How to Lose Weight the Easy and Fun Way!

In talking to a number of people over the last year it has come to my attention that many people have a hard time losing weight.  I was sorry to hear about their troubles, so I have been promising that I would share my story and the diet I used to get closer to an ideal weight.  I hope people find this helpful and encouraging.  I am pretty confident that if you follow this plan you will lose weight.

The story begins on a fine evening at the end of October a few years ago.  For whatever reason reason I was looking at Life insurance weight tables and they informed me that I was 35 pounds overweight.  I was horrified.  How had this happened???  All my life I had been reasonably athletic and also somewhat poor - both of which had led to me to be perpetually lean.  For instance, in college  I would only eat a $.50 can of corn for lunch every day (I am glad those days are in the past).   Well I can tell you what happened - I got a job and the paycheck that goes with it.  I am not a flashy person, but I do enjoy eating.  It is one of my primary recreational activities.  So once I had a paycheck and no longer had to eat cans of corn, I would go ahead and buy that big cookie after eating lunch.  Why not - I deserved it right???  Well I did start to notice over the course of a couple of months that my pants were getting tighter, but I could ignore that easy enough.  I did not notice that I looked any different.  Reading the numbers on the tables sparked me into action.  At the time I was in a hotel in Urbana Champagne.  I promptly walked down to the hotel gym and started riding the exercise bike.  I think I rode it for 45 min and I was pretty tired at the end.  I believe I burned around 450 calories.  Next I decided to give up eating cold turkey for the last day of the conference I was at.  This was tough because conference food is good., but all that good food comes with a caloric price.  I think I may have cheated and eaten a strawberry.  Even when I got back to NM it was tough because it was Halloween and my roommate had a big pot full of leftover candy bars that were dying to be eaten.

Now one I got back to NM I obviously had to find a diet that was sustainable for losing weight.  I started doing a little research on what actually caused people to gain weight.  Now we have all heard a number of urban legends regarding weight loss.  For instance the most famous one is that you should eat many small meals instead of three large meals.  Another one is that if you cut your caloric intake dramatically your metabolism will slow down and you will not burn so many calories.  Well I am a very results-oriented person, and based on my experience all of this discussion is not worth listening to.  In reality losing weight is really simple.  Basically if you burn more calories in a day than you eat you will lose weight.    I am a numbers person so basically what it boils down to is this.  For every 3500 calories you burn that you do not make up for with food you will lose a pound.  Armed with this knowledge I could create a goal I could shoot for.

Here was my plan.  I decided I would exercise for an hour every day.  I am a very busy guy so this is the max time I could spend at the YMCA.  I started out riding a stationary bike but eventually I transitioned to running on a treadmill.  Running is pretty much the most time-efficient way any normal person can burn calories.  My hour-long workouts typically resulted in burning roughly 600 calories a day.  Now the resting metabolism for a guy like me is roughly 2400 calories per day.  That means in a day I was burning 2400 + 600 = 3000 calories a day.

Now the normal recommendation is to lose something like 1-2 pounds a week, but I lead a somewhat undomesticated, rock N roll lifestyle so I decided I had neither the time nor the patience for that.  I decided I would try to run a 2000 calorie a day deficit.  This would mean I would lose a pound every other day and that I would lose 35 pounds in about 70 days.  I decided this was acceptable.    In order to do this would require that I eat a total of 1000 calories per day.

So next I started looking at the calorie content of food to see what would work for a diet.  I knew I needed protein because I was working out alot.  So I looked at the protein content of food.  I figured I would eat some lean meat.  I started out by eating the following every day:  For breakfast I would have a cup of yogurt (100 calories) for lunch I would have half a bean burrito (~300) calories, and for dinner after my workout I would have a salad (no salad dressing, only vinegar) with half a pound of turkey and a little bit of cottage cheese (~500 calories).  For a nighttime snack I would have one rice cake with salsa.  I really like salsa and thankfully salsa has almost no calories.

Now this was a pretty demanding it is true.  Actually for the first two weeks I woke up tired every day.  I was also thinking about food alot, and my brain seemed to be thinking slower than usual.  I was definitely losing weight, but I was getting so hungry that I resorted to eating Tofu as a snack one night.  That was not pleasant.  The Tofu experience convinced me that I needed to make a change.  I read somewhere that your brain needs fat to operate correctly and I liked the sound of that so I decided to go with it.  My current diet was really low on fat.  Now I do not have much time for cooking so I started looking at fast food to see if any fast food would give me protein and fat.  I looked at Subway and Taco Bell and some others, but nothing had a good ratio of calories to protein and other nutrients.  This is when I had to start thinking a little unconventionally - I checked McDonalds.  Now most food at McDonalds has a pretty low ratio of protein to calories, except for one Sandwich.  It turns out the double quarter pounder with cheese is actually very nutrient dense for the number of calories it has.  The Double quarter pounder has 750 calories, but it also has nearly 100% of your daily protein and fat needs.  Much to my surprise I found it was basically the perfect diet food.  If you do not believe me look at the nutrition information:

Double quarter pounder with cheese nutrition information:
http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food/product_nutrition.sandwiches.287.double-quarter-pounder-with-cheese.html 

I decided to stop eating the dinner salad and switching to the double quarter pounder for dinner after my workout.  My energy level went way up and my happiness level went way up too.  I no longer thought about food all the time because the fat in the double quarter pounder satisfied my food craving.  I never thought about tofu again.  And prehaps more importantly I was still losing a pound every other day.  Another plus is that I made new friends at McDonalds.  They started getting my order ready as I walked in the story every day.  I was a regular.

I carried this diet out for 6 weeks.  I lost 29 pounds from where I started and this even included a period where I went to a different conference with really good food (I restrained myself the first day, but the next two days I indulged myself.)  I realized I could stop at this point because I visited some friends in San Diego and someone came up to me and asked if I was alright.  They were wondering I had gotten cancer.  So I decided the life insurance company did not know what they were talking about and I went back to normal eating habits - just in time for Christmas :-).  Of course now normal meant keeping an net 0 daily calorie intake - which is easy when you have been eating only 1000 calories a day.

Now I have to make a disclaimer - I may be a doctor, but I am not the kind that helps people.  As my brother likes to say I am a "machine doctor," so take this with a grain of salt - literally, after the daily run you might be low on salt. I also want to leave you with a few notes:

NOTES:

1. I found I really like running on the treadmill.  It forces you to run harder and it is less damaging on the joints.  I find if I run hard on the street multiple days in a row I will get shin splints, but this never happens with the treadmill because it is cushioned.  
2. If you look at the numbers diet is by far the most important element in this equation.  Actually I could have not exercised at all and still lost alot of weight.  Conversely, you can exercise alot and then undo it in a second by eating a few cookies.  
3. Many people might think this diet would make you weak, but I cut 14 minutes off my best half-marathon time doing this.  I also felt more agile.
4. If you do not like double quarter pounders with cheese you could just eat the appropriate size steak instead.  

After the diet ended I continued the running.  I eventually got down to a sub 1:30 half-marathon which puts me in the top 6% of men in San Diego who raced.  Not bad in my opinion.  Now I am trying to get to an 1:20 half marathon.

I hope this story inspires and helps people to lose weight.  Please feel free to share your weight loss story with me in the comments.  I like to hear people's success.