Mid-life crisis?

In 2005 at the age of 37 I began a series of crises.  The first of these forced me to look at myself objectively for perhaps the first time in my life.  I could see how I treated people and how I ignored people.  I could see how secrets I kept from my wife were preventing true intimacy.  I could see that my ability to walk up 4 flights of stairs did not make me healthy.  And I could see that 235 pounds was at least 40 too many. A later crisis (deaths in the family) caused me to see my own mortality a bit clearer than before.

OMG! I'm Fat!?

Suddenly I could see the clues I had ignored for years.

• Pictures don't make me look fat; I am fat!
• BMI is a flawed scale, but my BMI=33 (Obese) is not wrong.
• In a carpool I got the front seat so the three "skinny butts" could fit in back.  How did I manage to ignore that one?

I never believed the "body shape" charts online that suggested that the ideal weight for my height was 160.  "Come on!", I'd say.  "160?  That's impossible.  I'd have to lose 70 pounds!  I'm not that fat."

But I was. 

Math and science geek

I didn't set out to do anything about it at first.  My scatter-shot ADD method of web browsing brought me to The Hacker's Diet, a free diet book by John Walker (a semi-famous software engineer).  I printed it out and began reading. (If you're interested in the math and physics of calorie counting, I definitely recommend it.)

    3500 calories = 1 pound of fat

When I got the math part down, it all seemed so simple.  I worked a Calorie-Counting diet in Excel for a while.  But Excel is buggy.  I switched to FitDay for a while, but it didn't have a lot of my foods in it and it didn't have a trendline on the weight log.  Then I found Calorie-Count.com. I'm pretty sure the folks who designed Calorie-Count have read John's book.  They do everything he suggests in there for building tracking tools.  Since I already lost 30 lbs on The Hacker's Diet, I knew how to continue on CC.  It was an easy transition. 

Undereating = starvation mode

My diet method for those first 30 lbs didn't involve actually counting calories.  It just involved eating fewer than I had been.  But since I wasn't really counting them, I didn't know how many I needed anymore.  Poor attention have I.  ADD, remember?

So in March 2007 when I started exercising again, I pushed my deficit into dangerous territory: 1500 calories or more per day!  My body stopped losing weight as quickly and began storing fat whenever it could.  My metabolism tanked. I didn't realize the error for 9 more months.

Calorie-Count forums save me

I was reading about Starvation mode in the forums on CC.  When I worked the numbers and found out I had a huge, exercise-induced deficit, I was stunned.  Could it really be true? I was skeptical, but willing to try it. 

I started eating more food to make up for my now 3,000 calories/week of exercise.  This kept my deficit around 600-700 per day, on average.  And it worked.  The weight has started coming off again.  This time it's just 5 lbs/month instead of 10, but I'm happy with it.  It's a lot better than 1!