• I feel light on my feet, and much more agile and quick.
• I can see my toes without leaning forward.
• I used to get a lot of lower back pain when standing or walking for long periods of time. Not any more.
• I don’t know how this is related, but I used to get headaches 2-3 times a week. They’ve almost entirely disappeared.
• I’m more, um, “regular”.  ‘Nuff said, but it sure is nice.  Couldn’t leave that item out.
• I spend less money on food.
• I do more home-cooking, which I love to do.
• I don’t feel stuffed and bloated after meals.
• I’m more educated about what I put into my body.
• I have far more energy for my kids and can play with them much more actively.
• My kids can hug me bigger and better, and latch their hands behind my back when they do it.
• My wife and I can hug and get close without my gut in the way – I never realized how much it kept our bodies apart.
• Sex is massively improved. This alone is worth all the hard work. 
• I get compliments from friends and co-workers every single day. At work, I often get overt double-takes from people who haven’t seen me in a while. Everyone stops me in the hallway to congratulate me and ask how I did it. It’s a big ego boost.
• I’ve inspired friends and family. I love how infectious the whole thing is, there are several people who are now on their own weight loss programs because they were inspired by me. Just as I was inspired by others. Also a big ego boost.
• I have bonded closer with the friends who are doing it with me.
• Amongst those of us doing it together, it’s almost like being part of a little community and provides much fodder for discussion.
• I bought some new clothes, and man, do I feel good wearing them and looking thin.
• I joined a gym, and instead of being a chore, I’ve found it to be fun and something I look forward to.

There is one negative, something I didn’t anticipate. I’m cold all the time! Losing all that blubber has made a big difference with regards to the temperatures I’m comfortable in, and I have to wear a jacket or something all the time. On the plus side, I imagine it will be far easier to get through the hottest days of summer in comfort. This is not a big deal at all, of course, but it amuses me and I thought it worth mentioning.

There you go, just off the top of my head. When I started this initiative, back in September 2009, I felt like I was taking the first step in climbing a mountain. To my surprise, it simply hasn’t been as hard as I thought it would be. Reflecting back over the last 6 months, they seem to have flown by, and I’ve developed new habits that have completely eclipsed the old habits, to the point where eating right and exercising doesn’t really require a lot of extra effort or discipline. In short, I want to eat right and exercise. It’s become a natural part of my routine, and it’s become easy to tell myself “no” to something that wouldn’t be good for me. It’s been more than a mere diet, it’s been a lifestyle change, and while I wish I had done it years ago, I’m glad I finally did it now. I’ll never go back to the way it used to be.

All right, 15 more pounds to go to reach my goal! A huge thanks to all my friends and family for their totally awesome support. I am so glad I announced my intentions to everyone, and the fact that everyone rallied around me has constantly inspired and motivated me. I don’t think I could have done it without all the encouragement! A special shout-out to my friend Bill for planting the seed by doing it first and gently encouraging me to join him, my friends Todd and Cory for nurturing it to bloom by doing it alongside me, and my wife Jennifer for doing it with me and losing 23 pounds herself! It is so much easier to do something like this when those you’re closest with are doing it with you; the mutual support and companionship is invaluable. Thanks all, and I promise to keep going!

If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything. Think about that for a moment, and let it sink in. You could have all the money in the world. You could have a huge mansion, “things” galore, girls hanging off your elbows at all hours. But if you’re not healthy, you have nothing. If you’re bedridden, you won’t be able to enjoy that mansion. If you’re so sick that you can’t stand up to pee in the toilet, what does it matter if you have enough money to buy up your local shopping mall? Your health is the most important possession you have, because it is a prerequisite to everything else. It directly determines your quality of life, regardless of your other material wealth. If you don’t have your health, you may as well have nothing, because you can’t use or enjoy any of  your stuff anyway.

Diets don’t fail. We abandon them. This is also completely true, and utterly profound. Saying that your diet failed is simply passing the buck. Diets are diets, they have no decision-making ability. You decide to follow them, or not. Viewing them as things that we either follow or do not follow puts the accountability right where it belongs: on the person following the diet. Diets don’t fail, we stop following them and then it seems like they failed. But it is we who fail to follow instructions. This saying keeps me on track, and reminds me that my weight loss is completely under my control.

And I think I will add a third saying to my mirror, something my friend Diane told me yesterday that she read somewhere: Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. In short, it isn’t worth overeating or overindulging for the fleeting enjoyment of food to the detriment of your weight and health. Being obese for 20 years, I can attest that while I enjoyed food quite a bit, it came with a heavy cost: loss of physical fitness and an increasing inability to do even menial daily tasks. Walking through the mall to shop with my wife, I would develop lower backaches, every single time without fail. Playing with my small children, finding a comfortable position in bed at night, walking up a flight of stairs – these things all became chores because my love of food led me to carry around 65 pounds of extra weight every waking moment of every day. What kind of trade-off is that? There is nothing that tastes so good that it’s worth losing that kind of mobility over, not to mention years off your valuable lifespan.

Find some motivational sayings that press a button with you, write them down, put them on your mirror and read them to yourself every day.  Remind yourself of why you’re losing weight, so you don’t lose sight of your goal.  Motivation matters!

The problem with doing something like this in private is that it’s too easy to quit. If you start to diet alone, and then you abandon your diet, you’re the only one that knows you even started it. It’s too easy to rationalize it away. “Oh well, I can try again next week.” I have done exactly that sort of rationalization before, and the problem is that next week turns into next year and more years after that. You can procrastinate forever if you’re the only one that knows you’re procrastinating. Publicizing your intention puts you on the hot seat. It creates accountability. Only the most disciplined people can truly be accountable only to themselves; most of the rest of us perform best when we’re accountable to others. Sure, I could still abandon my diet and simply take the heat from my friends and family. But I’m far less likely to, because any time I think about abandoning the diet, I think of all the comments and flack I’m going to take from the people that care about me. I would feel like I was letting people down, including myself.

It’s a huge emotional boost, and it’s something I think about if I get an eating urge, so it’s a great motivator. But honestly, I find I don’t have many urges, because now I’m just into it almost like it’s a fascinating hobby, and all the support I receive helps so much to keep me focused. If you’re thinking about dieting and losing weight, when you finally decide to take the plunge, publicize it! If your friends are anything like mine, I think you will find yourself amazed at the support you’ll receive.

You see, the standard advice is to avoid starting a diet around the holidays.  There are just too many temptations and it’s too easy to fail.  That may be true, and if you are on the fence about dieting, perhaps you should wait.  But for me, it was different.  I had decided I was going to do something about my weight, and the fact that my decision was made shortly before the holidays was kind of inconvenient, but it was what it was.  I did ponder that at the time.  In the end, I realized that I could choose to wait, and then possibly lose my nerve or resolve by the time January rolled around, and I wasn’t willing to risk that.  I was ready right now, and felt I had to take advantage of it while my attitude was good.

And besides, what’s the difference?  This holiday season, the next, all future holiday seasons – they’re all the same.  I’ll be just as tempted this year as I will be next year, and the year following and the year after that.  The whole point was not to simply diet and lose weight.  The point was to make permanent changes to my eating habits and lifestyle, and if the goal was bigger than simply losing weight, then the holidays were going to have to be included in those plans sooner or later.  As far as I’m concerned, the sooner the better.  Let’s get it over with and take my first test.

I got through Halloween ok.  All right, I admit to a bit of candy snacking here and there, but I will gladly rationalize that my candy consumption was easily a tenth or less of what it has been in previous years, when I gluttonized freely.  Now comes Thanksgiving and its accompanying feast.  I admit it makes me a little nervous.  I look forward to this (and the Christmas feast) all year.  I love turkey.  I love mashed potatoes.  I love, love, love that gravy.  I’ll drizzle it over my turkey and mashed potatoes, and even dip my roll into it.  The roll is smothered in butter, as are the mashed potatoes.  Sugared cranberries, pumpkin pie, beer and wine…the list goes on and on.  Most years I fill myself, then keep going, until I’m stuffed and tired and can’t move and feel like going to sleep.  Are you salivating yet?

But this year is going to be different.  It has to be different.  I won’t expect to adhere strictly to my calorie budget for the day; it’s a special day after all, and I figure I’m bound to go a little over.  But not by too much.  I will still measure everything, and I’m not going to let myself be taken in by the holiday mood and atmosphere.  It’s a meal, just like any other.  Just because it’s eaten surrounded by family and the food being offered isn’t normally what we fix, that doesn’t make it any different from a dieting perspective.  All the same rules still apply:  enjoy what you like, but watch your portions, and don’t overeat.  Measure everything.  When you’re no longer hungry, stop.  The same basic stuff I do every day.  Here are some specific tips I’ve culled from friends and other sources that I plan to follow on this most marvelous of feasting days:

• Visualize and self-support. Don’t engage in self-defeating rationalizations such as, “I’ll diet after the holidays,” or, “This one day won’t hurt.”  In one day, you can easily tack on an extra pound or two that will take you a week or two to lose.  Instead, self-affirm your goals and visualize where you want to be, just like you should be doing every day anyway.  I plan to go into our Thanksgiving feast visualizing nothing more than a healthy, satisfying meal, just like every other meal.  Just because there is something special about the day does not mean there has to be something special about what I eat.
• Climb back on the wagon when the day is done. Do your best to portion your meal, but chances are good you’ll go over your calorie budget anyway.  It is one thing to say, “I’ll diet after the holidays,” which suggests you are abandoning your diet for the time being, and another to say, “I may go a little over, but tomorrow I’ll get right back on track,” which suggests you’ll do your best while understanding the reality of the feast in front of you.
• Eat a healthy breakfast and lunch. It would be a huge mistake to starve yourself during the day, because by the time you get to the feast, the urge to gorge may be overwhelming.  I’m planning on a light breakfast and lunch that day, but certainly not skipping them altogether.
• Go ahead and sample. There’s bound to be lots of yummy food you don’t get often during the rest of the year, so go ahead and sample a little bit of everything so you don’t feel left out.  Just watch those portions.  For my part, instead of the typical half-dozen deviled eggs (I mean, really, come on), I’ll just have one.  And that pumpkin pie, just a thin slice, no ice cream on the side.
• Ditch the skin. Calorie-wise, turkey is great meat, but the skin can double the calorie count and for so little benefit.  Don’t eat it.
• Eat a salad. A full salad, right at the start of dinner, so it fills you early and makes you less hungry for the fatty stuff.  This is known as “low energy density food” – food that fills you up and satisfyingly occupies space in your tummy, but doesn’t have a lot of calories.  Remember to go easy on the dressing.  When you do go to town on the main courses, focus on the turkey, which is probably the lightest thing on your plate.
• Skip the gravy. Hard, I know, but think about it.  Liquid fat drippings mixed with flour and poured over food that’s already laden with calories.  It’s just not a good idea.  I’m skipping this like I’m skipping the ice cream with my pie.
• Wait 10 minutes before going for seconds. The hunger center in your brain needs a little time to catch up to your stomach sometimes.  It’s amazing how we can be very hungry for seconds right after polishing our plate, but 10 minutes later, wonder why we wanted any more food.  Give it a wait and see if you still really want anything.

Good luck – if I can do it, you can too!

The aptly-named Widow Maker Burger. You don't even want to know how many calories this one is.

In fact, it’s a lot like a gauntlet.  Check out some of the entrée choices and their calorie content, even for things that you think would be “safe”:  Spaghetti & Meatballs, 1,790 calories.  BBQ Chicken Salad, 1,009 calories.  The BBQ Chicken Sandwich, for crying out loud, is an incredible 1,523 calories – and these are the “light” choices I’d typically look for in a restaurant.   What do they do to that chicken sandwich, make it out of bacon? Don’t even think about stuff like the Country Fried Steak (2,409 calories) or the Beef Back Ribs, which are an astounding 4,301 calories – more than 2 days worth of calorie intake in a single dish!  That’s not even counting the sides or bread that come with the main course.  Even the sandwiches aren’t safe, with the Motherlode Sandwich clocking in at 1,541 calories and the Cashew Chicken Salad Sandwich costing a hefty 1,702 calories, not counting the fries (which certainly add another 700 calories or more).  Ouch.

Rotisserie Chicken - not bad at only 737 calories, including the skin which you shouldn't eat anyway.

Fortunately, if you look hard enough, you will find some reasonable choices on their menu.  The seafood is pretty good:  Cedar Plank Salmon is 985 calories, and the Shrimp Skewers are only 682 calories – still not exactly “light”, but manageable.  The Roast Turkey on Wheatberry sandwich is 945 calories, again not too bad if you just eat half.  Happily, one of my favorite dishes, the Rotisserie Chicken, weighs in at only 737 calories – that’s still a lot of calories, but it’s an entire half a chicken, which I certainly don’t need to eat all in one sitting.  (That calorie count also includes skin, which I don’t eat either, so you can probably shave a couple hundred calories off that total.)  Each entrée comes with grilled vegetables, one side dish and one bread.  I chose the red-skinned mashed potatoes (330 calories) and the sourdough roll (210 calories), both among the lightest options and both still plenty delicious.  I declined both butter and gravy (ok, actually I used a little butter for the roll, but only about half a tablespoon, 50 calories).  Add it all up and you get 1,277 calories, not too bad for half a chicken and generous side portions of mashed potatoes and bread.

Here’s where the huge portions at Claim Jumper become a good thing for dieters:  you don’t have to eat the whole thing, and the bigger the portion, the easier it is to split the dish.  I think this concept is key to dieting in any restaurant, and it’s something a friend of mine clued me into early on in my diet.  Just because you ordered it, don’t feel like you have to eat it all in one sitting!  You can take home leftovers, or if it’s something that doesn’t keep well, just toss it in the garbage.  How wasteful, you say?  Well, would you rather eat for the sake of not wasting anything even if it means you pack on the calories, or would you rather stay within your calorie budget and lose some weight?  Luckily, chicken, mashed potatoes and rolls all make for good leftovers.  I split everything in half, ate one half at the restaurant, and boxed the other half for dinner the following night.  The result:  only 638 total calories for dinner, and I have a dinner with the same calorie content for the next night as well.  Win!

The moral of the story is, no matter how hedonistic the restaurant, you can make it work for your diet.  If it can be done at Claim Jumper, the mother of all meat houses, it can probably be done anywhere.  Just use what you know about which foods are heavy and which foods are light, and don’t feel like you have to clean your whole plate.  Ask your waiter for the nutrition guide (don’t be embarassed or feel like you’re inconveniencing the staff – you’re on a mission and it’s their job), and if they don’t have one, make some educated guesses based on the rest of your diet (and then look it up later on the internet so you know what you consumed).  For example, you know for a fact that chicken is going to be lighter than beef, almost every time.  Grilled is better than fried.  And watch out for salads – not every salad is light!  Is it covered in bacon bits and blue cheese?  Then it’s probably just as bad as that bacon cheeseburger you passed over on the menu – avoid it.  Most importantly, regulate your portions.  Restaurants these days serve portions that are 2 or 3 times what the average person should be eating in a single sitting.  Split your meal up and box at least half of it.  Again, don’t be embarassed – you do what you have to do, and you do it proudly because you’re doing something good for yourself.  Why overeat, just because the restaurant is encouraging you to?  That annoying cousin who’s gently mocking you across the table?  Yeah, he’s 40 pounds overweight and wishes he had the discipline to skip the chocolate cake that’s going to literally add another pound worth of calories to his lazy lard ass.  And in 8 months, when you’ve lost 50 pounds and he’s pushing 50 pounds overweight himself, who’s going to have the last laugh?

So good luck, and be smart!  Restaurants don’t have to kill your diet if you don’t let them.

I’m not entirely sure how I got to that point – in the past I’ve struggled quite a bit with wanting to eat when I knew I shouldn’t, or wanting to eat bad fatty things when I knew I should be eating better.  I guess this time around, I reached a psychological limit, got kind of disgusted with myself, and found some resolve I didn’t know I had.  I’m not sure I could have done it a couple of years ago and 10 pounds lighter, when things didn’t feel as urgent.  This time around, I felt that if I didn’t do something, it would get entirely away from me and I’d lose control of my weight altogether.  That scared me, and I guess it scared me straight.

My mindset right now feels very focused.  I count my calories religiously, and it’s become kind of a contest for me.  How well can I do each day?  I find I’m not even hitting my daily limit, because I’m always trying to see how much I can stay under (not in an unhealthy sense; I’m eating plenty and healthily, but I’m always trying to beat my calorie budget for the day by at least a little).  And now that I’ve done it for several weeks, it’s easy.  The initial urges to eat are gone, and now I’m just focused on losing the weight.  I step on the scale every morning to keep myself in line, and watching even a couple of ounces come off is very rewarding.  The fact is, I’ve learned to like my diet.  It’s easy to keep doing something that you like to do.

I’ve been thinking of getting to this point for a long time, but I obviously wasn’t ready.  If I had tried before, I think I would have failed (or rather, abandoned the diet).  This time around, things have just clicked for me, and I have zero interest in doing anything that will jeopardize my success.  I find myself turning down temptations left and right, and feeling empowered and proud of myself every time.  It gets easier and easier, it really does.  Success is breeding success.  And believe it or not, I started my process with not a lot of confidence.  I’m not trying to brag – what I’m saying is that if I can do it, anyone can.  Eating is one of my favorite recreations, and I’ve had many a despairing moment when I thought I’d never pull myself out of the destructive cycle I found myself in when I weighed 250 pounds.

In the end, I think that I finally decided that losing weight was more important to me than eating big portions of my favorite fatty foods.  For me, it came down to dedication and focus, and a final decision that I was just going to get it done.  And it wasn’t just a disingenuous “you can do it” kind of thing for me, either – I genuinely decided that’s how it was going to be, and I can literally feel the difference in my mind from all past attempts.  Without that very concious decision, I would have abandoned my diet already.

Cracking 220 will be huge for me, kind of a bust through the dam, because I have not weighed less than 220 since I graduated from high school.  As I was gaining weight during that period in my very late teens and early 20s, I recall hitting 220 on the scale and, for the first time, thinking to myself that I might want to watch my weight.  That was almost 20 years ago, and looking back, I don’t know why I waited so long to do something about it.  It would be easy to wallow in the notion that I wasted years being overweight when I could have done something about it back then, but the fact is that it’s water under the bridge, and I simply didn’t have the mindset or the motivation to do anything about it.  I really didn’t care, at least not enough to take any action.

At this point, the diet is easy.  EASY.  All the hard stuff that happens in the first few weeks, getting used to new ways of eating and portioning out everything very carefully, is all behind me now.  I have almost no issues with hunger or temptation, because I’m eating well, and I’ve lost so much weight that I can’t imagine ever going back.  I feel better, I look better, and I step on the scale each day with anticipation – it’s become like a game to me, and I’m my own main competitor.  Every time I feel tempted by something tasty, I remind myself of  the goal, and I visualize what I’m going to look like when I weigh 185.  Once I visualize it, the temptation goes away.  I’m just not willing to jeopardize my goal for the sake of short-term satisfaction.

Sorry for the lack of posting lately, I’ll try to kickstart that with today’s post.  I have a backlog of subjects I’d like to talk about, and I’ll try to work on those this week and keep posting.  It helps keep me motivated, so there’s no reason for me not to do it.  Talk to you all later!

Calories are simply units of energy that your body uses for all its daily functions.  When you consume more calories than you use, your body turns the excess calories into fat for storage.  That way, if you ever have a deficit of calories, your body can use the calories stored in your fat in order to continue functioning.  Does this sound familiar?  You eat a lot, and fat builds up.  You stop eating, and fat goes down.  The key is to reduce caloric intake to the point that your body is using fat stores for energy, but not to make yourself so hungry that your body actually goes into “starvation mode”, where it reduces your metabolism to try and reserve your fat stores.  Basically, you need to continue eating, but shave enough off your calorie intake that your body continues to burn fat.  More on those details in another post; I think the biology behind all of this is actually quite fascinating.

I’m using a free iPhone app called Lose It! to track my calories and exercise.  It’s a terrific app that will also be the topic of a future post.  Basically, it lets me keep track of my daily weight, input my daily food intake, input my exercise, and calculates my calorie budget by the day and by the week.  3500 calories equals about 1 pound of body weight, so if you want to lose 1 pound, all you have to do is burn 3500 calories.  That means, in order to lose 1 pound per week, you need to eat 500 fewer calories per day than what your body burns.  If your body maintains a constant weight at 3000 calories per day, then if you shave that to 2500 calories per day, you will lose one pound in one week (7 days x 500 calories = 3500 calories/week).  Lose It! tracks all of this math for you, and calculates your daily calorie budget according to your height, weight, age and how quickly you want to lose the weight.  It will only allow you to calculate up to a loss of 2 pounds per week, as this is the maximum amount deemed safe by most health professionals.  Great app, and as I said, I’ll do a full review of it in a near future post.

So anyway, this all amounts to:  eat less, exercise more.  And keep strict track of what I’m eating and how much I’m exercising, so I’m not just guessing.  The results are good so far:  I started at 251 pounds, and today, nearly 4 weeks later, I weighed in at 237.2.  That’s actually a bit faster than expected, but my body is adjusting to a new kind of diet and will probably settle down in time.

Things I’m not doing:  trying to eat drastically different foods and burn myself out by excessive exercise.  Those are good routes to diet failure.  I’m still eating all the same foods I like to eat, just eating a lot less of them, and making better choices about what to have in between meals.  And I’m choosing to eat leaner foods more often – again, foods I already like, but wasn’t eating enough of.  This ensures I still feel full and not hungry, but that I decrease my calorie intake.  Instead of cheeseburgers, I choose deli sandwiches.  Instead of snacking on chips, I choose to snack on fruits.  Instead of a 16-ounce steak, I have 8 ounces.  The two things I have mostly eliminated from my diet altogether are soda and candy, two calorie killers that I have enjoyed far too fondly in the past.  Once again, I will give more details on many specific choices I’ve made in a future post.

Next week I’ll write about the diet plan I’m following and what makes it click.  Thanks again to all my friends and family for their generous support, it sure makes it easier to know everyone is behind me.