Virtual Epic Diet
by Dan Empfield 4.11.05
(www.slowtwitch.com)
WEEK TWO
THREE WEEKS IN, AND A DISTRACTION TO REPORT
It's an intense world, and it's getting more intense all the time. Maybe it's always been this way, but with 24 hour news we're more apprised of life's intensity. I don't know.
All I know is, I'm intensely aware of how fat I am. Not egregiously fat, but 15 pounds fat. This is largely due to the attention I paid to things not athletic over the Winter. I'm not complaining, just making an observation.
But my belly is an observation I'm tired of observing, and I'm going to buckle down and knuckle down and otherwise -uckle down and get this fat off once and for all. Boot camp style. Starting now.
You can join in or not. I'll be posting my progress on the Forum, with a daily almanac of everything caloric that goes in my mouth. Plus the training I do. Plus my weight. Daily.
My goal is to go from 175 pounds, my current weight, to 160 pounds. I haven't been 160 pounds since I was, oh, 17 years old or so. But that's where I'm going.
I'm publishing this for my own selfish reasons, specifically, because I'm less likely to fail if 5,000, or 50,000, people are spectating this diet and I therefore and going to succeed or fail based on my own willpower. Certainly I have no help around here. As I prepare for my diet by dumping the bag of Famous Amos cookies in the garbage (above), I catch my next door neighbor fishing them out again.
I'm going to be training, more or less, and also trying to keep my food intake to around 2000 calories a day (not counting calories I ingest on the bike or while running). I'm not a nutritionist. Don't follow my lead on the assumption that you think I know anything about proper dieting, because I don't. The axiom under which I'm operating is, burn more calories than I ingest.
So, I am left to my own devices, and I have decided to succeed, or make a fool out of myself, in front of an audience of my peers. If you want to join in, I'll be over at the Forum.
Why "Epic Diet." No, there's nothing Epic about it. It's a takeoff on last year's Virtual Epic Camp. I just thought I needed a diet right now more than I needed mega-mileage. I'll do the mileage later, when I'm not carrying around the equivalent of a 3-month old in a papoose.
Guys like me, we're always looking for a new battle to fight. I don't mean we promote conflict, I'm using "battle" in a way almost interchangeable with "challenge." But "challenge" isn't quite right, because it doesn't contain the notion of someone, or something, pushing back. So, battle it is.
Some of these battles are external, that is, I'm battling someone or, maybe, a historic someone, the way that Mark McGuire battled the historic Roger Maris for the all-time single season home run record. Some of the battles are internal, and in such case my battle is entirely with some element of my own self. Sometimes it's my good self, such as when I'm competing against me at my own historic best—when I'm trying to set a PR, for example.
But sometimes I'm battling my bad self, and that's what I've been doing for the past week. I'm completely surprised at what a pushover my bad self turned out to be.
When I embarked on my once-and-for-all, "get the last 15 pounds off" diet I gave my good self less than a 50/50 chance to prevail. My motivation for going public with it was to force upon myself a sort of performance anxiety. I thought that pushing the plate away, as unpalatable as that might be, might be less painful than facing those of you who are wondering whether I could keep this thing going.
The surprising thing is, keeping right at, or maybe 500 calories under, my basal metabolic rate was never hard; it was reasonably easy after the third day; and it's getting successively easier every day. But it isn't going entirely as planned and I have learned a few things I'll relate. I did not start my diet with a very clear set of healthy principles, and I've chosen to adopt what I suspect is a more sensible set of goals.
OLD AGE AND TREACHERY
My first discovery—entirely serendipitous—is that at age-48 I turn out to have considerable willpower I did not have as a younger man. You must understand, I have never been able to stick to anything by employing will, or steadfastness, or sense of duty. I simply avoid tedious, repetitive mandatory pain. It's really not that hard. Think about it. Why would a guy like me go to med school, race Ironman every year, have a job that required swimming at 6am, and a thousand other things that required such discipline? If you know you don't have extraordinary discipline, then you're just asking for trouble when you place yourself in a setting that requires it. Accordingly, I have never really attempted a hard-core eating regimen, because I just knew I never could pull it off. This was not a big thing when I was younger, because I could train myself to a lean body. But, not as I grew older.
What I've discovered, conversely, is that middle-aged people like me aren't quite the slaves to our weaknesses that we were when we were younger. The gap between our good intentions and our execution has narrowed. We own ourselves. When we make decisions about whether to fall in love, complete a project, keep to a budget or a schedule, or eat appropriately, we find we have the tools to see the decision through, though we may have lacked these tools when we were younger.
PATIENCE
We middle-aged folks also acquired patience along the way, and I found I needed to incorporate some of it into my diet. Maybe it was necessary, in the beginning, for me to think I could take my 15 pounds off in just a few weeks. But after some careful consideration I was faced with a dilemma: take the weight off too fast, and I'll be taking some lean mass off as well. The idea is to keep the lean tissue, and just shed the fat. I therefore needed to scale back my aggressive weight loss goals and realize that, at best, I'm going to be losing two pounds a week. It's going to take me two months to get to my goal of 160 pounds, and that's the best case scenario. I started a week ago at 175, I'm now at 173, my skinny jeans aren't quite as tight, and that is a rate of progress I'm going to be happy with. Furthermore, if I'm going to keep the lean mass I've got, let alone gain more of it, I'm going to have to be pretty diligent at my strength training.
BIG HELP AT THE GROCERY STORE
For those of you who are lucky to have a store like Trader Joes in your neighborhood, it's a godsend. This is a specialty store with a lot of gourmet foods, like a Cost Plus, but also with a lot of everyday commodities, and at great prices. The fortuitous part of this are the soups and sauces and prepared veggie dishes in sauces that taste great but are low-calorie. While I'll investigate some of the sites that aid in calorie counting, mostly I'm just reading what's on the side of the package. My intentions are to stick to the calorie totals for the day that seem appropriate, make sure the fat is good fat, eat a sufficient amount of protein, including red meat twice a week, and take a multivitamin.
PORTIONS
That said, these food companies lie like rugs. Let's face it, 2200 calories a day isn't a whole lot, and that's been my average, at least on non-training days. So, I'm not the pig I used to be. Therefore, when I eat a "portion" it's really a representative amount. But take this "soup" in a box, pictured at right. The container's size is "one cup" after you add water. But somehow this totals two servings.
Okay, then why aren't there two sets of ingredients packets? Or, is it supposed that you'll always have another person there with you to share this one cup of soup? Or, that you're always going to have to face the fact that this soup product is going to go half down your gullet and half down the sink, because it's unthinkable that I would be such a glutton as to shoehorn more than a half-cup down my throat?
Why not just face the fact that you're serving us one 240-calorie cup of soup, to be downed at one time by one person? What is the point in trying to get us to think that we're uncommonly gluttonous should we deign to eat the entire box at one sitting? Anyway...
I find I'm eating a lot of fish. I made a nice batch of ceviche, and in so doing got some fresh veggies in me, something I'm not huge on. For three days I ate swordfish basted in lime juice, then added to onions, garlic, tomatoes, cilantro and jalapenos conveniently minced in an "as seen on TV" salsa maker I bought.
LONG COURSE METABOLISM
I've got a notion, which falls short of hypothesis, and way short of theory. As I consider those really successful long coursers I've known, they all seem to me to have been fastidious eaters—Dave Scott rinsing his cottage cheese, that sort of thing. I contrast that to many of the short coursers, who ate anything and everything, and in copious amounts, staying skinny only by training their fannies off.
So, I wonder whether an austere diet regimen has, as a by-product, the altering of one's metabolism toward long course success. What I'm driving at is, what if Dave Scott's stomach says, "Incoming! You guys know how this guy never frickin' feeds us! So uptake it all, boys, and be quick about it!"
This, as opposed to the historic me, whose stomach might say, "Wear your rain hats and golashes, gents, the chief is eating yet again. Don't be in any huge hurry to get at this latest batch with your picks and shovels because, as we all know, there's more food coming, and sooner rather than later."
This is, remember, a notion. I have no idea whether there's any truth to it and, if so, whether it's trainable. Will my stomach one day say: "The bastard's starving us down here! Burn the deck chairs for firewood! Chew on the soles of your boots if you get hungry!"
We'll see.
RESTAURANTS
I passed a big test this past weekend. I accompanied a friend to a mexican restaurant. Usually I'm on my third basket of chips before my food comes. "And can you give me a side of sour cream?" I'd ask. "I'm afraid that the lard in the enchilada sauce will get lonely in my stomach unless it has enough extra saturated fat to play with."
This diet, however, has become a priority, and I was a very, very good boy. I got out of there for just under 1000 calories, giving me a 2000-calorie day.
So far so good.
The diet. Three weeks in the bag, commencing week four. The first two weeks required a lot of concentration I now see. Counting every calorie. Every meal. Anything that went into my mouth. While this is no way to live one's entire life I do not regret this, because it gives one an idea how hard it is to keep to one's basal metabolic rate. Counting calories, and I mean every calorie, is a life changer. Or, it can be and, frankly, should be.
I have several bottles of salad dressing in my refrigerator. A serving size is 2 tablespoons. Certain dressings have 28, or 45, calories per serving. Others have 120, or 140. And there's no telling. My raspberry vinaigrette is among the highest in calories, at about 130. Meanwhile, a dressing in a similar bottle, same store, same place on the shelf, with Pear and Gorgonzola in it, has 45 calories per serving.
This adds up. When you're trying to keep a meal at 800 or 1000 calories this really adds up quickly. You can have a hearty bowl of soup or 4 tablespoons (which is not that much) of ranch dressing. If you have one you can't have the other. What would you rather eat?
I lost 3 pounds the first week, staying between 500 and 1000 calories under whatever I thought I was burning. That meant if I worked out, I could eat more. The second week, things accelerated, and I lost 5 more pounds. In one stretch I lost 3 pounds in 4 days. I think I was a bit aggressive. But, things more or less worked themselves out, because at the beginning of the following week I had—what would you call it?—a serendipitous social encounter that impinged upon my otherwise strict schedule for an entire week (and counting).
How does this propel the story? I now had to face a challenge. I'd only spent two weeks in boot camp and now I was thrust onto the front lines. Entering restaurants, one after another, when you're on a diet, is like exiting your trench and sprinting toward your enemy, as machine guns are firing in your direction. But, I dodged the bullets. Well, most of them.
It was a week of havoc thrust upon my routine, and I did not realize how dependent on my routine I'd become. It's very hard to keep to your weight loss regiment when others enter the picture. But, I'm back on track, more or less, not because my social life has disappeared as quickly as it arrived, but because I've imposed upon myself the attention to routine that I'd lost.
I do not perceive that I've gained any of my weight back, but I suspect both sides in this battle—my fat and my resolve to lose it—gave as good as they got. I didn't lose any weight, but I lost a week. Now I'm back on track, and shall endeavor to get back on a 2 pounds per week weight loss trajectory (but there is the opera on Friday and the symphony on Sunday, with the requisite attendant meals, so, will I be a good boy?).
My workouts have been good, that is, my runs have been of a higher quality—faster—now that I'm 8 pounds lighter. I don't seem to have suffered any loss of strength, or been hostage to pangs of hunger. I'm giving myself a slight bit more leeway when choosing foods. I'll put some avocado in my salad. Stuff like that. Now that I'm within distance of my target goal I don't seem as anxious about what I'm eating because I now know I'll get there in a reasonable time.
As of now, I'm halfway to my weight loss goal. I'm into the single digits. I'm four diligent weeks out. I can smell the finish.
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