Monday, April 08, 2013
When I weighed in for my last PT
test at Fort Richardson, I weighed 205 lbs.
Although I consistently maxed the PT test, it was obvious that my weight
was creeping upward. I left the Army and
Ft. Richardson on Feb. 1, 1997 and quit exercising in earnest. In the Army, I was given time to
exercise. At lunch, I would run 4 miles
every other day. Maintaining my fitness
and my weight wasn’t difficult, but in the last 6 or 8 months my travel schedule
became more intense, so I exercised less.
By 2000, I weighed in at about 220 and by 2005, about 230. I was spending 3 days every 3 weeks in
Fairbanks eating at buffets, and while I did exercise, it is hard to burn off
all-you-can eat. In fact, one of the
recurring themes anyone dieting should hear playing in their head all the time
is that you can eat far more calories than you can burn, and unless you dig
ditches with a hand shovel for a living, the only successful way to lose weight
is to eat less.
What you eat as well as how much you eat is also very important. My wife would say that I become a missionary
for whatever diet book I happen to have most recently read. In fact, I do become conversational about the
books I read, but the interesting thing is that the books that I have read
concerning different diets generally recommend similar concentrations in
food. Dean Ornish has written many books
on his dietary recommendations, and years ago I read “Reversing Heart Disease”
which I found fascinating. He advocates
completely eliminating fat from the diet and eating almost exclusively
vegetables. “The Carbohydrate Addict’s
Diet” recommends reducing or eliminating sugars and simple starches from the
diet and gives lots of physiologic information on the subject. “The Rice Diet Solution” recommends severely
limiting simple sugars and starches and concentrating on a diet of
vegetables. “Wheat Belly” describes how
wheat has been modified over the years to become an allergen to many people and
why it should be eliminated along with sugars and other simple starches from
the diet, recommending instead a diet mostly containing vegetables. He gives an excellent physiologic explanation
of what simple starches do to you and how they are worse than plain table
sugar. There are many, many more but
these are a few that I have read for motivation over the years.
The problem
with each of these is that it is difficult for most people to be content eating
just vegetables. I evolved a solution
that has worked for me. I wanted a diet
that was easy to prepare, easy to eat, tasty, healthy, and that I didn’t tire
of. Easy, right? How do you do that with salads? My solution is this: I prepare a big salad about twice a week that
contains carrots, red, orange, and green bell peppers, lettuce of various
kinds, seedless grapes cut in halves, red cabbage, green cabbage, bok choi,
walnuts or pecans, frozen corn, and whatever else we happen to have in the
larder. I avoid vegetables that would
spoil the batch in a day or two like cucumbers, but zucchini seems to work out
OK. We don’t always have the whole list
in stock, but whatever we do have seems to work out fine.
Eating a salad in a restaurant is a
pain because they leave the pieces too big, so you either have to cut up your
lettuce or wad it into your mouth with a fork.
I want something I can eat quickly and easily, so I chop all the pieces
into bite-size that I can eat with a tablespoon instead of a fork. This alone makes eating a salad so much more
enjoyable that I don’t understand why the restaurants haven’t figured it
out. I put the salad into 2 or 3
gallon-size Zip-loc bags and put them in the refrigerator. With a little practice, the whole process
takes 15-20 minutes. Then, I eat a dinner-plate size portion for lunch and for
dinner. I use Costco Balsamic vinegar
for dressing (few calories and very tasty).
Watch out! Most other Balsamics
are very disappointing. For dinner, after the salad, I will also have a small
portion of whatever Beverly fixes.
Lately, I wondered
what would be wrong with salad for breakfast, so I now put a little olive oil
in a wok and stir a generous helping of the salad into the wok to cook for a
few minutes. When it is done, I turn the
heat down and add an egg and stir it until the egg is done and I have a
vegetable omelet, light on the eggs and heavy on the vegetables.
When I am
in weight loss mode, this is about all I eat, and I expect to lose several
pounds a week. It takes about 2 weeks
for your body to get into the metabolic mood to lose weight, so you have to be
patient, but hunger is not a problem. In
maintenance mode, I allow myself some treaty things, but I try not to splurge
at every meal, or the meal is no longer the maintenance meal and becomes the
weight-gain lifestyle instead of the weight-loss lifestyle.
“The Rice
Diet Solution” resonated with me at the time I read it and I followed the book
closely. I was astounded to see the
weight drop off very quickly and I went from about 230 to about 175 in a couple
of months. I have since hovered between
180 and 185 and have mostly been faithful to my lifestyle. I’m still not tired of the salad, but being
lazy, I am tired of making it. On the
other hand, I would spend far more time preparing almost any other kind of
substantial food. Eat hearty! I do.
