28 November 2004
This weekend I achieved a milestone, Thanksgiving dinner(s) notwithstanding, for a personal goal that I set back in June (June 9, to be exact): I have lost three milk jugs of weight. In more traditional terms, I've lost 24 pounds. I've found it more concrete to measure in terms of something you can heft, so I think of it terms of one-gallon container of milk, which weigh about 8 pounds each. ("A pint's a pound, the world around," at least in the U.S.) Saying "I lost eight pounds" is a little abstract. But grabbing one of those gallon containers of milk -- or better yet, three of them -- brings home much more forcefully to me what it means to lose that weight.
I never went on a diet in my life. As a kid, I was skinny-skinny, like my son is now. I could pack away the food, again like my son, and never give it a thought. But things change. I calculate that every major life-changing event added 15 pounds to my frame -- college, grad school, marriage, kids, divorce. Plus I entered a profession that is not known for requiring much physical activity. Plus unlike some other computer people, a lot of my hobbies are sedentary, reading and movies among them.
Over the years, all those cookies and bowls of ice cream and extra helpings of some particularly mouth-watering dish accreted onto my ever-growing body. I took on the stereotypical shape of the middle-aged male, with a protruding gut, and looking in the mirror, I could no longer fool myself that I was "height/weight proportional." The scale revealed another frightening number, proving what I already suspected, that I was as heavy as I'd ever been in my life. Yet in spite of this evidence, I still had the mentality of a skinny person. But it eventually sunk into me that the extra weight was, haha, weighing me down and starting to give me health problems.
I had never thought about dieting; that was for fat people. I wasn't a fat person; mentally, I was a skinny guy with extra weight. Moreover, I was suspicious of the sanctioned diets that periodically sweep the nation -- Atkins, South Beach, The Zone, 20/20. Their authoritarian tone rubs me the wrong way, and it seemed to me that they ask people to eat unnaturally. No carbs, that's crazy! Or a carefully measured portion of extra lean chicken breast once a day ... how long can a normal person keep this up? Those didn't seem like diets to me, they seemed more like penance that people wanted to pay for the sin of gluttony.
But one evening I was following links on the Web and ran across John Walker's Hacker's Diet. Walker is a programmer and entrepeneur (he founded Autodesk), and as he explains, when he decided that he weighed too much, he took an engineering mindset to the problem. His highly readable book (free online) ultimately dispenses the same advice that every honest diet book has to give: eat less, exercise more. Walker's approach, from my point of view, had a few features that appealed to me. One is that he harked back to the somewhat old-fashioned notion that it's all about the calories. Fewer calories, less weight. (Just like it was more calories, more weight.) The second was that, being a programmer, he created a set of spreadsheets for tracking all sorts of things. The most interesting to me involved, as he explained, "exponential smoothed weighted moving averages," a statistical concept he explains with admirable clarity. The point, basically, is to ignore daily fluctuations in weight -- a potentially discouraging issue -- and find trend lines. The final point that appealed to me is his insistence on the gradual, start-easy approach.
None of this is in the slightest way innovative. Even I have run across this stuff before. But something about Walker's book rang true with me, or perhaps I happened to see it right about the time I'd unconsciously made the decision that I needed to do something about my weight. For whatever reason, his book was the motivation I needed to get started.
Being me, I didn't follow Walker's advice particularly slavishly, either. Although I downloaded his spreadsheets, I never bothered with any of them. The only things I really did were these. First, I started weighing myself every day as soon as I got up, and of course recording the weight. Second, I began with Walker's suggested course of lame little calisthentics -- light pushups, light situps, some running in place. He starts you very easy indeed.
Finally, I started paying attention to calories. Walker has some suggestions for calorie intake for males of my height, so I started keeping tabs on the caloric values of foods I encountered. This was an eye-opener. Assuming about 1700 calories per day for a guy like me, it was quite a shock to see that you could spend better than a third of that on a single cinammon twist at the bakery. It became an interesting exercise to see how I could spend roughly 500 calories per meal. With my calorie awareness heightened, I also found it easy to see where I was taking on calories needlessly, out of habit. As a simple example, I simply cut out sugar in drinks, whether sugar in coffee or soda pop. I also reaffirmed my belief that the average restaurant meal is really enough for two meals. Teriyaki? Eat half, save the rest for tomorrow. Since I started in the summer, I found it relatively easy to skip a traditional dinner and substitute watermelon (yum) and/or green salad for which I made up a light dressing that featured mostly rice vinegar. Walker also has some suggestions for low-cal snack foods, especially for those late-night sessions at the computer. The two that I liked were pickles (almost no calories) and hot-air popcorn. I've also gone back to that classic diet food, cottage cheese, which makes for an adequate breakfast these days.
I was by no means fanatic about any of this. I did do the lame calisthentics, boring as they were. I did not obsess about calories; I simply paid attention, and in so doing, developed a ... well, not habit, exactly, but tendency to avoid extremely high-calorie foods. But I didn't eschew them completely; if a nice piece of cake were on offer, then I might have some. No use being all obsessive about it. But I just cut them out of my daily routine as a habit.
The effect was immediate. In slightly less than a month I'd lost the first milk jug. This was highly encouraging. And success feeds on itself. To add to my calisthentics, which had gradually gotten to more reps, I started a routine of walking the dogs to the park every day (about 1.2 miles round trip) and while there, walking the big loop several times to make a total of about 2 miles. I bought a pedometer to get a sense of how much I was walking, and occasionally got to the 10,000 steps that the walking people suggest, but that wasn't every day, and in any event, I dropped the pedometer and it stopped recording accurately. But I knew roughly what kind of exercise I was getting. And the dogs were loving it.
The weight kept coming off. I hit the two-milk-jug point at about 9 weeks. The weight tended to plateau at about the 15-pound mark and again at the 20-pound mark. Perhaps those are common stopping points in any weight-loss program, or perhaps I'd merely reduced to a size that my body was meant to be for my exercise level.
This weekend, as I say, I hit the three-milk-jug point. It's taken a lot longer to get the third jug off than it took to get the second one off, but this doesn't surprise me, and it doesn't particularly discourage me. Now that winter has set in, my eating habits are perforce different. No watermelon, for example. As I noted another time, I seem to be a lot hungrier now than I was in the summer, which I attribute to physiology.
There have been many benefits, and as far as I can tell, no downsides. Here's a somewhat random list of things I've liked about this weight-loss program:
My new-found consciousness has revealed other information as well. When I'm stressed at work (a lot lately), I eat more, and I particularly crave carbs. On the other hand, emotional turmoil kills my appetite. Our standard three-meals-a-day schedule is, for me personally, an invitation to weight gain. These days I do much more grazing and find I can do without at least one of the three meals -- ideally dinner, but sometimes (weekends, say) it will be lunch before I've gotten around to breakfast.
One thing I have not at all figured out is the relationship between overeating and weight gain. I can eat too much for a couple of days and not see the effect immediately, or sometimes at all. Perhaps I've stoked my metabolism such that it can shed excess incoming calories more efficiently than before.
I would like to exercise even more, but it's not very practical. Since my exercise consists mostly of walking the dogs, and that must happen in daylight, I can do it only in the morning, before work. That makes me later to work than I want. Plus it's nearly winter and it rains a lot and it's getting quite cold.
My ultimate goal is the fourth milk jug. I don't expect it to happen soon -- probably spring, assuming I can hold this weight (or reasonably so) for the winter. I'm hopeful.