My first thought was to write some software that would create perfectly balanced lists of foods, with associated quantities, that would meet all my nutritional needs and keep me at a particular caloric intake. The way I envisioned it, I'd have a massive database of available foods, and have the software operate on my favorites. I figured this would allow me to eat the foods I loved, and still get a perfect nutrition.
So I wrote the tool, and it worked just fine. I designed plenty of ingredient lists that provided perfect nutrition for someone of my age, gender, and caloric needs.
There were various problems. For one thing, I hated it. Yes, the food was healthy, but it was sort of depressing to think of maintaining myself on that kind of food forever and ever. It was basically a lifelong commitment, if I wanted to lose the weight and keep it off.
I tried a couple of solutions. One involved an attempt to eliminate eating entirely. I would simply blend the foods into one giant drink, and get it out of the way in 5 minutes. Presto! No more mealtimes to worry about, and my nutritional needs were met better than 99.9998% of the people on the planet.
Yuck!
Eventually that system broke down, and I devised an entirely new approach. Instead of concerning myself with the ideal nutrition, I would try a calorie-counting approach. The only problem with counting calories is that it's not really possible. You just can't make good estimates of how many calories are in a piece of food. If you weigh the ingredients individually, you can do it. But for prepared foods, forget it.
But I got this great idea, that I didn't really need to calculate how many calories I was eating in a given day, if I could instead measure the result of those calories. In other words, if I just weighed myself in the mornings, I could see how the calories from the previous day had effected me.
It wasn't a perfect measurement. There would be more water or less water, stuff in the bowels, and whatnot. But if I didn't worry about the day-to-day accuracy so much, and only thought about the accuracy of the measurement on average, then in fact it was dead on target!
I also realized that this was fine, because it was not the day-to-day accuracy, but only the average accuracy, that really mattered. After all, I didn't care about losing weight on any particular day, I only cared about losing weight over time. If I had a system that averaged out to dead accuracy, that was good enough!
So, this was a much easier proposition. Unlike calories, my weight was easy to calculate, and I already had the device that would do it.
I also got the great idea that the 180 lbs recommended by the doctor was really just a meaningless number. There was no way for me to get there immediately; so it made no sense to try for it. All I really cared about was being on a trajectory of weight-loss; in other words I just wanted to lose some amount - any amount - relative to what I'd weighed in the most recent past.
So I set up a constantly moving target, very close to my actual weight. The target would go down at a rate of speed that was healthy and realistic. I started it off at 1 lb per week.
So my initial target was essentially the same as my actual weight. And every week, my target went down by 1 lb. Meanwhile, every morning I'd weigh myself, and thus indirectly count calories for the previous day.
If my weight was below my target, that meant I was losing weight too rapidly; and therefore I should eat whatever I wanted for that day. Yay! No need for endless willpower!
If, on the other hand, my weight was above my target, that meant I hadn't lost enough weight the previous day, and I needed to engage in diet behavior; which for me meant lots of salads. Vegetables are notoriously low calorie.
The beautiful thing about this diet was that it operated on average. I didn't have to do impossible calculations, and I didn't even need a perfectly accurate scale. If I followed the rules, even inaccurate measurements would average out to more and more accurate results. I loved this aspect because it had the same almost magical properties that I loved so much about calculus, and about those neat scientific experiments I'd done from books when I was a kid.
So, with no thanks to my doctor, over the past year I've managed to lose very nearly the amount he recommended. As of this morning, I'm down to 183.6 lbs, a 28.2 lbs loss.
I also lost the weight very slowly, which is exactly how you're supposed to lose weight. One of the other beautiful ideas about this diet is that you can actually control how much weight you lose over time. I started off at a pound a week; then switched to a pound every 10 days. When I do get down to 180 lbs sometime this February, my plan is to switch to a pound a month. I don't know of any other diet that offers that level of ability to slow down weight loss. The other diets seem to be all about losing dangerous amounts of fat in the least amount of time possible. Bad scene. I don't want to be thin, if that means my organs will all be damaged, and I'll realize no health benefit from the weight loss.
Anyway, so this morning I was not expecting to find myself below my target. I'd had a pretty luxurious lunch with a friend yesterday, including mushroom pasta and crab dumplings, and I'd expected today to be a diet day. But no! I'd lost weight after all, and today is a non-diet day.
Lately I've been feeling more and more as though I don't need to go out and binge on delicious foods on my non-diet days. I think I may be losing my taste for overeating. This morning, for example, when I think about what I want to do with my glorious non-diet day, I find myself considering really very sensible options. I'm not sure if that's a result of habits built up from being on this diet, or not. It does seem to be happening though.
We'll see. Anyway I'm pretty pleased with all this. I love feeling like I've cracked the technology.
No comments:
Post a Comment