I’ve been burning off about two hundred grams per day since I started trying. That’s about 3kg (6 pounds) in two weeks. Seems like decent progress to me.
I didn’t really know what I was doing when I first started by I laid three ground rules for myself and decided to figure out the rest as I went.
- No weird fucking diet plans. I have zero interest in these weird plans like the Atkins diets where you eat only fat and protein, no carbohydrates, or stick to strange daily regimens (one kiwi fruit and a prawn cracker for breakfast) etc. etc. There are an infinite number of these crackpots schemes. They’re at best ludicrous and unsustainable (kiwi and prawn crackers) and at worst bad for your health (man is not designed to eat so much protein and fat alone).
- I’m not David Blaine. I’m no more going to starve myself of food than I would freeze myself in a block of ice or live underwater for a week. Acts of absurd self-discipline always break down. All it takes is time.
- Exercise will be part of the plan. Skinny weak and unfit is still weak and unfit. Gross.
So what did I do? I had already browsed Jeremy Zawodny’s series of articles about losing weight. And I had also read an online book, “The Hacker’s Diet.” My first move from that was to frequently weigh myself as well as track my calorie intake. Excel spreadsheet of course.
I soon found that counting exact calories is a shaky progress. Until someone designs a portable, tareable weighing scale, my estimates of how many calories I eat will be poor. I did work at it, but I found calculating the calories tedious. What was better, however, was just the act of recording what I was eating. The real trick to this was eating less, and moreover, eating less shit. I don’t need to note whether that Krispy Kreme donut was 275 or 350 calories. It’s irrelevant, it was shit and I didn’t need to eat it. So my spreadsheet counting calories has become more of a food confessional that is relatively easy to maintain. I like to highlight when I eat garbage and make scathing comments beside it. I feel brightest when I look and see a mostly-vegetable day.
So the confessional helps. It especially helps after reading the Hacker Diet, which emphasizes that you need to run a calorie deficit. The important point it makes is that exercise is a terribly inefficient way to generate that deficit — an hour of exercise might burn as little as three hundred calories. It’s far more efficient just to not eat the marginal piece of shit.I keep that nugget of wisdom in mind and it becomes very easy to decline things when I have the urge, or to select the less-sinful alternative. Just forgoing a few bits and pieces a day contributes in the same way an hour of running would.
So how have I changed my diet?
For lunch I’ve tried to totally dump snacking on garbage (junk foods, candy, etc.) I keep a relatively light lunch. No soft drinks, no potato chip side dishes, no soups, etc. If my mouth gets itchy later in the day I either eat fruit or drink water till I’m not hungry any more.
For dinner I’ve done two things: (a) reduce portion size and (b) massively increased the proportion of fruit and vegetables I eat. Here is where I discovered some diet folklore to be total bullshit. The common knowledge is eating for a diet is going to result in bland, boring, bad food. Rubbish. It’s only bland, boring, and bad because it’s prepared stupidly.
Food tastes good because it’s nicely cooked, nicely dressed, and is made from nice ingredients. What I discovered is that there is nothing magical about meat, pasta, and dairy as a dinner. It just turns out that it’s easiest to make something that tastes good out of meat, pasta, and dairy than from fruits and vegetables.
Vegetables and fruits taste worse because people buy garbage from the grocer and cook it without the same attention they’d cook meat, pasta, or dairy. So I told myself, “I’m going to buy the best vegetables and fruits available, I’m going to buy lots of them, in huge variety, and I’m going to cook them with the care they deserve.”
In practical terms, that means we get most of our fruit and vegetables from the various Japanese grocery stores and pay the consequent price. However, the stuff tastes really good. Instead of tired sacks of green grapes and red deicious apples we have bags of Japanese grapes that taste like candy and Momotaro tomatoes we just slice raw with a tiny bit of sea salt. When vegetabes taste good enough, they become a much easier substitute.
It also brings up another point. The other night, dinner was enoki mushrooms, zuchinni, onions, and asparagus. How’d I make it? I brushed it down with fruity olive oil and grilled it on my electric grill, then sprinkled it with some sea salt. Ewww olive oil and salt, right? Well, from my perspective eliminating these flavor force-multipliers (olive oil and salt, in particular) is idiotic. They’re not the pareto solution to losing weight. Most of the calories I ate came from the big ticket items, the meat, pasta, and dairy, not the drizzles of virgin olive oil. Thus I cook my vegetables lavishly and with a clean conscious.
Food is a big pleasure in life, so giving up pleasant meals is unimaginable. So I conscientiously decide to skimp on the unimportant meals (lunch being the best example) but then one important meals, not feel guilty.
For example, today we had an early Reunion Dinner since Tien-Lee is back for the weekend. We went to a very nice Chinese restaurant. I ate some really indulgent dishes: Teochew crab, wasabi prawn, a sweet steamed fish, and some rich fish maw soup. I didn’t hold back on that experience, but I didn’t make it a binge — I skipped their house speciality which involved some preperation of foie gras (pure cholesterol and fat), and I skipped the steamed rice (there was no need for it when the fish tasted so sweet and tender on its own).
And then again this evening… I had four quarts of crab stock I made from our King Crab weekend. So I prepared an ad-hoc recipe for risotto made from that crab stock, a chunk of nice parmesan, and topped with crab from a Hairy Crab we had in the freezer, and some beautiful scallops from Japan. So yeah, not a low-calorie dish, but the portion was much smaller than what I would have eaten in the past. When I was hungry later we tore through a bag of grapes from Korea (Koreans are getting really good with their fruits — it’s almost as good as Japanese, especially the grapes) and some fresh strawberries drizzled with balsamic vinegar. So I am, again, guilt-free.
My biggest failing last week was exercise. I did almost nothing. Between work, and oversleeping, and getting home late from Japanese lessons, I never had the vigor to run to work. I’ll be better about it next week because I will be more conscientious about earlier bedtime. As well, I leeched an access card to the hotel pool next door, so I’ll be able to swim during lunch on days that I have Japanese or otherwise didn’t feel like running to work. So that should help. After all 3500 calories burnt sheds a pound of fat. That is around an extra three pounds per month on top of whatever calorie deficit I’m running.
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