How I lose 4 pounds a month yet eat like a king.

A true story.

I have a bit of a middle-age weight problem. I'm not obese, just your average overweight male. I grew up to be a 155 pound teenager of 6 feet and just a while back I was pushing 200.

I wanted to lose 20 pounds or so without feeling hungry and certainly not changing my sedentary lifestyle (I hate to exercise). I had tried all the diets and even considered taking diet drugs. My physician told me not to worry about it, for my age (56) I was still within the "normal" range.

Well, today as I write this (Sept 1997), I'm losing 4 pounds a month, I eat like a king and I'll tell you here and now, how I do it and I'll even prove it to you! Read on.

As an amateur chef I love good food and wine. When I travel, I overeat and gain a half pound a day. I get caught up in a ratchet effect - easy to gain weight, so difficult to lose, impossible to control.

What I needed was a way to eat just a little bit less each day, everyday. I figured if I could short myself about 350 calories a day, I could lose a pound every 10 days because each pound is 3500 calories. That would be a pretty good proposition. 36 pounds a year; not bad!

But how could I know how much less to eat? How much should I eat to just maintain my weight? I found the answer in some software and I'll tell you about it.

Have you ever tried to count calories with a book of food values? Have you tried "low-fat" anything? Yuk!

I decided to use my computer to keep track of what I was eating. I wanted to avoid turning to "low fat" whatever in my recipes versus "the real thing"! And I wanted to avoid the shiny treadmill and unused exercise bike stashed in a corner of my basement. And I certainly didn't want to go hungry like I had been on all those "diets" that I had tried and quickly sent packing!

Today I never use margarine, I use rich creamery butter. I never use low fat milk, I use regular full-bodied 100% rich milk and always the richest, thickest cream I can buy. I eat the best cuts of meat, juiciest sausages, the best-tasting of everything. Just like a king! Except, I'm losing weight. OK, enough; now about the software and the proof...

First off, the software computes my daily calorie need. It uses age, weight, height, general activity level and gender. For me it started at about 2100 calories per day. It's all automatic, I don't have to do any arithmetic at all. As my weight goes down, it magically adjusts.

Then I tell it what recipes I use. I enter my recipes and it computes the amount of calories per serving. How? I enter ingredients and amounts using the database of foods that comes with the software. If you want you can add foods using values on a food label. Adding recipes is a bit of a drag, so I just add recipes on any day that I make the recipe. Just about all my recipes are in my personal database now.

Next I tell the software what I eat for each meal or snack. This gets tricky, especially when I eat out. Estimating the size of servings (let alone the ingredients) at a restaurant is just about impossible. But I give it a try anyway. I'm pretty good at estimating especially because I  weigh everything at home. I can pretty much tell how much a filet mignon weighs just by looking at it. And when I'm eating out I double all my calorie estimates because I know restaurants use lots of fat and the servings are huge. And, like a dummy, I eat everything on the plate.

Back to the software. One thing that really helps is the software's ability to memorize the foods I usually eat. For example, I usually have 2 slices of thick sliced bacon in the morning. So I told the software to remember that. Then when I enter my breakfast, I just click click and the bacon is there - no searching the database again for that particular bacon and serving size.

Another thing I use is the meal import function. My breakfast is more often than not the same day in, day out. So I can import yesterday's (or any day's) breakfast into today - click click click.

Every morning I tell the software how much I weigh. And whenever I get some exercise by biking or walking or treadmilling or whatever, I tell the software and it computes how many calories additional I used that day.

It takes me a while to keep track of what I eat but it's worth it! I'm losing the weight and here's the proof at the bottom of this page: charts of my calories (in and out) and my weight are right there. I took my annual physical in August and lo and behold, my cholesterol is down.

When you look at the charts below you'll see (as I did, to my horror!) that some weeks nothing happens! Pretty frustrating! But slowly, surely and as predicted, the pounds slide off.

I must admit that it is not particularly fun to be tied to the computer each day telling it what I am eating or planning, but it is the only method I have found of getting what I want - less of me. And really it only consumes a few minutes a day so it's no big deal. And it's great to have the charts (and the mirror) tell me what's happening.

The software is an old, reliable program. It's called Santé (click here for more info).

If you have any questions or comments, drop me a line: infodesk5@hoptechno.com.

July 4th to August 5th 1997

 

August 6th to September 6th 1997

August 24th to September 26th 1997

Click here for nutrition table for 7,248 foods.

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