extra bonus: when I do swing through the drive through, I can make do with just a burger instead of ordering the combo meal. After all, I don't need a drink, which allows me to skip the fries as well.
