Weighed in today at 300.4 pounds, which means I dropped 5.6 in the last week.
Yeah, that's a crazy amount of weight to drop in the first week, but I've got two things for you. 1) if you're fat, and you suddenly switch to a good diet and exercise, you drop a shitload of weight real fast for the first 20 or so pounds, then you have to start grinding it out like all the normies. 2) if you're fat and you don't drop that first weight real fast, you're still fat and you're doing it wrong.
This protein-heavy and low-carb diet is working wonders. I'm never starving, and I can eat a reasonable amount of meat. That works for me. I also cut out a lot of soda. Even diet soda will bring you down, given that all that sodium that's packed in adds up.
What's been surprising is that a lot of skinny folks have been like, 'Yes, great job, keep it going!' while most of the fat folks have either immediately started to explain to me why my approach wouldn't work for them or some other nonsense. I'm content with your failure if you're content with it.
Look, people, here's the secret. I'm not doing a crash diet, I'm eating 4-5 times a day, I'm not spending hours in the gym, I've simply adjusted my existing life to a healthier one. I'm eating lots of protein, avoiding carbs, getting on the treadmill M-F for a half hour or so, and not sabotaging myself by making exceptions.
The last part of it, too, is that I've accepted that I'm the only one who's going to lose this weight. I can't count on anyone but me to make this happen. People everywhere, everyday unintentionally stand in the way of my weight loss, and simply circumventing them has been a huge step for me. I am accountable for this, and only me.
Oh, and planning. That was a big lesson last week. I went to Busch Stadium with my son and his baseball team that I'm coaching to walk on the field before the game. I snagged some stadium nachos while I was there, then, when I went to enter them into my food diary, and I saw that they were between 700-1100 calories, I was shocked. I should've planned.
Therefore, when my wife and I made our monthly sojourn to her hometown in northern Illinois, I planned everything. Before I ate anything, I looked it up online, compared it with my food diary to see if it was in my budget for calories, carbs, sugar, etc, and only put it in my mouth if I could 'afford' it. If we were hitting a fast food joint, I pulled into the parking lot, pulled out my Windows Phone or iPad, and looked at their menu, and carefully planned each piece. THIS HELPS TREMENDOUSLY.
It seems like a lot of folks psych themselves out of weight loss by building into this HUGE, all-encompassing thing, but it's really not that big a deal. Just chill the fuck out, tweak your life a bit, and make it happen.
The most annoying part is that people are constantly shoving food at each other. Not only that, but a lot of folks just won't let up when I say 'no.' There were a few times this weekend in which I damn near went 'Hulk smash' on some folks because they wouldn't stop trying to ram pie down my gullet.
On top of that, I insist that I eat at the same times every day. That helps tremendously with regulating my food intake, and makes life easy to manage. What that means, then, is that I don't give a fuck what time your party is, or what time you're serving food. I'm eating 'x food' at 'x time,' and I don't care what that means for you. Period. Again, I'm the only one who's going to lose this weight, and I'm not going to let anything stand in my way. Don't take it personally, and either be supportive or shut the hell up.
I've gotta be selfish and inflexible in this process, but you'll be glad I took that approach when you can't stop staring at me and wonder what it would be like to make sex at me.
Last thing - the applications I've been using have been tremendously helpful. I've been using a combination of three, and this may get pared down as things move along.
MyFitnessPal - I use the Windows Phone app + the iPad app + the web application, and this has been tremendous. Thank you very much, Chris, for the recommendation on this. This is where I plug in all my food and keep track of my daily intake. I can use this to make sure my carbs and sugar are low, while my proteins are through the roof, and that my calories hit their target. It has a huge, ever-growing food database, to which you can add whenever you want, plus the phone application lets you scan in barcodes, which rocks. Friend me on here and you can see what a bad-ass, manageable diet looks like (though I did have to improvise while traveling this past weekend, but I was still well within my plan.)
RunKeeper - I plug all my runs in here, and they auto-feed into Fitocracy, which I'll get to in a moment. I use this to calculate the caloric burn and auto-spam to Facebook and Twitter that I'm better and more active than the other fatties. There is not yet a Windows Phone application, which is disappointing. I manually feed the stats from my treadmill into this for now, or if I'm forced to run outside, I'll use RunningMate on the Windows Phone for its GPS tracking.
Fitocracy - This is where everything all kinda ties together. It makes fitness into a game, and I love it. It automatically picks up my RunKeeper stats, I feed my daily weigh-ins into it, and it's very cool. The only problem is they still don't have a category for sex.
I also use 'Virgin Health Miles' at work, and that's been very, very helpful. It's what I use to weigh in and track my steps every day.
Please 'friend' me on any of these sites if you want. There's no reason that you can't enjoy watching me succeed.
-Blaine
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