Category: Strategy

Friday Paleo-friendly lunches with friends and the constant struggle of portion size

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On Fridays, I usually have lunch with some friends as we celebrate the end of the work week and the beginning of the weekend. We typically go to Logan’s Roadhouse or Saltgrass Steak House. At these two places, I can order a very Paleo-friendly 6oz Filet steak with a baked sweet potato with regular butter. As my pre-meal food, I usually order a Caesar salad with no croutons and I pull most of the cheese off of it and set it to the side. I know that the Caesar dressing is probably not the most Paleo-friendly, but it’s a small indulgence I allow myself once a week.

When we don’t eat steak, we go to Mexican restaurants where I can order some type of fajitas with grilled onions or grilled mixed vegetables. The looks on the faces of the wait staff as I tell them I don’t need beans, rice, or tortillas is always pretty hilarious.

It is possible to eat lunch at restaurants that are Paleo-friendly. Most restaurants have some sort of meat and vegetable option unless you’re at a sandwich shop (in which case you might just have to eat a salad). I’ve had to ask for something off the menu only once, and even then, it was only a slight change.

Incidentally, today’s lunch marks an important turning point for me: I didn’t eat my entire sweet potato. I have a hard time not eating an entire sweet potato because they are so delicious to me. I often eat the whole potato which makes me feel over-fed. Today, I stopped short of eating the whole thing, leaving about 1/4 of it on the plate. I felt full and decided that I was only going to finish it for the sake of how much I liked eating them, and that wasn’t good enough. Three hours later, I feel sated and actually, I feel great about having not eaten the whole thing.

You’d think that by now, 16 months after staring my Paleo journey, I would have had this licked by now, but you’d be wrong. Sweet potatoes have been my Achilles heel. It’s one of the very few foods that, while Paleo, I have a hard time controlling myself over. Sherry is very good about only giving me one half of a sweet potato with any meal we eat, but if I’m left to my own devices, I’ll grab an entire sweet potato. It’s not good for me to eat the entire potato with a regular-sized portion, so I typically compensate by getting less protein to go along with it, but not always.

When you have a bad relationship with food, you have to always remain vigilant. The fight never ends, and you must always be looking not only at what you eat, but also how much you eat. For me, the struggle is real, and I’m always learning something new about myself and how to control my relationship with food. I feel good about today’s victory and I will cling to it to push me into the future.

Slow and steady wins the race: We’ve heard it before, but do we really do it?

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Slow and steady wins the race. We hear it time and time again. Tortoise and hare. It’s a concept taught to us since kindergarten. But do we really live it? Do we really embrace why it’s so important?

In our high-tech modern culture, we want everything right now. Yesterday isn’t soon enough. People get impatient after 2.3 seconds when clicking a hyperlink online. If it takes longer than 2.3 seconds, the majority of persons who clicked that link will either scroll on or click another. We are an impatient people. That works against us in many ways.

I am only going to concentrate on diet and exercise here. When I set out to lose weight and get healthy, I set some pretty aggressive goals for myself. I wanted to lose 20 lbs the first month, and 50 lbs total four months later. The crazy part is that I was able to do it. That wasn’t a good thing, though, because it could have set me up for disappointment and failure later.

You see, when I weighed nearly 300 lbs, it was easy for me to lose a lot of weight quickly because the weight I was losing was actually pretty small compared to my total weight. When you weigh 290 lbs, 20 lbs isn’t that much. When you weigh 173, 20 lbs is a lot! As I was losing weight at a rate of 10 lbs per month, it felt like it was taking forever. I weigh myself every morning, and seeing the weight fluctuate as it went on its downward trend ever so slowly was, at times, a little disappointing. However, upon reviewing those trends at the end of each month and finding I had lost the 10 lbs was always a great feeling.

And then it stopped.

My weight hovered around 177 for a very long time. Months, in fact. I had the toughest time reaching my penultimate goal of 175 lbs, and my ultimate goal of 165 lbs was beginning to feel like it was going to be out of reach. But, through the long plateau, I persisted. I kept eating right, and I introduced exercise into my regimen.

Even after five months of exercise, I managed to only lose about 2-3 lbs (depending on which average weight I used as a starting point). It wasn’t until last week that I finally dipped into the 173 range. This is a big deal for me, as it means I’m finally making progress again on the scale, and the hard work is paying off.

So, what changed? Nothing, really. Just perseverance. I decided that I didn’t want to engage in any drastic activity to try to drop any weight because any weight lost that way would be temporary. I needed to lose it naturally in a way that would be sustainable in the long run and in keeping with my lifestyle. I made a mental picture of this last block of weight being a huge piece of errant stone on a statue. I was the artist holding the chisel working to get the errant stone off without damaging the work I’d done so far on the statue. I knew at some point, the errant stone would fall away, and it seems it finally has.

With that said, I have been seeing changes in my body that haven’t been reflected on the scale. My waist has shrunk as has my face. My cheeks are deeper, and my fitness levels are soaring. I’m running sub-9 minute miles regularly now, and I find myself able to do physical tasks without exertion or minimal effort. It’s truly amazing how rejuvenated I feel as a 49 year old man. I can only imagine how someone in their 20’s or 30’s would feel after losing the amount of weight I’ve lost and begun a fitness program.

It’s taken me a long time to get where I am at today, but at the same time, it feels like it happened in a moment. That’s the tricky thing about time, effort, and delayed gratification. While you’re going through the transition, it feels like it’s taking forever. But then you finish, and you realize that the time and effort were well worth it. For me, the journey never ends, but at this spot on the road I find myself on, I’m very happy with the results so far, and I am optimistic for the future. I can’t wait to see where I’m at by September. How fast I’m running, what I weigh, how many push ups I’m doing, and what other fitness or exercise I’ve added to my routine. I have no firm goals other than eventually reaching 165 lbs. All in good time. It’s been a great ride so far.

The truth about what is hard and what isn’t: diet vs exercise

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I saw a meme on the Book of Faces this week that resonated with me because so many people see exercise as the panacea for losing weight.

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They are different kinds of hard, but one of them really is about getting past discomfort and creating a habit while the other requires introspection, a change in our perception of what food is, and analyzing our relationship with food. Then, you need to do planning and a lot of work to prepare for the week if you’re going to succeed. Yes, preparing meals and sticking to a meal plan is harder than exercise.

I am fortunate that my awesome wife Sherry diligently prepares our food every Sunday. It’s at great cost not financially, but emotionally and in time. She typically gives up, at a minimum, half of her Sunday to make our food. There have been Sunday Prep Days that have lasted all day. I try to help out where I can, but more often than not, she has things so tightly choreographed that me “helping” gets in her way and causes her to make mistakes. I try to be as supportive as I can in every way because she is, after all, making my meals for an entire week in one day.

Starting running was easy in comparison. All I needed to do was put on some shorts and running shoes and get out there. Any physical discomfort I felt was temporary, and as long as I was careful, I was able to avoid over-exertion and injury. Creating the habit to run every other day wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t nearly as hard as giving up an entire day a week to make healthy foods.

With that said, I haven’t talked about the most difficult part of the food prep: eating well. One of the reasons we do food prep is not only to save time during the week, but to have healthy options available that spent time and money to prepare to dissuade us from eating out or eating bad foods. The cost is considerable in food prep, both financially and in time. We are less likely to leave already prepared food in the refrigerator when we know that it already cost us money and time to make.

Eating well requires discipline. Lots of it for some people. For stress eaters, it can be especially difficult. There are volumes written about strategies one can employ to curb hunger, so I won’t go into that here and now (perhaps a later blog post about my own strategies). I was an emotional eater, and also someone who ate because I used it as a form of entertainment. I had to face down the reasons I ate too much and address them head-on. That was far more difficult than running has ever been.

You can’t exercise away a bad diet. Bad eating habits will inhibit any progress you could ever make through exercise. Do yourself a favor and eat right. Your body will reward you for it!

Exercise Not Required: Lose 100+ lbs for FREE!

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This is not a joke, nor is it unbelievable. It’s not unattainable. It’s not fiction. It’s not fantasy. It’s not a joke. It’s not click-bait (okay, so it kinda was, but it’s because people don’t really believe it, so they click to find out what the catch is). The truth is that you can totally lose weight without exercise. How do I know? Because not only have I done it, but I’ve personally watched dozens of people I know do it!

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Have they all lost 100 lbs? No, but not all of them need to lose that much. I did, because I was a huge, fat guy. Seriously, I was “Yo Momma Joke” fat. I stayed that way for a long time because I couldn’t fathom the amount of work necessary for me to lose weight. When I looked at calories burned through exercise versus the number of calories I was eating just to keep from being hungry, it looked like just a drop in the bucket. It looked that way, because that’s honestly what exercise is: a drop in the bucket, from a caloric viewpoint. It’s irrefutable that exercise is good for you, your heart, your muscles, bones, and even your mind. However, it’s not good for losing weight. Exercise alone will leave you with a very slow and tiring weight loss process. Diet, on the other hand, is where it’s at. Why? It attacks the source of obesity or being overweight: the food that goes into your body.

I am not talking calorie counting (which studies show doesn’t work well for everyone) or (and this one is laughable to me) moderation. People who say that moderation works have never had an eating disorder or an unhealthy relationship with food. Sure, in theory, moderation could work, and it should work. Heck, there are thin people I know who use moderation to control their weight. However, these people have never been FAT. I don’t mean 10-15 lbs overweight. I’m talking 100+ lbs FAT. I was. I know how hard it is to be that large and need to lose weight. I know the challenges, the hunger, the cravings, and the self-doubt that goes into needing to lose weight. What I didn’t know that just by changing what I eat, I could lose all the weight and get healthy. Nobody told me that. They all just said, “Exercise a lot and use moderation.” Please.

I see people posting online about how they exercised their weight off. About how they worked hard and got great results. Yet I know people personally who exercise every single day and work their tails off and are frustrated that they don’t see their efforts translated onto the scale. It’s because they were sold on the idea that exercise will give you weight loss. Sadly, it’s just not true.

Do you need to lose 10-15 lbs? You’re already near your ideal weight? Good! Exercise will go a long way in helping you reach your goal. Do you need to lose 100+ lbs? Then exercise alone won’t get you there anytime soon. What will is being careful with what you’re putting into your mouth.

I’m not saying starve. I didn’t. I’m not saying buy any products that promise weight loss. Heck, I’m not even touting, pushing, or selling a program you need to sign up and pay for. I advocate a healthy lifestyle by eating right that happen to have some free information available for that you can adopt today! Whole30 and Paleo are the method by which I changed my life and became healthy. They don’t pay me, and I don’t charge money for advice. I just believe in them, as they have been the key to my weight loss and amazing health. And yeah, I’m a runner now, too, so there’s that.

Day One or One Day: Which one do you pick?

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0042bdd88e05e5347cb12e43ccd8151cIt’s simple, really. You can keep making plans and putting off starting your healthy lifestyle to “One day,” or you can make today “Day One.” Day One can even be planning menus and taking action toward getting healthy. It doesn’t mean you have to make your next meal Paleo, Whole30, or Keto. Day One can be going for a walk after work. It can be emptying your pantry of food items with sugar, carbs, beans, and dairy. It can be putting together a grocery list or even going to the store and buying groceries for your new healthy lifestyle. It can be avoiding sugar starting now.

Don’t make getting healthy a “One day” decision. Make today Day One. You will look back at Day One and wonder what took you so long to start. I know I have many times.

Counting Calories and Satiety: Why there’s more to it than just calories in vs calories out

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I tried to count calories to lose weight. It didn’t work for me. Why? Because without understanding the differences between good and bad calories and satiety, I would often still feel hungry after a meal. On its most basic level, nutrition is easy: eat fewer calories than you expend in a day to create a deficit which, in turn, will yield weight loss. Seems simple, right? Well, there’s more to it than that.

Satiety: the quality or state of being fed or gratified. This is a word many people don’t know, understand, or consider. It turns out that it’s one of the most important keys to losing weight effectively. If you eat 500 calories at a meal but don’t feel full, you’ll be miserable at best and unless you have really great willpower, you’ll succumb to the cravings and eat more. On the other hand, if you eat 500 calories that fill you up, you will be less inclined to snack or over-eat and will be able to make it to the next regular meal without any discomfort.

That’s a huge key for many people: comfort. Nobody wants to starve. It’s hard-wired into our brains to avoid starving. It’s uncomfortable at best, and downright horrible. I’ve had to go days without food before, and I can tell you, I never want to experience that again. As an overweight person, going for too long without food was very uncomfortable. Heck, I’d find myself hungry a few hours after a meal and would snack to make that bad feeling go away. Many overweight people who want to lose weight fail because they can’t deal with that hungry feeling. That’s because the food they eat are hyper-nutritious but low in satiety. These are foods like pizza, hamburgers, Taco Bell, etc. You have to eat a lot to feel full, but then you took in 2-3 days worth of calories.

The main factor in our success in being able to stick with Whole30 and Paleo has been satiety. Every meal we eat is very high in satiety which in turn not only fills us up but keeps us from getting hungry again too soon. It makes meals satisfying in a way that doesn’t make you feel bloated or stuffed. It energizes you instead of drags you down.

Some people succeed with counting calories. A good friend of mine lost a lot of weight this way, but it is not sustainable. They gained the weight back (and then some). I am not one of those people either; counting calories always ended in failure for me. Like an idiot, I tried time and time again and found short-term success only to have it return with an addition 10-15 lbs each time. It wasn’t until I addressed the reasons I ate too much coupled with learning to eat good foods high in satiety did I find success.

Identifying the cause of your ill health and poor fitness is as important as how you fix it

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Do you know what caused you to get out of shape, overweight, and unhealthy? I am not talking about eating too much and not exercising enough. What I mean is, have you really sat down and thought about how you got into the unhealthy predicament you find yourself in? It’s tough to face our failures and weaknesses, but in order to fix them, we have to be honest with ourselves.

I’ve said in the past that if you’re not willing to commit 100%, then you’re wasting your time trying to get healthy and lose weight. I do not say that to discourage anyone from trying to do so, but to point out that anything less than your full effort isn’t going to get you the results you want. The same is true of attacking the source of your unhealthy lifestyle.

innoutedgeFor me, it was a combination of an unhealthy relationship with food (I loved to eat for the sake of eating) and a lack of exercise (I hated to do anything that could be considered exercise. In retrospect, I don’t know why this was). I know there are people who have eating disorders, conditions, diseases, and other maladies that made them overweight. I get it; it’s not all a simple fix. However, for those who do have the aforementioned issues, they have a starting point, and likely, professional help to go to. For the rest of us, it’s incumbent on us to identify the problem and attack it with all the force we have.

My example has been laid out bare on the pages of this blog. I ate too much and didn’t exercise enough. I attacked one first before the other. Now, I eat healthy and exercise often. My health has greatly improved and my fitness level is actually pretty decent. The only way I was able to do this was by being honest with myself and identifying the problem areas and finding a way past them. Whole30 and Paleo were the answer for me, and it worked.

img_3754All the effort in the world won’t change anything if you’re not changing the right thing. Changing a light bulb in the kitchen won’t fix the burned out bulb in the bedroom. Exercise isn’t the cure for being overweight. Diet isn’t the cure for being out of shape. Eating whole wheat and drinking OJ won’t solve anything. Do the introspection, identify your problem, and make a plan to fix it. Seek professional advice or assistance if necessary. Whatever you do, make sure the work you are doing is in the right area. Don’t waste your time and energy changing the wrong light bulb.

How I deal with disappointment in lost progress

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Like you, every now and then, I eat either something I shouldn’t have eaten, or I eat far more than I should have. It’s this pesky thing called living life to the fullest and not skipping out on experiences or adventures. Fortunately for me, I believe that I have gained a healthy balance between these off-plan meals and every day eating. I allow myself treats every now and then, and only in strict moderation. However, this doesn’t alleviate the natural emotions I go through in regards to seeing the numbers creep up on the scale or the pants feeling tighter than usual.

When I see the numbers on the scale go up, I get mad. Not at the scale and not so much at myself, but just angry. I feel it. I use that anger as fuel to stick to my eating plan in a very strict manner. If I’m running that day, I run an extra mile, or maybe I will run a little harder/faster. I make sure to eat just enough to fuel my body but not enough to feel stuffed. It’s good to be full. It’s not good to be stuffed.

When I go for days or weeks without seeing the numbers on the scale get smaller, I feel disappointed. Not in myself, because I know I’m doing most everything right. I do, however, take a closer look at my eating habits and try to analyze what I’m doing wrong. The last plateau I was on, I found that I was not eating enough. I was actually cutting back too much, and I put my body into starvation mode. This was bad. I adjusted, and sure enough, I was rewarded with more progress on the scale.

One thing I never do is contemplate quitting. There is no quitting a healthy lifestyle. There is only making adjustments to fix the formula to get the results I want. I also never get upset at myself. The past is the past. I can only change the future, and I make plans and do my best to stick to them.

I’m no Jedi or super person. I do not possess anything special or different than you. We all have willpower. We all have the ability to be motivated. It is incumbent on you to find your strength and motivation and stick with it. You can do it. Use that energy for good.

Lose weight or get healthy? What’s your real goal?

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File_000 (39)I was afraid I was going to die young due to poor health. If things kept going the way they were going, it was going to be an early end for me. I decided that I wanted to get healthy, and weight loss factored into that for me. I didn’t set out to merely lose weight. It was a big part of it to be sure, but it wasn’t the main goal.  The main goal was to not die young, get healthy, and maybe even get fit.

When we start a diet plan for the reason of losing weight, we tend to watch the scale very closely for feedback and we base our success or failure on the numbers. When the numbers don’t match our expectations, we are much more likely to give up and fail in adopting the new diet or lifestyle. That’s why I always say that the scale is just one measure of our health and progress. There are many times when I go through days or weeks (and in the past few months, bunches of weeks) without any loss of weight. But during these lean times where the scale didn’t reward my good eating habits, my waist did by losing almost 4 inches, and my overall fitness levels have been rising as I’ve been running now for over three months.

I have friends who are using many different methods to get healthy. Some see great weight losses and others see the loss come at a slower pace. We all have our own journeys, and we can only truly commit to them when we are able to come to terms with the sacrifices required. That’s totally okay. That Sherry and I were able to commit to a much more rigid lifestyle than others doesn’t mean we are any better at it. It just means we set our minds to it to a different level; nothing more. You have to be comfortable with your level of commitment or the change in lifestyle won’t work for you. Again, like I always say, do whatever program you want to do, but do it to the best of your ability.

With that said, for 2017, I recommend setting a goal of getting healthy, not losing weight. Weight loss will be a healthy and welcome byproduct of getting healthy. Our bodies are made to be thin, so getting healthy will bring your body back into balance, and you will get weight loss. Just don’t look for weight loss to be the only measure of success. There are so many ways to look at it, and your body will give you constant feedback in different areas. You just need to know where to look.

New Years Resolutions: The Truth

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I’m not a believer in New Years Resolutions for myself. I’ve never been one to make a resolution based on the year changing. As a friend recently said, there’s really no magical difference between one year and the next, and I agree.

With that said, however, New Years Resolutions do seem to be a thing, and a thing that works for some people. I won’t belittle anyone for making one. If that’s your thing, DO IT! But if you make a resultion, then there’s something very important thing you need to know. Most of them fail.

The reasons for this are many, and I am not going to go into them. I will dovetail off the last post I made and tackle one such reason: realistic goals. Many people make resolutions to exercise three or even five times a week. They make a resolution to eat healthy. They make resolutions to lose weight. All of these are very difficult to do when going from a lifestyle that doesn’t incorporate any of these already.

Make whatever resolution you want to make, but make it realistic. Make it more generalized. Make the goals attainable. Instead of saying, “I want to lose 50 lbs by July,” say, ” I want to be healthier by the summertime.” Instead of saying, “I will work out five times a week,” say, “I am going to adopt a plan that allows me to get into exercise in a healthy way that encourages me to want to exercise more on my own” or “I want to get into the habit of exercising.”

When Sherry and I decided to do our first Whole30, we didn’t wait for New Year. We started a week after our decision was made. We took that week to get rid of food we already had by either eating it, donating it, giving it away, or throwing it away (it’s surprising how much bad food we had in our pantry and refrigerator!). When we did our second Whole30, it was again, something we felt we should do to reset things, and we just did it. We are about to start our third Whole30 in a few days, and it has nothing to do with New Years Resolutions and everything to do with the fact that we need to get back to smaller portions and eating good, whole foods. Our Paleo diet has been super awesome, but we’ve allowed some non-Paleo things to creep in here and there, and we don’t want to backslide. So… Whole30 #3, here we come!

If you’re a resolutions type of person, make a realistic one. For the rest of us, there’s no time like the present to make a change. That it happens to be a New Year shouldn’t stop you. If someone asks if your changed diet or exercise plan is a resolution, you can tell them it is and be done with it or tell them it’s a coincidence. It really doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you make a change, set realistic goals, and stick with it.