So the site is called “My Final 15 lbs”. Great, but how the HELL did he lose the first 60?! And in five months, no less!
🙂
Before I get into the story, here is what I found works for me:
- Ketogenic diet;
- Various forms of fasting;
- High Intensity Interval Training (on a bicycle);
- Getting at least 7 hours of sleep nightly.
That’s it. Now you can go on your merry way and Google that stuff and see if it will work for you.
What? You’re still here? Well, thank you. I suppose you’d like to know the background behind this stuff. Curiosity is a good thing …
Once I figured it out, and incorporated what I learned into my daily habits and routine, it was ridiculously easy. Had I known in 1990 what I know now, I would have been totally ripped considering the amount of lifting and bicycling I used to do.
As it was in 1990, I was only able to get my weight down to 185 pounds … with difficulty. I was biking about 200 miles a week, lifting weights for three hours a week, and eating egg white omelettes among other things.
After expending so much effort to get such mediocre results, I slowly slacked off and gained about 55 pounds over the next two decades.
As I wrote elsewhere, in November, 2014, I decided to really do something about my weight and my health. Of course, that’s something we have all done, repeatedly, with mixed and worsening results. What made this time different.
First, I have to be honest, I gained a lot of weight while my father was ill with prostate cancer. He was diagnosed in 2009 and died in early 2013. My guess is that I was under a lot of stress during that time, and it took me almost two years to get over his loss.
I still miss him terribly, but we all press on. That’s life.
Second, this time, I asked some fundamental questions about weight-loss. Questions like, “Why does the body store fat?” and “How does the body metabolize its fat stores when it actually decides to?”
Why does the body store fat?
Well, the answer should be obvious, no? The body stores fat in order to be able to use it for energy later when food is scarce. Storing fat is how animals, including humans, survive lean times.
Ah, but before going on to the next question, “How does the body metabolize its fat stores?”, this brought up an interesting (for me, at least) question. And the answer to this question led me to a whole slew of information, hypotheses and logical conclusions that contradicted just about everything I knew about nutrition up until that point. What the answer to this question led to, in November 2014, blew my mind. Are you ready for the question?
How does the body store fat?
Initially, I thought “You eat fat and, if you don’t burn it right away, it gets stored in adipose tissue.” I.e., you eat fat, you get fat. That’s why, when I was biking and lifting in the 90’s, I also ate egg-white omelettes and albacore tuna in water. No fat there. I was also carbo-loading, to keep my glycogen stores up. And eating during long bike-rides so I wouldn’t bonk.
I’ve bonked a couple of times. It’s not fun.
If you start researching this question, though, you will find that I was wrong. Really wrong.
Fat does NOT make you fat. And if you start looking at the biochemistry of diabetes, you will start to understand why.