Hey there – so yeah, as the title says, I have managed to lose 30 pounds in the first 4 months of this year – I still have quite a way to go but I am off to a good start and 30 pounds seemed like a good milestone to start talking about what I have done and what is working for me.
I will start off by saying that I am not a doctor or a nutritionist or running coach or anything like that – I am just here to tell my story and hopefully someone can get something out of it.
So what did I do?
Ate less and exercised more….sounds like a smart assed thing to say, but it is what I did and I will get into that here right away. I will say here though, that I did not do any miracle diet or use some magic elixir, I just found some things that I could change that spoke to me and that I could perform consistently, and over time it has worked.
Weight gain or loss is all about balancing calories consumed versus calories expended – consume less calories than you expend and you will lose weight – but it takes a fair bit of a calorie deficit to show real changes, so either get a fast unhealthy weight loss or you make a consistent change that you do over a period of time and it adds up.
What this simple math is missing though is the mental element, if you have to do it over a period of time, how do you stay consistent? How do you make sure you keep doing what you are doing? How do you push yourself to keep going if you get stuck or things take a step backwards on you? I am going to get into what I have found to work for me a bit later and why I think they worked for me. Again, not a doctor so these will just be some opinions based on what I believe is happening.
Before I get into that though I want to give you some background on my weight and weight loss history. I will say that I have been fighting my weight since my teen years – lots of ups and downs and lots of failed starts.
All those ups and downs came to a head in 2002 when I spent a lot of time in the gym, a lot of time watching my diet and a lot of time running. I ran my first half marathon that year – trained for a full but got knocked down by heat issues about 3 weeks before the race, so ran the half instead. I was around the 217 pound mark at this point. This also lines up to when I met my future wife.
A few years later I managed to do my first full marathon and was staying in decent shape – then we had kids and things kind of fell apart – My guilt of being away from the family to train fed into my natural laziness here. This is the mental part of that whole weight loss equation.
Now, we did manage to discover the runDisney races here too and I did one of the marathons and then a couple Goofy Challenges (half marathon one day and a full the next) but I was never really in shape for the runs and I was relying on my previous conditioning and sheer pig headedness to struggle through the events.
I realized in the summer of 2012 that I wanted to do another Goofy Challenge and do it well for a change – so a while before this I had hit 272 pounds and managed to get the weight down a bit, but I needed to do more. So in the fall of 2012, I was at 255 and I started documenting my runs and changing my diet, but also tracking what I was eating. I came down about 20 pounds or so over the fall training period before going into the Goofy Challenge in Jan 2013. This is also when BigGoofyRunner.com started – my notes became the first posts on that site.
I did something different here too, after the race was done, I kept training and the weight kept slowly coming off and this all culminated into setting new PRs in 2014 for both half (1:46 and 222 pounds) and full, doing my first ultra marathon (just shy of 50 miles in 12 hours) and doing a wicked Dopey Challenge (5k, 10k, half and full on successive days) in January of 2015 – 2014 was 1971 miles of running and I had several months where I broke 200. It was a good running year.
2015 fell apart though – I had some health issues, we got a new treadmill, plus other life changes made running more difficult and I fell back into bad habits. I did do 2 ultras that year though, with one of them being over 50 miles in 12 hours – so I still had something.
In the end, basically I fell apart here and even though I tried to get back at it, I had several things holding me back – turns out one of the things was the treadmill we got in Jan 2015 – it killed me mentally and physically every time I ran on it – I blamed myself here though and not the treadmill.
I struggled with my weight and my running for years, and I did do a few additional ultras and Dopey and Goofy Challenges, I really was not training and I was on a long bad slope.
So as this continued, I could never really get things to work properly for training or weight loss – I think part of the problem was that I wanted to train for long distance, which meant I had to fuel for it, so I would eat, but then the treadmill would beat me down and I wouldn’t run as far as I expected and I would have a surplus of calories.
Then in March 2020 we started working from home – this is very good thing for me and I started with the mindset that I would use it as an opportunity to try to start getting healthier. And in the first month or so you can see that the weight did start to come off a bit. Basically I was watching what I was eating more and I would take short breaks from work to do some lighter free weights I had in my office. But as I did that I started finding it easier to snack and harder to find time to do the weights (I kept adding to the exercises I did, to the point that I didn’t really have time to do them or I felt guilty if I took a break long enough to do them).
So I was finding the weights were intermittent and I was snacking too much, also drinking too much Coke – overall I was eating healthier but the snacking was killing any progress.
Through the summer I was able to keep relatively steady for weight since the pool provided extra exercise, but once the pool was closed for the season, you can see my weight increasing again. This culminated in pretty steady weight gain.
I did try to make some changes but had several false starts.
Tried a few times to get things to work but fell apart.
But you can see in the chart, things started working in January 2021 – what did I do?
First off – some of the issues I needed to fix:
So, one of my biggest issues is Coke – full on addiction, if it is in the house, I drink it. I crave it. If I don’t have it, I get headaches. It got to the point in December 2020 that I was drinking more than 2 litres a day – almost 800 empty calories a day. That’s not good. But if I don’t drink it I get headaches – like full on need to lay down kind of headaches, and nothing I had tried worked as a substitute, not coffee with sugar, not tea with sugar, sweet tea came close but not really…nothing worked.
Issue 2 – never felt like I had time to exercise – which is weird since I am working from home and technically had more time…
Issue 3 – snacking – I would have a very quick breakfast of toast before starting work, since I was working from home I had time to make a breakfast but the habit was still toast before running out the door or starting work. Of course the toast wouldn’t last in the system long and I would get hungry, and I would end up craving more carbs since I started the day with the carbs. This meant I had lots of carbs through the day and lots of things based from white flour and white flour is not great for me. I once had bagels for breakfast 3 days in a row and gained 5 pounds…
Issue 4 – exercise – my work and my hobbies all had me sitting at a desk…beyond needing to lose weight, that just isn’t healthy
So what did I do?
Issue 1 – Coke – I still crave it but I accidentally found something that temporarily backs off the cravings and stunningly also staves off the headaches. I am not sure how but it alone was life changing. What was it?
Cold brew coffee….seriously.
In December we got ourselves a cold brew coffee pot as a bit of Christmas present for ourselves, we go through a lot of coffee in the house and this seemed like a good way to have a pot ready plus it would be a neat experiment. I think I am the only one in the house that actually likes it but I found that I could drink it without anything added, so no cream, no sugar, just black. I can’t do that with regular coffee so I figured at least it would help me reduce some calories for my normal coffee consumption. But what I found was that once we ran out of Coke in the house on January 4th and I forced myself to not buy any more to bring home, was that I could get by with the cold brew and I would not get the withdrawal headaches. That was a massive revelation to say the least. This meant that if I could avoid bringing Coke home, I could lose significant weight just by cutting those calories…and still not feel like crap. Wow.
For Issue 2 – In January I started also keeping myself a bit accountable by doing daily vlogs over on the BigGoofyRunner YouTube channel. So I would complete work for the day and then immediately record a vlog. This trained me to make a clean break with work at the end of every day to do personal stuff – this had been hard to do working from home. So what this did was taught my brain to stop with work and break for personal and family time. Before this I was essentially starting earlier and earlier and then not cutting clean at the end of the day and then after supper instead of exercising I would collapse on the couch and not do anything. After January was done I started doing weekly vlogs instead since they took up too much time. But that gave me the knowledge that I could break clean and then gave me time back – so I started spending time on the treadmill right after work starting in February.
This is what I mostly did in January – I did not address issues 3 and 4 until February.
For issue 3 – snacking. White flower and carbs are my down fall, I have some and I need more but I think I get a pretty good insulin spike from them and they get consumed by the body fast and then I crave more. Needed to do something about that. Now I had time that I could cook myself a better breakfast in the morning but I was already making many changes and it would have been easy to get lazy and just do toast again. So instead I fell back on protein to help me out. Protein, of course fills you up for longer and takes longer for the body to process – less of an insulin spike and less cravings.
For me this meant hard boiled eggs and protein shakes for breakfast. I pre-boil several eggs to cover multiple breakfasts, shell them and put them in the fridge. Every morning after I take the dogs out I have 2 eggs and the protein shake. For a shake I am just using a low calorie powdered protein shake I got from Costco that I add water to, mix it up and drink with my vitamins and eggs. (I live in Canada, and I am working in a basement office, some days in the winter I don’t see the sun, so I take vitamin D daily). The eggs are probably getting me about 13 grams of protein and the shake should be 30 – so lots of protein. Breakfast is about 7 am. I then grab a big glass of cold brew coffee and head down to the office to work. Having everything ready before hand so I just need to grab it from the fridge really helps me be consistent here.
I then work for a few hours and when I get a break between meetings, I come up and microwave 2-3 strips of bacon and maybe have a few small pieces of cheese. And some more cold brew coffee. This covers me until lunch time.
Lunch ends up being just about whatever is easy to cook – I was on a pizza pop kick there for a while. Just needs to be a bit filling.
In the afternoon, I will have a light snack that could be popcorn or maybe some crackers, etc – I allow more carbs here because I want to make sure I have ready calories to get on the treadmill right after work.
Supper ends up being a healthy meal – Heather has been on a good health kick and is doing great with a 150 day plus streak of greater than 5k on the treadmill and we have been eating pretty healthy for supper.
In the evening I will have a snack but it needs to be before 8:30 – not for any kind of intermittent fasting type reason, but just me recognizing if I snack much later than that I am more likely to grab cookies or a higher calorie snack. So trying to fight that.
Because I have pretty consistent breakfasts and early morning snacks, it makes it easier for me to track what I am eating too. So, I don’t do a full food diary as such but what I do is track anything out of the ordinary I eat through the day. With a consistent breakfast or morning snack, I don’t have to spend time writing those down, so that saves some time with only having to write down different things I had.
This has helped me catch weird spikes in my weight because I have been able to track them back to food or drink items that my system reacted to. This means, I know what causes the spike and I can avoid it in the future or be mentally prepared if I decide to have that food item anyway.
Issue 4 – Exercising. As I mentioned before, I tried doing a bunch of weight exercises through the day and I tried to get running to occur but I was inconsistent – mostly due to the amount of time it was taking to do.
So in February I decided to do a few things – I sat down and decided all the various exercises I wanted to do and grouped them into 7 work outs. For example work out 1 would be bicep curls, triceps extensions, and seated military press. And I figured what I would do is take those 7 work outs and assign 3 of them to each week / work day. The idea being that I would take a fast stretch break from work, do 1 set of each exercise in one of the work outs with some 30 pound barbells I keep in the office and then I would get back to work. So essentially I would stand up do 1 set of 3 different exercises and then sit down and get back to work. And then I would check off that work out for the day and then later in the day I would take another break and do another workout before getting back to work…and so on. In this way I would do at least a little bit of exercise for various upper and lower body muscle groups through the day without taking any real time out of work. I’m not going to get massive doing this but it is working the muscles pretty well and they are decently toned and some muscle has been gained in some areas.
I also do a plank every work day and most work days I will do a quick full upper body work out with some 10 pound barbells for a bit more exercise. This is on top of the 2 year chin up streak I am that I do every morning – chin ups, dips and push ups – but not many (say 5-10 of each), think of it more as wake up routine than an actual strength training exercise.
And cardio – as I mentioned earlier, I have started doing that right after work each day. To start from somewhere I started following a Hal Higdon Novice marathon training program running 4 times a week. To start with the Tues, Wed, Thurs runs fit nicely in the time frame between work being over and supper time. But as Wednesday runs got longer they needed to sometimes move until after supper. I marked these runs off on a spreadsheet on my OneNote tracking pages – more on that right away.
The long runs on the weekend became a problem though and that showed up another issue… the treadmill, even as I lost weight and put more effort into running on the treadmill, I continued to get worse on the thing. I have pretty hated this particular treadmill since we got it – I was in peak condition when we bought it in Jan 2015…and I found that I had to run 10-20% slower on it than I was used to and I would still get off the treadmill mentally and physically destroyed. Which really sucks, since I have always considered treadmill training a secret weapon for me, especially for speed work.
This all culminated in doing an 11 mile “run” and essentially getting off the treadmill and ordering a new one from a brand we had used before and loved. It has been glorious on the new treadmill. So a lesson there, sometimes it is not you that needs to be fixed, sometimes the equipment really is the problem, I wished I had realized that 5-6 years earlier. The new treadmill is so much better, I have done a 10 miler on it and come off energized, still tired and worked hard, but happy.
Check out this video of us unboxing and setting up the new treadmill:
I have also realized that even with the new treadmill, I am dreading the longer runs through the whole week. I am not mentally ready for those yet – so since I am not training for a specific race or specifically to get ready for a marathon, I have backed off the longer runs to be 2 smaller runs usually which is easier to swallow mentally. And that means I am more likely to do the runs consistently which helps with the current real goal, losing weight.
That gets us a long way into discussing what I did for addressing the calories consumed and the calories expended parts of the equation, but also starts to lead us int what I did to get the third part, the mental part, to work.
Recognizing that I wasn’t mentally ready for long runs was huge because consistency is huge to lose weight long term.
But also data – data is key, for me at least. Having the data and using that data, or displaying it in a way that shows progress and issues – that is huge.
Since I started working from home I have been keep a log of each day – essentially a brief journal – I wanted to have a record of the whole pandemic thing since we are essentially living through someone else’s history lesson and I wanted some record of what I did during this time. And I started using those log sheets as a way to track my data and to keep me accountable.
I use Microsoft OneNote for this – before each week I put in a heading for each day and for each work day I put in check boxes for what I need to do for exercises each day, put in places to track my weight each day, and that I did my chin ups, etc. Here is also where I track what I ate for the day, if I did anything else physical, etc.
So that gives me a lot of data but I needed it in a form that I could visualize and compare one day to last. That became graphs – I did this in Excel but you could use paper…which is what my wife is doing.
I think this visualization is important for a few reasons but mostly because you can see that your weight will vary through the week just based on changes in diet, etc. If you aren’t following a rigid plan that is laid out for you, your low for the week might not be on the weigh in day if you do it weekly and you can miss some important information. For me, I have been able to see the impacts of diet choices quickly, correlated the changes back to what I have in the OneNote journal and then make appropriate changes immediately – lets you react quickly.
For example, in early April I had a few Mondays and Tuesdays where my weight would be higher than expected and I tracked it back to having too many low carb beers on the prior weekends. Now one or two of the low carb beers doesn’t impact my weight usually, but in the cases of these weekend I had a couple a night for a few nights in a row and they added up. Now I limit myself to 1 a night.
For me being able to see the improvements, see how I have gotten better helps me stay focused and stay on track and that is what the visualization tools do. Taking steps to prep all of this ahead of time also makes it easier to do on the day if you are feeling beat down or just lazy. I also tend to have these spreadsheets kept visible to me most of my work day…helps cut down on the snack urges…
But have the data also helps me see the overall improvement and get excited and engaged with keeping going.
When I look back at it now – in 2014 when I was at my running peak, I was tracking everything then too, both on BigGoofyRunner.com but also on various spreadsheets. When things started to fall apart the tracking fell down too and I just was not able to get things really going again until I could start tracking again.
So, I am not going to sit here and tell you that it is easy to get motivated, because, it isn’t always. But sometimes being able to look at how far you have come can poke you and give you extra motivation. It can definitely help if you see things going backward on the scale and you can point at your notes and go “ahh, crap, that thing” and come up with a plan to fix it. But it comes down to success breeding motivation.
This was a long one, so lets recap:
1. Reduce calories consumed – for me I replaced Coke with unsweetened cold brew coffee and ramped up the morning protein to help me curb snacking
2. Increasing calories expended – a light weight exercise plan that I can slip into normal work time along with motivational check boxes. Also a running plan that helped me realize a new treadmill was required. From there consistent exercise.
3. Mental push – I did a lot of prep to make sure set up things that made it easy for me to track everything and to visualize improvements and when things were falling down. Also by journaling everything I was better able to track my own mental state and catch issues so I could allow myself to take rest days or to move things around and be flexible. Basically, I made sure I had a plan I could follow easily but that was also flexible enough to allow me to change on the fly as I needed.
Also, don’t forget that support from others can be huge. My wife, Heather, is also on a weight loss journey right now and encouraging and supporting each other is big to help keep going. Granted it has to be the right encouragement – someone pushing and being too “Rah! Rah!” makes me push back – so people like that kind of encouragement but I know enough about my personality to know that works against my goals usually. So make sure to find a support team that gives you not only the encouragement but in the form you need. Think of this of the introvert versus the extrovert kind of thing, different personalities need different types of encouragement.
And with that last little lecture, I will shut this down now. Hopefully it was useful to someone out there. If there are any questions please be sure to comment and let me know. If you are on your own fitness journey as well, comment and let us provide you with encouragement…of the appropriate kind.
Thanks and have a good one!
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