Diet history and what I’m doing now.

Ever since people started to notice that I’ve lost some weight, the first thing I get asked is what diet am I following. Everyone wants to know if I’m doing the Atkins, or Paleo, or Keto diet; or if I’ve gone on a low fat diet, or tried a vegan diet, or even if I’m taking any medications or supplements to help with my diet. When I say I’m just eating better,  working out and not following any strict “diet”, everyone is always so surprised and almost incredulous to a point. 

It’s as if in order for people to accept that I’ve lost weight unless they can fit me into one of these “diet boxes” because it’s what’s expected.  I get it, I’m guilty of doing the same thing in the past and even now the first things that comes to mind when I see someone who’s been successful in loosing a bunch of weight in a relatively short period of times is how did they do it? Was it surgery or pills? We are predisposed to want to the easy way out always and when we hear about a diet or program that offers quick weight loss with very little to none exercise, we want to know if it works and how it works. Unfortunately for us, these trendy diets or fad diets do not work for the majority of us.

It seems like every few years a new diet grabs headlines and calls itself a weight-loss miracle. There are so many different diets and weight loss programs out there that it’s hard to keep up. I have tried many of these diets in the past and have obviously failed in my attempts to keep any weight off long term.

I’ve struggled with weight since I was in middle school but it didn’t really get to be that bad until my senior year in college. I knew that soon I had to go out and start interviewing for jobs and my mom put the fear of God in me when she said that companies would not want to hire a fat person. I know she meant well but that left a big impression in me that to this day still causes me anxiety. What if my current employer decides I’m too fat to be working for the company? I know it’s crazy but thoughts like that cross my mind. Anyways, my first attempt at a weight loss program was back in 2005/2006, a senior in college looking to start a professional career soon and my self esteem was through the floor. There was a company in Puerto Rico called “L.A. Weight Loss Center” and they had offices both at my hometown and where I went to college so with my mom’s encouragement I decided to try it out. I had to keep a food diary and write down everything I ate and I had an allowed quantity of proteins, fat and starches. I also had to do a TakeOff as they called it, which was a juice cleanse with a nasty tasting juice they sold that was a mixture of different juices (at leas that’s what I though). There were also some snack bars that they sold and I bought them in bulk. A few thousand dollars later (on a college student budget) and about six months of this going twice a week to the office to be weight and for the “nutritionist” to go over my diary I had lost about 50 lbs. I had originally been around 270 lbs when I started and dropped down to around 220 lbs on a good day. I was ecstatic with the results, I got a job and moved away and what happened, the diet went down the toilet.

Once I started working and didn’t have time to follow a strict diet and watch everything I ate and stopped buying these horrible snack bars and juice TakeOff crap I rapidly started to gain back the weight. I gained over 30 lbs in the first few months after moving on my own and then some. By 2012 my weight had crawled back up to 315 lbs (at the time that was the heaviest I’d been) and during the thanksgiving holiday that year we visited Disney World and Universal Studios Orlando and I wouldn’t fit in the seat of one of the roller coasters. I was so embarrassed that day that I remember crying in a bathroom stall until I calmed down.

Shortly afterward this trip, I was assigned a short term work assignment in Copenhagen, Denmark and fortunately it forced me to adjust my lifestyle for about four months. I had no car, so I walked or took the metro everywhere and was eating much better. At the end of those four months I had lost about 20 lbs with very little effort. Once I got back home to Texas, I was determined to continue on this weight-loss journey to I joined a gym and hired a trainer. I ended up wasting so much money on this trainer and I regret ever doing that. He didn’t understand my struggle and I felt so intimidated going to that gym that paid for the training sessions and for the membership but didn’t go. Training with that guy was literally torture for me so I ended up purchasing some home workout DVDs. I had purchased the P90X years before and never took it out of the box, yet I still went ahead and purchased the Insanity program. Insanity proved to me too much for my joints with all the jumping around so I gave the P90X a try and ended up liking it. I managed to loose another 30 lbs by the end of 2013 without dieting.

I was feeling great, confident, was dating and having fun. I met my partner that year and we hit it off, moved in together about six months afterward. I stopped working out, I was happy, wanted us to go out and eat and if not I would cook at home and watch movies and slowly but surely fell back into some old bad habits. Four years later I had gained back all the weight I lost back and then some more and at over 320 lbs I was back to feeling defeated. I tried the low carb, high fat (keto, Atkins or whatever you want to call it) and it seemed to work the first couple of weeks when I lost 15lbs, but then the fatigue kicked in and the joint pain and the heart palpitations. Everyone said it was normal to feel this way when your body goes into ketosis and that it should go away in a few days. Two weeks later when I was still feeling sick, I said fuck it and went and bought a twinkie and then had one of the worst binge eating episodes of my life.

So this time around I wanted to do things differently. Based on my experience, I knew that there’s not one true diet that works for everyone. I have to do what works for me, no shortcuts and no fads. It’s a simple mass and energy balance like I learned at school. The bottom line is that if I wanted to shed some weight I would have to expend more energy than I was consuming. What does that mean? Moderation in my food intake and I had to exercise. I wouldn’t restrict myself to any diet, I would eat normal foods and add exercise to my routine to best of my abilities. I want to gain muscle and lose fat and if I eat junk all the time that’s not going to be achieved. I don’t want to be obese but I don’t want to be “skinny fat” either. So that meant finding the right balance between healthy and unhealthy food.

After doing some research on what types of food are best for building muscle, getting lean and staying healthy, it turns out that you don’t need to restrict yourself to low carb or low fat as long as your macronutrients (protein, carbs, fats) are balanced. I found a term that I liked, called “Flexible Dieting”. Even though it has diet in the name, it doesn’t really feel like a diet to me. Obviously there are still some sacrifices I need to make but nothing like previous times where I would feel so deprived that I ended up bingeing and feeling even worse than when I started them. It’s help me look at dieting as a lifestyle and not just a “get results quick thing”. I’ve read some people refer to the flexible diet as the 80/20 diet. If you get the majority (~80%) of your calories from relatively unprocessed and nutrient filled foods, you can fill the remaining 20% with your favorite treats and still be able to live a healthy life and achieve your weight goals. Using some online resources and the MyFitnessPal website, I calculated the total calories I should be consuming on a daily basis in order to lose fat and broke it down to these base macros.  Now I can easily track my macros and total calories being consumed and wearing a heart rate monitor while working out helps me estimate how many calories I’m consuming.  There are days and times when I do stray and eat more of what would be considered “unhealthy” or don’t work out as I should, but as long as I do not let it happen too often, I should be OK. What you do for the majority of the time is what counts most. As I move forward I hope that this bad days happen less and less. In the meantime I’ll take it one day at a time and carry on.

So next time I get ask what diet I’m following I will say: “I’m doing me and what feels right to me”

I know this was a long post but thank you for reading.

Until next time.