Previous weight: 356.8
Current weight: 354.4
Delta: -1 pound, 4 ounces
My personal assessment of the past week: Good. Trending downward again. And soon I’ll be okay to start exercising which should make things go even faster.
I’ve been reading a book…well, it’s sensationalist propaganda, honestly. It’s by this guy named Tim Ferriss, who came to fame with his book The 4 Hour Workweek, which can be summed up as “don’t have a family, invest your money, and use technology as a force multiplier and you too can live like a rich person even if you’re not”. Since I already screwed up step one, it’s not that useful to me.
But now he’s got a book called The 4-Hour Body which is getting lots of press, so…I figured I’d check it out.
Here are his five dieting rules:
1. Don’t eat anything white and/or starchy. This means that my beloved, beloved rice must go by the wayside. Also no potatoes, pasta or bread, because as we all know…
Instead, eat proteins like egg whites (Tim’s favorite, and frankly there’s almost no downside to them), chicken and lean pork. Get your carbohydrates from vegetables. This is where Ferriss differs from the abominable Atkins Diet, which would have you cut out carbohydrates altogether. His favorite vegetables are lentils, which have both protein and carbs, and spinach, which which has so many necessary vitamins and minerals that it’s no wonder it tastes awful.
2. Make a mealplan for a week and then follow it as closely as you can. Ferriss points out that eating the same thing every week can seem restrictive, but if you actually tracked what you ate for a week you’d probably discover that you eat the same things over and over anyway.
3. Don’t drink calories. This is pretty much a given. Even if you drink diet soda, try not to drink more than two a day because the aspartame can cause you to retain water.
4. Don’t eat fruit. Fructose, the sugar found in fruit, is easily digested and almost instantly turned into fat unless you’re doing something to burn it off.
5. On one day a week, ignore all of the above and eat whatever you want – but just for that one day. Also, this is not optional. You must eat at least one “binge” meal a week. Why? People who go on very restrictive diets tend to lose weight…until their body panics, goes into “starvation mode” and refuses to give anything up.
I have personal experience with this. I’m not sure if I ever told this story before or not, but back in 2002 or so I lost about fifty pounds and got under 300 for the first time in years. But it didn’t take because I was literally killing myself doing it – I was eating so few calories that I was falling asleep on the drive home from work. Eventually my restrictive diet stopped working, I got pissed and dumped it, and went right back to where I am now. If I had followed rule five back then, we wouldn’t be talking about this now…and a lot of bad stuff might not have happened to me.
Overall, I like these rules. They’re a pretty good encapsulation of modern dieting. Since carbs are so damn caloric, getting them from your veggies instead of straight pretty much ensures that you will eat under the necessary amount for weight loss even without counting calories.
I haven’t gotten to the workout part of the book yet. We’ll see how much that agrees with me, since I hate exercising.