Recently I was at Coach Lauren and read this post. In it she points to an e-book by Brad Pilon called Eat Stop Eat. Lauren does an excellent job outlining the major points of this program, but it all boils down to intermittent fasting, basically 24 hours once or twice a week.
I have not tried this as of yet, but am seriously considering it, as constant measuring of calories consumed gets tiring and difficult after doing it for 6 months. I can only imagine what it would be lie to do it forever. Yes, during that time you can learn to eat healthy, but even "healthy" food if eaten in excess, ie. eating more calories than you burn, will cause you to get fat. This approach has the advantage of allowing your body to use its own God given abilities to keep your weight under control and even loose weight.
It is well worth giving it a look. I am going to try it in the near future once I get used to my new exercise routine.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Thursday, November 18, 2010
My Weight Loss - Diet
My weight loss started when I we ill first with pneumonia and then with my stroke and its attendant high blood pressure. The first 10 pounds were a result of the diuretic I was put on for my blood pressure, as in the week following being put on it I lost that weight while changing nothing in my diet. That just shows how much fluid my body was retaining. The next 10 pounds came with the stroke and my time in hospital. So basically the first 20 pounds came off in 2 weeks or so.
Following that I did not lose anything for a couple of months even though I was eating "healthy" and exercising. Part of that was simply a result of losing so much weight so quickly, but a bigger part was my buying into the eat healthy food and you will lose weight while forgetting the number of calories consumed compared to the number burned is what determines weight loss.
The thing is, there is some truth to the "healthy" food belief, but it is not that you can eat as much of that so called healthy food and still lose weight. The grain of truth is this, healthy food generally contains more fiber and is less calorie dense. By that I mean for a fairly large serving of beans, you are actually consuming less calories and will feel more full than and similar sized serving of say white flour pasta with a fatty ground beef in tomato sauce. Furthermore, with the healthy food, you will probably also consume more vitamins and minerals your body needs to stay strong and healthy. From this, the myth that you can eat healthy food and not gain weight developed. Don't get caught by this one. What matters is consuming less calories than you burn.
Eventually I realized that and seriously started counting calories at the beginning of June. At that point I was about 230 pounds. Counting calories by carefully measuring everything I eat has resulted in me dropping my weight to 197 as of a couple of weeks back. Better yet in that time my body composition changed dramatically. I started out at 230 pounds total, but that weight was made up of a fat mass of 102 pounds and a lean mass of 128 pounds. When I reached 197 my body composition changed to a fat mass of 59 pounds and a lean mass of 138 pounds. What that means is in that time where I lost 33 pounds total I really lost 43 pounds of body fat and gained 10 pounds of muscle. I still have more weight and fat to get rid of, but this is certainly a great start.
Just as a side note here, a scale that measures your body fat percentage or getting something else to do so is a very valuable tool to help in healthy weight reduction. It will give you a good picture of what is happening in your body, and can help you realize that even though you seem to be losing weight slowly, you may be losing fat quickly.
From all this there are a couple of lessons I would point to. First and probably most important, watch how many calories you eat. You need to create a deficit of calories burning more than you consume. Without measuring calories and recording them you will have a great deal of difficulty doing this. What can help is reading the nutrition labels, and actually measuring out your servings. At first I was surprised at what a serving was, but now I am used to it. A kitchen scale, especially and digital one, can be a great help in this. Second, remember that the quality of food matters. High fiber in particular, is very helpful in weigh loss. Yes you can get rid of the pounds eating whatever you want, but I find with the low fiber, highly processed stuff I would get more hungry and be more inclined to cheat than with the less processed, more natural, high fiber stuff.
With all this I also exercised a great deal, but that is a topic for another post.
Following that I did not lose anything for a couple of months even though I was eating "healthy" and exercising. Part of that was simply a result of losing so much weight so quickly, but a bigger part was my buying into the eat healthy food and you will lose weight while forgetting the number of calories consumed compared to the number burned is what determines weight loss.
The thing is, there is some truth to the "healthy" food belief, but it is not that you can eat as much of that so called healthy food and still lose weight. The grain of truth is this, healthy food generally contains more fiber and is less calorie dense. By that I mean for a fairly large serving of beans, you are actually consuming less calories and will feel more full than and similar sized serving of say white flour pasta with a fatty ground beef in tomato sauce. Furthermore, with the healthy food, you will probably also consume more vitamins and minerals your body needs to stay strong and healthy. From this, the myth that you can eat healthy food and not gain weight developed. Don't get caught by this one. What matters is consuming less calories than you burn.
Eventually I realized that and seriously started counting calories at the beginning of June. At that point I was about 230 pounds. Counting calories by carefully measuring everything I eat has resulted in me dropping my weight to 197 as of a couple of weeks back. Better yet in that time my body composition changed dramatically. I started out at 230 pounds total, but that weight was made up of a fat mass of 102 pounds and a lean mass of 128 pounds. When I reached 197 my body composition changed to a fat mass of 59 pounds and a lean mass of 138 pounds. What that means is in that time where I lost 33 pounds total I really lost 43 pounds of body fat and gained 10 pounds of muscle. I still have more weight and fat to get rid of, but this is certainly a great start.
Just as a side note here, a scale that measures your body fat percentage or getting something else to do so is a very valuable tool to help in healthy weight reduction. It will give you a good picture of what is happening in your body, and can help you realize that even though you seem to be losing weight slowly, you may be losing fat quickly.
From all this there are a couple of lessons I would point to. First and probably most important, watch how many calories you eat. You need to create a deficit of calories burning more than you consume. Without measuring calories and recording them you will have a great deal of difficulty doing this. What can help is reading the nutrition labels, and actually measuring out your servings. At first I was surprised at what a serving was, but now I am used to it. A kitchen scale, especially and digital one, can be a great help in this. Second, remember that the quality of food matters. High fiber in particular, is very helpful in weigh loss. Yes you can get rid of the pounds eating whatever you want, but I find with the low fiber, highly processed stuff I would get more hungry and be more inclined to cheat than with the less processed, more natural, high fiber stuff.
With all this I also exercised a great deal, but that is a topic for another post.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Why I Started This Blog
It all started during the last half of 2009. Due to various things, my life had become very high stress, and being an emotional eater, I dealt with that by eating. The first hints that things in my body were not well, at least the ones beyond being obese, was that by October I was getting sick fairly frequently. Then at the beginning of November I got the H1N1 flu. I got over it in a week or so, but had a lingering cough. Slowly that cough got worse, but I didn't really notice it. Slowly I found going up and down stairs I would run out of breath, but I figured it was just because I weighed so much for my frame (250-260 pounds) and needed to get in shape. So I started to eat healthier and workout again, but I still kept running out of breath and coughing. Then on Sunday December 13th I got up coughing. I could barely breath, had a fever, and was coughing up mucus mixed with blood. I called Telehealth Ontario and was told I needed to see a doctor in 6 hours. They contacted the on call doctor at the medical clinic where my doctor practices and they got me in there in a couple of hours. I had pneumonia, and by the next day when my x-rays came back and I saw my doctor, I found out I had a bad case of it.
The next several days were spent sleeping, when I could, and trying to recover. After a month off work I had a follow-up X-ray only to find the pneumonia had not cleared at all, I had just gotten used to being sick. They put me on two strong antibiotics and scheduled a CT scan of my lungs. They also found that I had extremely high blood pressure, and while I can't remember the exact numbers they were extremely high.
The next antibiotics worked well, and in two days I felt much better. Six days after finding out the pneumonia had not cleared at all I had the CT scan and it showed things clearing up. Then several days after that I woke up with the right side of my face feeling numb, similar to how it would feel after the dentist administered Novocain. I was also slurring my speech and had lost the fine coordination in my fingers so I had a hard time typing. Later that day I saw my doctor. Even with meds my blood pressure had again skyrocketed and she sent me on to the hospital where the eventual diagnosis was that I had had a small stroke. After another CT-scan, this time of my head and neck, an MRI of my head and neck, and a Cardio-echo of my heart, not to mention a huge amount of blood tests in the hospital they had no real idea on why I had the stroke as nothing was conclusive.
I got out after 5 days and went home. Feeling better, but still unable to work for another month or so, I went home realizing that I had to change my lifestyle. I needed to loose weight (something that had already started with all this having my weight go down from 255 to 235 in the two weeks from finding out my pneumonia had not cleared up) and get healthy. I needed to change what I eat, and how I live. That was a necessity for me.
In time it was determined that the stroke was caused by either an atypical pneumonia or a virus that took advantage of my decrease immune function due to the pneumonia to reduce my heart function (when they did the Cardio-echo in the hospital my ejection fraction was 30-35% and should have been 60-65%) causing a small clot to form. It broke loose and went to my brain causing the stroke. Thanks to God, my heart function returned to normal by May, when they did a follow up echo, and barring the same thing happening it is unlikely that I will have another stroke.
It is part of my quest to get in good shape, loose fat, gain muscle, get my blood pressure down and get off all the medications I am on, that I have started this blog. The good news is over the past several months I have lost weight (currently I am around 200 pounds) and my medications have been reduced. I no longer take ramipril, my metoprolol dosage has been reduced, as has my dosage of amlodipine. My blood pressure is better, although since reducing the amlodipine in August, it has not been as good as it was before that change. I still have 30-40 pounds to loose, but that looks like a much more attainable goal since I have lost more than that already.
That gives some of my background, and why fitness is a necessity for me. The reason for this blog is to put down my thoughts and provide helpful information to others who also realize the necessity of fitness.
The next several days were spent sleeping, when I could, and trying to recover. After a month off work I had a follow-up X-ray only to find the pneumonia had not cleared at all, I had just gotten used to being sick. They put me on two strong antibiotics and scheduled a CT scan of my lungs. They also found that I had extremely high blood pressure, and while I can't remember the exact numbers they were extremely high.
The next antibiotics worked well, and in two days I felt much better. Six days after finding out the pneumonia had not cleared at all I had the CT scan and it showed things clearing up. Then several days after that I woke up with the right side of my face feeling numb, similar to how it would feel after the dentist administered Novocain. I was also slurring my speech and had lost the fine coordination in my fingers so I had a hard time typing. Later that day I saw my doctor. Even with meds my blood pressure had again skyrocketed and she sent me on to the hospital where the eventual diagnosis was that I had had a small stroke. After another CT-scan, this time of my head and neck, an MRI of my head and neck, and a Cardio-echo of my heart, not to mention a huge amount of blood tests in the hospital they had no real idea on why I had the stroke as nothing was conclusive.
I got out after 5 days and went home. Feeling better, but still unable to work for another month or so, I went home realizing that I had to change my lifestyle. I needed to loose weight (something that had already started with all this having my weight go down from 255 to 235 in the two weeks from finding out my pneumonia had not cleared up) and get healthy. I needed to change what I eat, and how I live. That was a necessity for me.
In time it was determined that the stroke was caused by either an atypical pneumonia or a virus that took advantage of my decrease immune function due to the pneumonia to reduce my heart function (when they did the Cardio-echo in the hospital my ejection fraction was 30-35% and should have been 60-65%) causing a small clot to form. It broke loose and went to my brain causing the stroke. Thanks to God, my heart function returned to normal by May, when they did a follow up echo, and barring the same thing happening it is unlikely that I will have another stroke.
It is part of my quest to get in good shape, loose fat, gain muscle, get my blood pressure down and get off all the medications I am on, that I have started this blog. The good news is over the past several months I have lost weight (currently I am around 200 pounds) and my medications have been reduced. I no longer take ramipril, my metoprolol dosage has been reduced, as has my dosage of amlodipine. My blood pressure is better, although since reducing the amlodipine in August, it has not been as good as it was before that change. I still have 30-40 pounds to loose, but that looks like a much more attainable goal since I have lost more than that already.
That gives some of my background, and why fitness is a necessity for me. The reason for this blog is to put down my thoughts and provide helpful information to others who also realize the necessity of fitness.
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