The incredible shrinking man ....

This article and it's contents are my own, they do not represent the views of my current, prior (or future) employer (s) ...

I've met a lot of friends recently after not seeing them for a long time, a very long time .... in one case I met a former friend after a gap of almost ten years. Glad to say, we might be friends again, but this blog is about something different. It's about what he and indeed many other people have said to me recently when they've met me. How have I lost so much weight? So, without trying to turn this into a self-help article, or an incredible story about this super diet, drug etc, it's just me putting pen to paper about my journey.

Firstly, how much weight have I lost?

errr, about 14kg, which is 2.205 stones for those non-metric types, in about 14 months.

Here's a pic of me in Feb 2016 vs me in April 2017:

So how?? I found a diet that seemed to make sense and stuck to it. It was from a book I had on my bookshelf for some time. I originally bought it (from a charity shop) because I have always been vain in the way most men are and I wanted a six-pack and the title seemed to promise it ... The book is called 'The Abs Diet' - but actually, it turned out it's an acronym for recommended super foods, rather than a route to six-pack Abs (!) However, that's ok. There are key principles within it which I could apply, selectively. The diet is hardcore and not one I could religiously stick to. However, it had principles - did I mention that already? :) I could stick to those.

Eat Regularly

Yeah, my diet choice wanted me to eat more ... In fact, six times a day - three meals and three snacks. I won't pretend to understand the science, but this actually fits into the way I used to eat as a kid - maybe I hard-wired myself that way from young and so this pattern is more in line with my metabolism. As a kid, I would nibble begrudgingly at mealtimes, often with a lot of disrespect to the meals prepared at home by Mom. Then snack on packets of crisps/chocolates/sweets in between meals. This time I needed to be healthier. This is where the book was good, it had suggestions of food pairings for snacks. I chose only a few snack options to make things simpler; almonds/raisins, peanut butter on wholemeal toast, milk/clementine, oh and smoothies (homemade).

Don't inconvenience others

Sticking to a diet is tough, especially if you live with someone who isn't dieting. I decided early on I didn't want to have 'separate' meals from my wife. I adjusted the diet to work together. The diet has suggestions for lunches, suppers etc. While I convinced myself I could have these bland meals - I couldn't force my wife into that too or indeed ask her to make two meals on nights she cooked. However, the principle of the diet was not to exclude certain food types, rather to just choosier healthy versions, brown rice rather than white for example. So, my wife and I compromised, we carried on having our usual meals at home but I had healthier carbs with mine.

Don't rely on Exercise

Exercise is important. What I realised though, was if I wanted to make this work I should lose weight naturally through diet and then exercise later once my weight and body fat had already reduced by a lot. If I did it the other way round, then weight loss/health gain would be only because of the exercise. I wouldn't learn what was healthy vs unhealthy food. I would be caught in a trap, of getting healthy and then putting it all back on again as soon as I stopped exercising. In my work, I'm always travelling and it's often not very easy to exercise regularly, so this was important. I had failed for this reason in the past.

Exercise

Ha, as if to contradict my last point - you need to be active. I just realised that I needed a.n.other way of staying active. i.e. not necessarily a boring routine I could ONLY do in a gym, but something I could do anywhere. I can't run and I can't always be near a cycle, the next best thing was to walk. So I invested in a step counter.

I reached a point where I was averaging about 10,000 steps a day, yup that arbitrary measurement we hear about so often. Now it's slightly less:

Measure

Counting steps was the start, but there was so much more to measure. This is where it got really interesting, without measuring I can't accurately work out what I'm eating and what effect (if any) walking was having on. I began using a food recording app to track my meals.

This was the game changer. When I first started recording food, I adopted the diet really slowly. When it suggested peanut butter was good, I used Sunpat. When it suggested milk, I used semi-skimmed. When it suggested six meals a day, I struggled between 'right-sizing' snacks vs meals. Crude as calories are, they were a good way of determining or helping me work out how big, small a meal should be and if I can have that chocolate biscuit or not. I relied on 'calories' as a guide, to begin with anyway ... Nowadays I use skimmed milk, no sugar/salt/added ingredients peanut butter.

Ignore Calories, look at fat and protein

The food app I'm using let's me set calorie goals. Actually, it asks me for my current weight, height, age, gender and goal weight. It uses this to set a 'goal' calorie amount per day.

I don't ignore this calorie goal, but I don't pay attention to it. Some days I keep within, some days I exceed - the point is I don't let it control me, it's just a guideline.

The real use for it comes from another important principle in the Abs diet. It proposes preferred ratios of fat, protein and fibre that your should aim for in your diet. I discovered that I was having too much fat as a proportion of everything else, surprise surprise. I altered the percentages to get a better ratio and this, in turn, sets goals on how much protein, fat etc I should consume each day. Since I was measuring all my food anyway, I was getting a 'general' idea how much I was consuming so I could keep within those targets instead, rather than calorie targets.

Initially, I started with a high-calorie goal, so that meant a high fat allowance each day. Over time, I dropped the calorie goals and so now I've reached a target of 56g fat daily. So, it's not important I stick to 1680 calories, rather that I stick to 56g fat, 84g protein because they're in line with my desired ratios, etc.

The hardest part for me was protein. It took me a while but I really wanted to resist being one of those people ingesting large amounts of bulking protein powder, especially as I couldn't be sure how 'natural' or vegetarian they were. I eventually fund that either hemp protein or pea protein are great substitutes. To make the smoothies suggested in the book doesn't actually need that much powder either, as they are mainly yoghurt, milk and either fruit or oats. So, (if) I use protein powder (and I only do if I'm making a smoothie) then it's 1 teaspoon per serving (about 7g).

Fibre, it's important

This is really important. Keeping to protein, fat goals etc is good, but it's really important to have enough sources of fibre. Doing this diet helped teach me I was inadequately low. So I customised the homepage of my app to show me this, fibre, fat and protein. Put crudely, if you aren't consuming enough fibre then how can you "lose" fat/weight ....

Time, be patient

It was really difficult to know if this was really working. I knew I was losing weight, I could see my weight had decreased and people would comment I looked thinner. All the same, I still felt it was going slowly and I almost gave up, many times. Stick to it. The real truth was when my clothes/belts no longer fitted me.

I started this journey simply because I was approaching 40 and simply, I didn't want to be fat when I got to that age. By that metric, I planned in good time and still have a few months to go :)

HIT and press record

After almost 10 months and exceeding my original weight goals, I felt comfortable introducing exercise back into my life. Now that I was ready to exercise I needed to choose a good one and to find a way of feeding my level of activity into my food recording app. I bought a cheap bluetooth heart rate chest strap. They're much more accurate than the ones in smart watches and they work seamlessly with gym equipment. I can record my activity on my phone but also as soon as I step on a treadmill, step machine etc I get immediate feedback on how hard I'm working.

This measurement allows me to make sure I'm getting the real benefit of HIT - i.e. I'm working out my heart to a real INTENSE level. My exercise routine is really simple, 2 mins running, 1 minute rest, 2 minutes cycling, 1 minute rest, 2 minutes rowing, 1 minute rest, 2 minutes step, 1 minute rest, 2 minutes running, 1 minute rest, 2 minutes rowing, 1 minute rest, 2 minutes cycling and then stop and rest for 2 minutes. All followed by an all over body stretch I picked up from a Matt Roberts' textbook.

The order of running, cycling etc isn't important and in fact can be any cardio-active exercise. The point is 7 exercises in 2 min intensive bursts, interleaved with 1 minute rest. As you do this regularly, you can increase intensity as shown by your heart rate, don't go mad just push hard. It was inspired by a BBC documentary I watched on TV.

When I'm unable to get to the gym, I then substitute with the famous 7-minute exercise, which can be done at home, in a hotel room etc. It's not as effective as my normal workout but better than doing nothing.

Cheat

All through the dieting and exercising, there was always room to cheat. In fact, as the book says - you must cheat! It helps keep everything sane :) I have a cheat day (s)

So, in summary ...

I can't guarantee this will work for everyone, there is probably something about metabolism etc which makes it suited to me. However, it is working. Nowadays I often have complete binges and it doesn't really affect me in a big way. More importantly, I have the stats to detect and adjust if it does.

In reality, this diet has simply meant, eating many almonds. Eating more peanut butter, more salads/green leaves, more dairy. However I still have a lot of the old meals and sandwiches I used to have, I just use brown bread and brown rice instead for the fibre.

Update - 18 April 2017, I was 82.6kgs on Jan 2016 with body fat percentage of about 23 and now I am:

I hope this was an interesting read, very different to my previous blogs. I was inspired by Sam Cooper, a good friend of mine, do check out her blogs, especially this one: "How marathon training helped me in the workplace."

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