Before and After: Healthy Eating and Running My Ass Off to Lose 78 Pounds.

The title says it all. Many folks I’ve talked to about my weight loss journey that began in October of 2017 asked if I had a before and after photo of my progress. To be honest, I rarely took full figure shots of myself back then and didn’t think I had a “before” photo of myself. Turns out, I have one from February 2017.

So, here it is. Looking at myself from then brings up many emotions, the strongest of which is a feeling of heavy anxiety. I never want to weight 256 pounds again. I’m healthy, I’m a runner, and I’m much happier.

Update - 5.13.18:

Many people have been asking me what I did to achieve this. I didn’t really want to write a lengthy blog post about it (Drew Beechum from the Maltose Falcons wrote an in-depth post about his recent 100 pound weight loss journey that's fantastic), but I did recently respond privately to someone who asked how I got into running. So, I'm just going to post my response to that person here. Hope this helps!

I started running, but very slow. I listened to my body and would adjust my pace so I was comfortable, almost to the point where I felt like I wasn’t trying, and tried to maintain that. Usually 20-30 minutes daily (DAILY—I didn’t take days off unless I was sick or injured and literally couldn’t walk). I would “run” for 30 minutes after work, at a 14-15 minute/mile pace, then before bed, I would walk on the treadmill, but at the maximum grade (10%) for 10 minutes.

After every workout, I was drenched with sweat. I gradually got faster and ran further distances. My first 5k was a month after I started and was a 11 minute/mile pace. I also did rowing when I couldn’t run for a couple weeks due to a sprained ankle. I never stopped. Now, running is just a part of my day. 2 miles before work, 3 miles or more after, 4-5 miles or more on Saturday and Sunday.

I use my Apple Watch for recording workouts. It’s a huge help and great motivator. I also have a Fitbit One in my pocket all day (I've been using the Fitbit One for years). I record everything and every activity. If I don’t have tangible data, I feel like I wasted an opportunity to document my exercise. It's really nice being able to reference data.

My advice is this: be really active, but don’t hurt yourself. Really cut the calories and stop eating unhealthy. I’m fully vegan now. I was mostly vegan before I decided to start running, except I’d have cheese or dairy now and then. That is no longer the case.

My diet is plant-based and I eat triple the amount of vegetables than I did before. I still eat chips and have desserts, but it’s limited. I love chips and hummus, but I realize that I’m just using the chips to deliver the healthy hummus to my stomach. So, now I eat baby carrots with hummus and it’s awesome. Stuff like that. The way I see it, if you’re gonna work so hard to sweat and exercise, you don’t want to throw it away by eating crap. I ran and worked hard, so I needed to respect that and my body.

These days, I’m maintaining the running, still limiting my calories (I’m not hungry, but I never feel stuffed), and drinking beer without really worrying about any of it. I am still on a trajectory to get to 175 pounds, but losing that last 10 pounds from 185 has taken about two months. Once I lose another couple of pounds and hit my goal, I’ll be in maintenance mode and focusing on strength training.

Locking Down Facebook...

I’ve been seeing many articles about “how to lockdown the privacy on your Facebook profile” after the Cambridge Analytica story. I’ve already done most of what these articles recommend, except I haven’t deleted my “advertising interests.” These “interests” are what Facebook records about users as they interact with the app. My interests ranged from beer (duh), to Progressivism, to the color purple. Facebook say they build these profiles about users to better serve advertising to their interests, but we all know that this is all about collecting as much data about their users as possible to offer to advertisers. I’m not completely against this, but there was a lot of detail about what I liked and disliked (outside of pages I actually clicked “like”), and that kind of creeped me out.

So, this morning I decided to delete every interest point, one-by-one, which was quite the tedious task. There were around 600 different things of “interest to me” and I deleted them all.

Honestly, I enjoy the convenience of Facebook, especially for planning events, using Messenger, and just keeping up with friends. I really don’t want to delete my profile, even though I know my profile exists on Facebook to ultimately allow them to extract data about me for advertisers. I don’t mind giving Facebook some of that data, but it’s a hell of a lot of information they’re giving to advertisers if someone has their privacy settings for everything on Facebook set to default.

Since I stopped making my posts public and un-friending toxic people, Facebook has been OK for me. Would I like an alternative? Sure I would. But, for now, I’m keeping Facebook locked down as much as I can until the time comes where Facebook is no longer relevant, if that time ever comes at all...

Weight Loss, Plateaus, and The Magic Number.

Today, I hit 65 pounds of total weight loss since beginning in October of 2017. But for the past couple of weeks, I've been holding steady at 193-197 pounds. While 191 is a mere two pounds less than 193, I'm stoked about it!

But now, I feel like I've plateaued a bit. I believe this is for a couple of reasons:

First, I started having beers during the week again, and I've brought dessert back into my life. When I began my weight loss regiment, I wanted to hit an ideal weight and then start incorporating "normals" back into my diet, while still eating healthy and running at least 20 miles per week. Beer was something I cut out entirely on weekdays and I now know that doing this was a big contributor to my weight loss. I've now hit my "goal," so the beer and desserts are back (Yay!). I'm not going overboard with it, limiting my intake to two or so beers every other day. I'm loose with it, but I'm still monitoring and logging the calories and carbs I drink (the best I can).

Second, I've been steadily running around 23 miles per week. At this point, it isn't difficult for me to hit this goal, but I'm starting to feel like I need to run more and step up the cardio a bit.

While I'm happy with my weight loss thus far, I'd really like to be in the 180's, which means I need to effectively lose just seven to ten more pounds.

My weight spiked a few pounds last week when I was sick and couldn't exercise, and the outdoor runs I did after the sickness were slower and shorter than usual, which I expected. The "spike" was just normal weight fluctuation as far as I can tell, but it caused me to start the week at a higher weight than I would have preferred.

Now, to address this plateau...

My new goal is to run 30-35 miles per week while still drinking beer during the week and tweaking my diet to bring in even more calories. I feel that running more and eating more will lead to a slower, more gradual weight loss, and I won't have an exercise/calorie/nutrition imbalance. (But, I'm no expert...)

With my new work schedule, I'm getting more sleep during the week (two hours more per night, Monday through Friday), waking up early enough to run three miles before work while still allowing me to do a faster two mile sprint/run after work, totaling five miles per day. I plan to keep the weekend to 3-5 miles of running. I've been doing this for the last week or so and I love it. The runs after work are great and take about 17 minutes.

So, that's where I am. I'm hoping to crack the 180's in a week or so, and maybe maintain 185 in 3-5 weeks. I'm feeling great and running strong!