Weight Loss Tips ala Ben

People have asked throughout my weight loss process what I’ve been doing, and I give some tips on things that have been helpful to them, but I haven’t aggregated links and tips into one place yet. So I thought, being almost 5lbs past half way (that is negative 58lbs since Jan 1, 2009) on my journey towards what I weighed when I entered college, it seems like a good time.

• Count Calories – Find a way to do this consistently. I use an iPhone app called Lose It. Great app, highly recommend something like this that makes it quick to do this in the ‘crack-in-the-day’ moments (like everyone else who has an iPhone, this is one of my iPhone pooping activities). This is key number 1, and by far the most important thing to helping Lauren and I lose weight. One super-nice feature of this is it only lets you set a healthy calorie target (consensus is that if you try to lose more than 2lbs/week just by cutting calories it can be bad for you), and as you record you weight each day it adjusts the calorie budget.
• At some point, I actually started exercising regularly (with the exception of the last few weeks since we are trying to figure out how to re-arrange life with a dog). I phased it in after the diet was pretty solid. I think changing too much at once was gonna end up in a yo-yo / unsustainable scenario for me. Anyway, I started with the Podrunner Intervals: First day to 5k in April. I’m modifying that some now. I think I’m going to run some shorter distances faster since I’m not getting the 3.2 miles in 30 minutes yet (they end the last week at 30 minutes). Also I’m now doing the free Turbulence Training program on the off running days.
• I don’t have some super-specific diet, but in the last month or so I’ve been upping the Protein a little and decreasing carbs and fat some. I’m doing whey protein shakes usually once a day, which helps with the protein thing. I’m eating less pasta, and less sugary stuff, like cookies and chocolate (though, of course, I don’t cut those out).
• I think a diet shouldn’t be defined as something you do to lose weight, but instead should be taken to mean “the food that you eat.” So it is important for me to eat foods that I like, and focus on portion control and picking foods that are better for me (again, that I like). I do not want to change how I eat when I hit my goal weight and I want to eat the same after having kids (or as similar as possible). So I try to make sure whatever I do it is reasonable for the long term.
• When eating out I favor subway over McD’s. At a Chinese restaurant I get non-breaded dishes instead of my favorite General Tso’s Chicken or Sweet and sour meat. At sit-down places I order more salads, or chicken dishes instead of burgers.
• I drink a fair bit of water, and cut out pop mostly (my work has free pop – I’m sure I can contribute 10 lbs to this fact). When I do drink pop it is diet. When I drink gatorade or powerade I get G2 or powerade zero (I do like those though).

So, anyway, this isn’t revolutionary or anything. It mostly boils down to being deliberate when I eat instead of acting on impulse, accountability through calorie tracking, and phasing in things one at a time (if your personality is like mine anyway).

The things I wish I would have done better at that I haven’t:
1) Take more before and incremental pictures, and mark them in folder or with names that say my weight.
2) Record measurements of waist and arms and stuff like that at regular intervals along with my weight into a spreadsheet. My iPhone app sorta has my data captured at the moment, so until I can import it into excel I have no good way to say “On this day I weighed X.” It does have a cool graph, so I don’t feel compelled in the “I’m and Engineer” sense to have excel do graphs for me…k, I’m taking this to a super-nerdy place.
3) Figured out how to balance lean mass loss vs. fat loss better than I have. I think doing more measurements with a tape measure would have helped me track this better, but my new body fat % scale suggests that I’ve lost 12.4lbs since I started paying attention to body fat. And about 2.5lbs is from lean mass, according to the scale (which admittedly isn’t super accurate, but it is consistent).