This was no easy task, and it literally took months of self-discipline. During the first week of January, I tipped the scales at 215.6 pounds, and on Sunday I weighed 174.8 pounds. That’s a net weight loss of just over 40 pounds in eight months, an average of just five pounds a month.
While researching this bucket list item it quickly became apparent to me that the term “ideal weight” is hard to define. Its definition varies depending on who you ask and what source you consult. I’m 6-foot-3 inches tall and the general consensus (while there was some variation depending on the source) was that my ideal weight was somewhere between 175 and 180 pounds. I kind of liked the 180-pound idea because I read somewhere that Bear Grylls weighs 180 pounds. I figured that if I weighed as much as Grylls, that’d be pretty good.
Losing 40 pounds wasn’t easy, but my methods were simple. I cut back to no more than two beers a day and eliminated sweets, soft drinks and hard candy. I also cut back on portion sizes and ate only twice a day, that is, I’d eat only lunch and dinner, no breakfast. I also tried to avoid hamburgers, cheese, pork and fried foods when possible.
One important aspect of my diet was that I only followed these rules six days a week. Sunday was my free day, and I ate and drank what ever I wanted. If I wanted to eat a tub of Blue Bell ice cream for breakfast, a Super-sized Big Mac combo for lunch and the Surf-n-Turf buffet down at Wind Creek for dinner, it was all fair game.
To ensure that I wasn’t depriving myself of any necessary nutritional needs during the week, I also took a few supplements every morning. I took a One a Day multivitamin as well as doses of B12, Vitamin D and fish oil. It’s my feeling that the multivitamin and B12 had the most impact on my diet. I started taking Vitamin D and fish oil after reading a couple of articles about their benefits in recent issues of Outside magazine.
Exercise was also an important factor in my weight loss. I typically jogged three miles every other day, which is something I’ve been doing since high school. Go figure, but the lighter I got, the easier my runs got. I’m sure that these calorie-burning runs did help some of the weight come off.
The down side to all of this has been people’s reaction to my weight loss. The impact on people that I see on a regular basis wasn’t that great, but folks that I see every once in a while had the strongest reaction. “Man, you’re gonna dry up and blow away if you don’t start eating” is something that I heard almost daily. It’s no telling how many of them have wondered if I were either smoking crystal meth or dying from some sort of wasting disease. I assure everyone out there that I’m not “on the trail mix” or freebasing cocaine. I’ve just been following a simple, low calorie diet.
In the end, I enjoyed scratching another item off my bucket list. Now the trick will be to maintain my diet and to keep the weight off.
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