Please note that the following article is based upon a personal experience. The author is not a physician or dietary specialist. It is recommended that you contact your physician before making drastic changes to your diet.
About three years ago, a few years of sitting in an office all day and eating out consistently had helped me gain about seventy pounds. As a former athlete, weighing in at two hundred forty-five pounds on a frame of 5’9″ was a little bothersome, but the bigger trouble for me was simply how I felt everyday. Finally, I decided to do something about it.
It started with an exercise plan. Years ago, I had heard that cardiovascular exercise was useless unless you worked out for thirty minutes straight. This had deterred me from working out in the past, so this time I decided to follow my own plan and simply run one mile every day. Whether it took me fifteen minutes or ten, I committed to simply running one mile until I felt that my body could take more. Although I was not improving my cardiovascular capabilities, I was burning calories, building muscle, and preparing my body for meaningful workouts in the future.
I lost ten pounds pretty quickly and increased my workouts slightly. After losing another ten pounds, I hit a plateau. The problem was that I wasn’t losing any more weight and I couldn’t increase my workouts because of how overweight I still was. My body couldn’t handle it. At that point, I realized that I was going to have to go on the diet. At the time, I didn’t realize it, but it was going to be a three-phase diet.
The first phase to this diet involved the biggest changes. Instead of eating whatever my day lead me to, I became very disciplined. For starters, I gave up coffee, juice, soda and any unnecessary drinks. Breakfast was a basic Equate diet shake from WalMart at about 7 am. The time was important for me because at 7 am I had already been up for a few hours and the theory behind this diet was constant, low-calorie eating. By waiting two hours to eat in the morning, it enabled me to space my eating more easily. About two hours later, I would have a fruit snack such as an apple, two slices of cantaloupe, or a pear. The type of fruit didn’t really matter. I simply purchased whatever was on sale at ShopRite.
Between noon and 1 pm, I would have another diet shake for lunch. This was followed by another fruit snack at about 3 pm. The gap between this snack and dinner was the longest of the day, but it was reasonable to me because I was usually busy coaching soccer during this gap. Around 7 pm I would have dinner, not a reasonable dinner, but dinner. Dinner was the one meal of the day that I didn’t limit because I felt that having the willpower to do this diet would be easier if I had something to look forward to. The other piece to the diet was that I drank a gallon of water a day in an effort flush my system and fill my stomach.
This diet showed immediate results and as I lost weight, increasing my workouts became easier, but once again, I hit a plateau. That’s when I began the second stage of the diet which was simply converting my diet shakes to the low-calorie version, reducing my diet by about ninety calories a day. Once again, my weight loss was stimulated.
At about one-hundred ninety pounds, I hit my final dieting plateau. At this point, my exercising had become vigorous (i.e. a ten-mile run was not uncommon), but I couldn’t lose a pound. I realized that I was going to have to fool my metabolism. I slowly transitioned myself towards eating normal two or three days a week and sticking to my diet the rest of the week. This forced my body to adjust its metabolism to my high-calorie days so that when I had a low-calorie day I was bound to lose weight and I did. In the end, I finished up only at one hundred seventy-five pounds.
This diet was not conventional, but because I allowed myself to enjoy dinner, I ate all day, and I kept my stomach full with water, the diet was tolerable. When I started this diet, walking across the office was a labor. In the end, I was running Labor Day races.
