Almost any expert out there will tell you that losing weight is part what you eat and part exercise.
I'm hesitant to call it "diet", since most people associate the term with something short term to lose weight or some latest fad. I'm trying to do more than that. I'm trying to adjust my eating in a way that I can maintain the rest of my life. That means keeping in a few things that are bad for me, because I just won't give up chocolate forever. Sorry.
I started by figuring out how many calories I needed to eat. To get that, first I needed my basal (or resting) metabolic rate to figure out how many calories I needed just to stay alive and healthy. Using my weight and lean body mass, I used the formulas at http://www.shapefit.com/basal-metabolic-rate.html to come up with 1754 calories.
I'll write more about my training regiment in a later post. For now, let's just say it's a little more than "moderate." ;-) Based on that, using the same site, I used a multiplier of 1.9
1754 * 1.9 = 3332 calories per day.
Assuming a target of losing 5 pounds per month and 3500 calories per pound of fat, I need to consume 17,500 calories less per month than I'm burning. Dividing that over 30 days, I need to eat 583 calories less per day. 3332 - 583 = 2749 calories per day
Now I have a target. Shockingly, that's more than I was eating when I gained all this weight. The difference is that I'm training again. With that in mind, I don't want to put my body in starvation mode and I'm training hard enough to worry about replenishing muscle and liver glycogen between workouts. Of course, I'm keeping an eye on this and will make adjustments as necessary.
I started off working on portion control. No more classic three meals per day. I'm now eating 4 to 5 meals a day, never going more than 4 hours without eating. Instead of going from "stuffed to capacity" to "hungry enough to eat my desk", now I go from "just satisfied" to "just thinking about food."
Each meal will be 550 to 680 calories per day (depending on how many I eat, 4 or 5, plus some will be larger and some will be smaller). Trust me, that's not a big meal.
Eating such small meals, I'm now eating more from the grocery store and less from the restaurants. Sometimes a meal is just a bagel with peanut butter or jam and a glass of apple juice.
As far as what I'm eating, it's all just normal foods. I love Golden Grahams for breakfast. I eat a lot of bagels (usually with strawberry jam), English muffins (usually with peanut butter), oranges, carrots, rye toast, yogurt, turkey sandwiches, and canned tuna (usually on the toasted rye, with relish). When I'm riding, sometimes I'll have a PowerBar (the good old kind that you can leave in your car for a month and it's still fine) and, like most cyclists, I'm addicted to Cytomax.
I still have a Coke once in a while or a Hershey bar. As long as they fit within the day's calorie intake, why not? I'm planning on eating like this for the foreseeable future and I want to have something good once in a while. I'm not going to cut out everything I like. Part of being thinner is a better lifestyle, which includes a candy bar once in a while!
Let me mention, none of those are "low fat" or "low cal" versions of something else.If I'm eating yogurt, it's the real deal. I'm not getting "light" bagels or anything like that. My Coke is the bright red labeled Coca Cola, with lots of empty sugar calories. At least I can burn the sugar on the bike!
I picked these things because I like them. Everything on the list I like. I'd never stick with it if I were eating a bunch of things I hated.
That said, I am eating less soda, cheese, and candy than I was. Kicking the soda habit was hard. I had a caffeine headache for about two weeks. I'm eating less often at fast food and casual "junk on the wall" restaurants.
I've almost completely cut out mayo, butter, and potato chips. I could have them in moderation, but I'm not a moderation kind of guy. I figured off I was better off just ruling them out.
As far as supplements, I'm not taking any. The closest I come is Cytomax (a sports drink) while riding and a daily multivitamin (the kind you get the store brand of for about $8 for a 6 month supply). I've long believed that any supplements that really work are banned in sport anyway. No point in using them to get ready to ride again.
That's probably enough on diet for now, though it's really a huge topic!
Just as an update, as of this morning, I'm down to 192, a loss of 5 pounds in 4 weeks, so I'm on target so far!
