Onward and downward

Current Weight: 194

Things may not be moving quite as fast as they did right at the beginning. But the fact is we're a month and a half into this thing and I'm down 18 pounds. That's an average of 12 pounds a month, which translates to 48 pounds in four months... which translates, pretty much, to the L-IV goal.

Now, this might be a little rigged at this point. In the last couple weeks I've stepped back on the diet - though to be fair what I've stepped back on is the paleo restrictions and not so much the goal of eating not more than 100 grams of carbs a day and certainly well under 2000 calories. In fact, in the last week my average daily intake looks like this:

1586 calories
88 grams fat
110 grams carbs
90 grams protein

Even that's not entirely fair since I opted not to hold myself back on the carbs on Christmas. Take out the 242 from that day, and the other six days averaged a mere 88 grams of carbs.

Anyway, as I said, the 12 pounds a month figure might not quite work at this point, since of the 18 pounds I've lost, I lost ten in the first two weeks, meaning I lost just eight in the last month. At eight a month, the 32 pounds I have to go would take another four months from now, which means it would take 5.5 months total. But frankly, that's still pretty good, and if that's the cost of not being miserable on a super-restrictive diet for four months, I'll take it.

We do still have to see what happens in January with all the traveling, which is now less than a week away from starting. Not only will I be eating worse and/or more, but I also probably won't be exercising much aside from just walking. It is only two weeks, of course. I suppose the worst case scenario is I put a couple pounds back on and simply have to turn the jets back on once travel concludes. Really, I should just do what I can to watch portions - order small things when possible. I certainly feel like I've gotten to a point where I don't have any need (to the extent that I ever did) for huge amounts of food - I mean, I'm operating on 1600 calories a day and I feel fine. So as long as the blowout mega-calorie days are kept to a minimum, hopefully this will be okay.

Redoubling

So, in the time since I last posted, I crept under 200 pounds - to 199 - at my weigh-in last Monday. I also got sick of the paleo diet and went off it for a while; my trainer suggested that it might have a positive effect to go off for maybe a week and then go back on, to keep the body on its toes.

I don't know if that's true or not, but after this past week, I feel motivated to redouble my efforts. I've spent the last few days traveling - and, as a result, not exercising and eating a lot more calories (and in particular carbs) than I had gotten used to. And my body is not happy with me. The problems that had pretty much vanished by a week into the low-carb diet - no heartburn, minimal GI issues - have been creeping back in the last day or two. Between Thursday and Friday I ate nearly 6,000 calories and nearly 650 grams of carbs - that's more like four days of calories and a full week of carbs based on how I had been eating. And as sick as I was getting of the paleo diet as I reached the end of the first month, eating like that for even a couple days has really bothered me both mentally and physically. Combine that with the lack of exercise due to travel and I might skip a week on the scale - hopefully I can rebound this week and then have a good weigh-in on the 27th.

It's funny when I think about it, though. I lost 13 pounds in a month, and it took me just a couple days of eating the way I always would have in years past to make me feel like I hadn't accomplished anything at all. I have no idea how I'm going to handle this in January when we're traveling for almost two weeks solid - lots of almonds and the least adorned meats I can find, I guess. Trying to eat smaller portions doesn't really help on the road because then I'm just wasting food, rather than being able to at least turn a large meal into more than one by bringing home leftovers. At any rate, the good news is that if I fell out of the wagon this week, the last couple days have made me want to chase it down and grab the reins. Looking forward to getting back to the gym on Monday.

Rolling along

My calories/fat/protein/carbs this week so far:

Monday: 1,448/82/110/73
Tuesday: 1,764/116/103/85
Wednesday: 1,565/83/147/60
Thursday: 1,494/83/133/59

Barely out of ketosis there today. I must confess to a serving of pumpkin pie yesterday and today - look, no one else likes it and I love pumpkin pie - but while that violates paleo rules it really hasn't violated the intended limits; notice that my carb totals were at historic lows even with the 35ish grams that a serving of pumpkin pie adds. I could probably stand to boost my calorie numbers a bit, but really, as long as I'm not constantly starving, it's not that big a deal, right? By the end of the week, I should be under 200 pounds for the first time in literally years - looking at an old blog post from New Year's 2006, I wrote as part of a note that I was hoping to get into better shape that "I still haven't ever hit 200 pounds." I'm pretty sure I did it at some point later that year, so that means it's been four-plus, and pretty close to five, years since I weighed as little as I will at the end of this week if everything goes according to plan. The weight loss is becoming increasingly noticeable (not as much in the torso, which is really the area I'm least satisfied with, but that stuff always comes off last), I continue to be heartburn-free, and while the diet can be tough (even with my little violations) it's mostly working well so far. (I confess I'm tempted to add just dairy back, for the variety, but let's see how much longer I can keep it rolling without any full-time cheats, especially since I'll be traveling in January, which will make it more difficult to adhere to any serious dietary standards.)

Basically, while eating so much less and working out so much more is tough, it's getting results, and that makes me happy. It's definitely going to be a lot easier to keep up this regimen the longer I keep having four and five-pound loss weeks.

Begin week three

Current weight: 202

Four more pounds down when I stepped on the scale at the gym tonight. This is great for a number of reasons. Obviously, it's good because I continue to lose weight, and continue to be ahead of the pace I would need to lose fifty pounds in four months (I've lost ten pounds in the first two weeks, meaning it would take me just two and a half months to lose fifty at the same rate). But it's also good because this past week was Thanksgiving. Not only did I cheat on Thanksgiving (with, as mentioned in an earlier post, not a ton more calories but certainly a load of carbs), but I cheated a bit on Friday and Saturday as well, having a slice of pumpkin pie on both nights as well as a half-cheating dinner on Friday. And yet, in spite of Thanksgiving and pie, I still lost four pounds! You could argue, I suppose, that I could have lost even more had I avoided the pie or the Thanksgiving carbfest, but you know what? Four pounds in a week is a lot to lose, and I know that on the whole I've worked hard for this. If I can lose weight without fully depriving myself of some of life's little pleasures, that works for me.

Thanksgiving

No posts for a couple days, as no one noticed. Why not? Well, at a certain point, just posting "Diet's still going fine, went to the gym again" gets a little tedious. Lest you think this is any indication of a lack of commitment to the plan, here are the numbers from Tuesday and Wednesday:

Tuesday
1,663 calories consumed
598 calories burned in exercise
99 grams of carbs

Wednesday
1,833 calories consumed
699 calories burned in exercise
73 grams of carbs

The calorie numbers will always be reasonably rough, but on an average day I'm only consuming about a thousand net calories between diet and exercise, which I expect will be a pretty good weight loss facilitator assuming I can keep it up for another few months.

Today was Thanksgiving, which of course meant it was a cheat day. I didn't actually go nuts on the calories - I kept track of what I was eating in spite of not dieting and came up with 2,254 calories, a pretty sane number. The 348 grams of carbs, on the other hand... you really get a sense for just how ridiculously stuffed with carbohydrates the average American diet is when you go on a diet that restricts them. I had 60 grams of a fairly healthy cereal and half a cup of milk for lunch, and that alone was 54 grams of carbs! While there are certainly things I miss on a very low carb diet, if anything Thanksgiving probably reinforced my goal. I'm definitely glad I burned another 690 calories on the elliptical this afternoon before packing myself with carb-heavy dinner, and I'm looking forward to going to the gym again tomorrow.

Begin week two

Another pretty normal day. Lots of almonds, plus I made a grass-feed beef burger for dinner using actual ground beef that I shaped myself, and it came out pretty well. Burned 694 calories doing the interval setting on the elliptical, which I think is my best total yet in a 60-minute session (plus five-minute cool down). But the big news came when I stepped on the scale after I got out of the shower at the gym.

Current weight: 206

Six pounds??? I weighed myself at the same general time of day as last Thursday - in fact a couple hours later, and while I likely had less to eat today, it couldn't have made that much of a difference. This is probably just attributable to some of the water weight coming off quickly (and it has been a week and a half rather than just a week since I last weighed myself) - I can't imagine I'm on pace to lose six pounds every single week - but I will say it makes keeping on going a lot easier to see a number like that at the end of Week One.

Day seven

Well, that's the end of the first week. It's been okay. I've rarely been starving even though my average caloric intake for the seven days was under 1,650, my heartburn is way down, my mood feels elevated... the biggest downsides have been I've had a lot of sore muscles (unsurprising and unrelated to the diet) and at times I've had some serious carbohydrate cravings. I did cheat a bit again today, this time more out of necessity; I work Sundays and very little is open in the area, and because a few extra people were in the office today, pizza was ordered. So lunch was two slices of pizza, but I had very few carbs for the rest of the day so it seems to have worked out all right. Today was a (much needed, I'd say) off day from exercise, but it's back on the horse tomorrow as we start week two. Tomorrow will also see me step on the scale for the first time since starting the diet and exercise regimen. I know not to expect big gains - anything more than a couple pounds would be unrealistic, after all - but just seeing the scale tick downward the first time would be a nice little mental boost.

Day six recap

Saturdays should, in theory, be the easiest days of this challenge. I rarely have commitments on Saturdays, so finding time for the gym is pretty easy, and because I am more consistently at home it's easy to cook for myself. In practice, of course, my one-day weekend (because of my regular lab work at Roosevelt on Fridays) provides a stiffer challenge because it's easy to just want to relax. As it happened, I weighed not going to the gym but ended up doing so anyway, getting in another hour on the elliptical to bring my "fitness minutes" total to 360 for the week, matching my target in spite of taking Wednesday off.

After the gym I was absolutely ravenous. I think I need to start frontloading my carbs more; on both Friday and Saturday I went to the gym with extremely low carb totals for the day (in both cases, ketosis levels) to that point and both times I came away ridiculously starving and craving carbohydrates. In hindsight, it makes more sense to eat whatever carbs I'm going to have for the day before the gym, leaving me with a little more fuel when I go, and then for the post-gym dinner try to hold the carbs to a minimum, I think.

At any rate, this level of hunger led to my first "cheat meal," as we went to McCormick and Schmick's. I did consider just getting plain grilled fish and not cheating, but I was so low on carbs at this point that one meal seemed like it would be fine. And really it was. Even with a couple pieces of bread, cod wrapped in a pastry shell, and a scoop of ice cream for dessert, my calculations (admittedly rough) only ran me to about 2,000 total calories for the day and 165 grams of carbs - both well over what I'd been doing for the past week, but hardly anything excessive (in fact the 165 grams of carbs still falls a good 62 grams below the recommended minimum on the website I use to track my food intake, even accounting for my weight loss goal). It's worth noting that I woke up this morning with very mild heartburn, which had pretty much vanished during the preceding week. This could be attributable to the extra carbs or to the fact that I ate more than 100 g of carbs in a single sitting, though really it could just as easily be attributed to the fact that I ate a reasonably-sized dinner at 9 pm. I don't know for sure, but I will say that it put a damper on my desire to have any more full-size meal cheats in the near future, although I'm sure those cravings will come back.

Day five

More pretty smooth sailing today, although I had a very small amount of carbs, even by the standards of the diet, before 7 pm and so started to feel a little off at the gym. (Because I didn't happen to have any fruit in the house and was at home today, I only ended up eating 20 grams of carbs before going to the gym around 5, and after an hour on the elliptical and 30 more minutes on the treadmill I was pretty gassed. There was a "natural foods vending machine" in the lobby, so I got some 100% juice out of it just to inject some carbs into my system, since 20 is too low even for this diet and I had no intention of going into ketosis. Technically fruit juice is discouraged because, I assume, processing the fruit in any way takes away some of the benefits of eating whole fruit, but I give a hearty "meh" to that one.) I also had a rather large grapefruit with dinner, and ended up pushing my total carbs for the day to just under 100.

The only other thing that happened is that my cravings have been picking up. Last night I had two separate dreams, or one very long dream that took place in multiple locations, that involved me eating either fruit snacks or some sort of gummy candy. Then a Sonic commercial at the gym gave me a craving for a Coney dog, which eventually morphed into feeling like I could absolutely murder a five-way chili at Skyline - which makes no sense as there are no Skylines in the area and I've only been there once in my entire life. I think it was probably an amalgamation in the brain - I wanted the chili/cheese/onions but less so the hot dog, but throw in some nice carb-laden spaghetti and that'll do the trick.

As I mentioned, people talk about "cheat days," and while I had been thinking that that was more for people who were on the diet full time, it might not be the worst idea. I mean, the cravings aren't crazy or unmanageable, but if I can work things into the nutritional balance, there's certainly something to be said for not constantly depriving yourself of things just to do so. I could always just switch this to the Zone Diet if the Paleo turns out to be a bit too aggressive - it's working so far, but it has only been five days, after all. If I end up eating a lot of the same few things, well, how enjoyable is that going to be for five months?

(Yeah, yeah, it's day five and he's already trying to rationalize giving up. Giving up the Paleo diet wouldn't be the same thing as giving up the diet - clearly an alteration in food intake at some level needs to happen for this to work. But who knows if the Paleo is even the best one for me? I'll give it time, but let's see where we are after the first month.)

Day four

Pretty smooth day dietarily. Less smooth from an exercise standpoint, as I once again ached all the way to the bank (I can barely tie my shoes from the lower back soreness) but still went to the gym for a 40-minute training session featuring boxing. I can hardly wait for tomorrow when my back still hurts and my arms and legs kill too from all the dancing around and punching.

Turkey and fish (plus some spinach) for lunch, hamburger (plus some broccoli and raspberries) for dinner, and a lot of almonds. Oh, and a granny smith apple. That pretty much covers the whole day; my fat intake was a little down, and I had another sub-100 carb day, but I still rarely felt very hungry. Let's hope for more smooth sailing ahead.

In other news, it looks like I may have lost a little weight (probably water weight) in my face. I'm very curious to see what the count is at the next weigh-in, which will probably be Monday night.

Day three

Of course, nothing ever goes exactly as you expect. I had been planning on mostly cooking my own food on the diet; today was the second day in a row on which I went out for lunch instead. I got a sashimi plate with tuna, salmon and tilapia, so it was probably cleaner than yesterday's lunch, and with a greater intake of nuts today I was only hit hard by hunger once, around lunchtime, although throughout the day I felt pretty pleasant. If that's attributable to a smoothing out of my blood sugar level thanks to a low-carb diet, well, I may never go over 150 carbs again!

Meanwhile, I spent most of the day in excruciating lower back pain from the circuit training on Tuesday night, which had hammered my apparently rarely-used extensor muscles. I was still planning on going to the gym, but having to get up early on Thursday combined with not being able to even get to the gym until at least 8:30 tonight, combined further with the overall pain, led to me giving up for the night. I still plan on doing six hours for the week, but I'll have to make it up, possibly with an extra 30 minutes each on Friday and Saturday, days on which I have less going on. In fairness to me, it is my first few days at this and I don't think I anticipated quite this level of soreness, but going forward I'm presuming it has nowhere to go but up.

Dinner was another lamb patty and a container of raspberries. Fruit is probably going to be a big key in the near future because, as has happened in the past when I've tried to cut back on my sugar intake, I'm starting to really crave sweets. Today while driving home I had the sudden urge for a Fruit Roll-Up, which is random since I haven't had one in at least a year that I can think of. While I understand that a lot of people on the paleo diet have their "cheat meals" or perhaps even "cheat days," I think that's more for people who are on it for the long-term. My hope, if I haven't already said this, is to use the diet to drop weight fairly quickly and then start adding things back. At the very least, let's see how long I can go without really having the need for cheats. I guess my big fear is that "cheating" could lead to a bigger backslide earlier than I'd want. Of course, it could turn out that this exact diet isn't really for me anyway, but based just on the past few days it's clear that something lower-carb is probably the way to go. My mood seems to have evened out even at times of hunger, my stomach seems to be less acidic, and without getting too TMI on you, let's just say that my GI tract is less active than usual. These are all good things, I would say.

Day two

Bit of a rough second day, but as we come to the end of it, I think things are starting to fall into place a bit.

Food today was a bit awkward. Because I was sufficiently hungry/calorie-starved to eat all my chicken on Monday night, I was left to see what was out there for lunch (after another several-egg breakfast). There's a buffet-type place in my building that did have some relatively unadorned meats (I had a piece of baked ham, a couple pieces of roasted turkey and a tilapia fillet with a little paprika and parsley seasoning), and even if it probably violates the full spirit of the paleo diet a little, I think I can live with it (much more so than with a Vitamin Water). Aside from that it was mostly almonds and water during the day, although that will fill you up more than it might sound because of the almonds' high fat content.

Then it was off to the gym where I got my butt absolutely kicked in 45 minutes of circuit training. After wanting to die by the halfway mark, I actually hit a bit of a second wind on the final group of exercises and finished strong, although even after a 15-minute cooldown walk on the treadmill my heart rate was still over 120. I did put in a few minutes of stretching this time, so hopefully I won't be as sore tomorrow. Either way, after circuit training, an hour on the elliptical sounds just dandy, thanks!

I had to return to Whole Foods for dinner and picked up some frozen beef and lamb patties, plus some organic chicken/turkey sausage as a morning alternative to eggs (still cholesterol, but a good deal less). Dinner was one of the lamb patties (lamb is so delicious), plus a few ounces of raspberries and then a couple ounces of almonds to at least push me over the 1,500 calorie mark for the day. The final tally, admittedly a bit rough since I didn't have precise measurements on lunch: 1,654 calories, 74 g of carbs (falling into the "sweet spot" described by Mark's Daily Apple), 94 g of fat, 130 g of protein. And, well, 1,081 mg of cholesterol. While red meat should be a nice little supplement, it's clear that the majority of my calories need to come from plant-based sources - and if I'm to have any hope of not piling on the cholesterol while still getting the necessary fat (the paleo diet should be at least 50% fat, and quite possibly more, apparently), it's gotta be high-fat plant sources. So, nuts. And I may have to talk myself into avocados.

Well, it's a process. I knew I probably wouldn't get this perfect from day one, but at least I've got my carbs way down and my exercise way up. That ought to help almost no matter what else I'm doing.

Day two, morning thoughts

Predictably, my legs weren't too happy with me this morning, but as long as I kept the blood flowing the soreness wasn't as bad as I might have expected after an hour on the elliptical. I also didn't wake up totally starving, which was nice, although I don't want to be eating dinner at 9:30 pm on a regular basis - even on a diet I have to think that putting a few hundred calories into the system that late in the day isn't really helpful. My total calorie consumption for Monday was just under 1600 and my carbs were only 112 grams - a little over the 50-100 "weight loss sweet spot" touted by Mark's Daily Apple, a site dealing with the "primal diet" that my sister pointed me to.

As I was explaining the basics of the paleo diet to Drew, he seemed shocked that I could avoid eating grains and dairy, in particular, for months at a stretch. Certainly it will be hard. I think the toughest part of the paleo diet isn't so much its restrictions per se, but more the significant level to which those restrictions conflict with modern living. When was the last time you went a week without eating either (a) a piece of pizza, (b) a bowl of cereal, (c) a sandwich of any kind, or (d) a pasta dish? Yeah, I don't know offhand either, but I'm guessing pretty much never. (In fact, a lot of my initial weight gain in high school can be attributed to my daily penchant for foot-long Blimpie sandwiches after school followed just a few hours later by dinner, which often involved me eating goofily large amounts of pasta.) Well, on the paleo diet, not only can't I eat any of those things this week, I can't eat any of them again for several months. At least. And that doesn't even include ice cream, yogurt, etc.

So the willpower will be more to do with dealing with the sheer ubiquity of all the foods I'm not supposed to be eating. In that spirit, I offer you here my one cheat so far: last night, I had a bottle of Vitamin Water (125 calories, 33 g of carbs, pushing me out of the sweet spot) with dinner. It was the last of a few bottles I had purchased before deciding to start the diet, and I figured it was better to just finish it now than have it sit in the fridge for months. Could I have given it away or something? Probably. But it was late, I hadn't had a lot of calories and tap water wasn't sounding appetizing.

I plan to have that be my only cheat. But I still feel better about writing it down rather than justifying it to myself as not a big deal and keeping it to myself. I will now say three Hail Proteins, and go and sin no more.

Day One

Starting Weight: 212 lbs (as measured Thursday night at the gym)

The paleo diet is going to take some getting used to. In particular, I don't really have a sense for quantities yet, which led to me only having eaten about 900 calories prior to 9 pm tonight. In retrospect I could probably have seen this coming; vegetables have some bulk, but their caloric imprint is virtually nil - the broccoli and onions I cooked up to go with my chicken dinner added a combined 60 calories to the proceedings. I talked to my trainer briefly at the gym and he recommended eating more eggs for breakfast (I had three this morning, but that's still only 210 calories, although quite a bit of cholesterol) and eating heavier meat. Chicken is a good diet food if you're also eating other stuff, but I ate more than a pound of chicken breast today and only got 550 calories out of it. That's all well and good except for the fact that it was my main course at both lunch and dinner. I certainly got a lot of protein out of that, but protein isn't everything.

So it'll probably be back to the store tomorrow to look for more red meat, or something with a bit more of a caloric impact than chicken. The other alternative is just to eat a lot of nuts, but I'd rather mix up what I'm eating anyway, lest this diet get super boring and quickly start to feel like a chore. Or more like a chore.

More positively, I went to the gym and did an hour-plus on the elliptical, going 4.46 miles (so it measured) and burning 620 calories. It was easier than I thought it might be to get used to; when I first got on my leg muscles were not thrilled, but I pushed past that after a few minutes. When I got off the machine my feet felt like they were encased in cement, but no matter. I also thoroughly sweated through my shirt, something that I don't normally do at the gym, so that seems pretty indicative of greater exertion.

T minus one

In preparation for the start of the diet tomorrow, I cooked two chicken breasts for myself tonight, putting the second in a container to take to work. This may be obvious to those of you who actually do it all the time, but there is something exceedingly satisfying about cooking for oneself, even though all the work of washing dishes and such is a real pain in the butt. Being able to actually put food on the table that tastes good and was the result of something you did really brings out the positive feelings.

For tonight's dinner I put a tablespoon of olive oil in a pan and tossed in about half of a smallish yellow onion. Then I put in the two chicken breasts and cooked them up with the onion (which was pretty caramelized by the end). After they were done, I pulled them out and threw five large asparagus spears into the pan for a quick sauté.

Compared to what you'd get at a restaurant, no, it wasn't amazingly flavorful or expertly made. But it was pretty decent, and it was nice and healthy. We'll see if cooking for myself nearly every day will get me any better at it over the coming months.

Getting started

Welcome (to all nobody who will read this) to my latest attempt at chronicling my self-improvement. In the past, well, it hasn't exactly worked out that well. So why is this time going to be different? Well... it just is. I hope.

So what's the deal? Well, the name "L-IV-e Blog" is both a play on "liveblog" and a hint at the more ambitious side of the goal. While I was discussing weight loss goals with my trainer at the gym, he suggested that working out for an hour a day, six days a week, and going on the "paleo diet," I could lose fifty pounds (L) in four months (IV). Fifty pounds is pretty much exactly how much I need to lose; if it takes a bit more than four months, I think I can live with that. But it worked for the name of the blog, so what the heck. That's what I'm calling it.

What am I going to be blogging? Well, I'm going to be doing everything I can to track my progress and keep myself honest. So expect food and exercise reports, overall progress reports, maybe some pictures if we actually get where we need to be going... basically, super boring stuff that's of no interest to anyone. Well, and I'll be talking about the experience, because believe me, if you don't already know, with the way I've lived my life up to this point... this really is going to be one hell of an experience if I can actually go through with it.

It all starts Monday, November 15, 2010.