How I Lost 25 Pounds in 30 Months

Yes, you read that correctly. 30 months. Not 30 days. Not 30 weeks. 30 months. It's not very exciting, is it? It isn't. In fact, at times the rate of weight loss has been excruciating. But the weight has stayed off! When I decided to lose the weight on January 1, 2014 I weighed 208 pounds. This morning I was 183. Over the weekend when I played tennis three times and refereed a U11 girls soccer game I was as low as 182.5.

How did I do it? I've lost weight before using a variety of diets but always put the weight back on once I hit my target number. I also made the mistake of no longer weighing myself. I fooled myself into thinking I'd notice weight gain when my clothes started to get tight again or had to use loosen my belt. This time I decided to use a different method influenced by Gary Taube's Why We Get Fat and The 8-Hour Diet by David Zinczenko. As a result I changed what I ate, when I ate and what I didn't eat. I won't go into the details of why. The books I cited explain that.

What did I eat? Foods with low glycemic load. Food with high protein content. Fruits and veggies. Nuts. If I want snacks instead of munching on chips or cookies I'll have cocoa dusted almonds or Atkins chocolate coated almonds.

What did I avoid? Carbohydrates such as bread, pasta, cereals and cookies. Also watched my sugar intake. Notice I didn't say “eliminate carbohydrates.” I limit them. For instance over the weekend my wife and I went out to dinner with friends. I had the obligatory pre-meal piece of bread and my main course had risotto in it.

When did I eat? Between noon and 8:00 p.m. A form of intermittent fasting. The idea is that restricting calorie intake to 8 hours allows my system to burn other calories stored in my body.

A typical lunch consists of: Greek yogurt, carrots with dip, cheese sticks and an apple, pear or banana. Dinner is the usual: chicken and veggies, home-made soup, or microwave dinners by Weight Watchers or Kashi. (The ones with the lowest sodium content. Some have an astonishing amount of sodium! Some have close to 1,000 mg!) No seconds! And for dessert a Weight Watchers frozen treat.

It's been working! What's nice about this approach is that I'm not obsessed on counting calories. I do keep rough track of the total so that it stays below 1,500 calories a day, preferably 1,200. What's not so nice is that it takes a while to notice a change in weight. It has required steadfast patience and resisting the urge to give up in despair and dive into a bag of chips or cookies. At first I was averaging a pound a month. I've hit a plateau around 187 for several months before starting to nudge downwards again recently. At least it's not trending back up! And it's not going to.

Of course there have been some nice benefits such as looser clothes, being able to play more tennis, ski or referee soccer with fewer pounds to pound on my knees and just feeling better. My cholesterol numbers have dropped dramatically too.

I've also made it a point not to call what I'm doing “dieting.” Instead I prefer to think of it is a permanent change in what I eat and when I eat. It's a new and permanent regimen.