A Plan of Action

If I'm going to lose weight, then I'd better have a plan in place that is gonna get me there; not having a plan is what bought me my man boobs in the first place, after all.

Considering the dieting fundamentals outlined previously, a good diet will have these characteristics:

1) Contains significantly fewer calories than I plan on expending.

2) Takes advantage of a ketotic state

3) Increases overall body metabolism

4) Keeps me full/ decreases hunger

5) Few restrictions on the actual foods I can eat.

Let's review these items one by one.

1) Contains significantly fewer calories than I plan on expending.
Because I want to lose weight, not just maintain my weight, my diet will need to provide significantly fewer calories than I will expend. There are three things to consider when determining exactly how many calories I want to consume: A) Basal Metabolic Rate. B) Exercise. C) Desired rate of weight loss.

Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) refers to the number of calories your body needs to sustain life if you lay in bed all day. It accounts for things like protein synthesis for replacing dying cells, energy required for the muscle action of breathing/ digestion/ circulation, as well as the energy consumed by the brain in the form of glucose during rest. There are many calculators that can help you determine your BMR on the web.

At 6' 1", 243lbs, and a tender 27 years of age, my BMR is 2323.39 Cals per day. PLEASE NOTE: an estimated BMR does not exactly reflect ones actual calorie consumption during a day of rest. There are many factors like muscle tone, genetics, state of health, etc that will affect ones BMR. The numbers generated are derived from averages. A more accurate test to determine the caloric expenditure of your body at rest is called a Resting Metabolic Rate and can be performed by some physicians. This number is tailored to your own body specifically and is more reliable.

Exercise obviously adds to the number of calories used by your body. In addition, frequent and regular exercise can increase your resting metabolic rate as your muscles become more toned and burn more calories on a continuous basis (muscle tone is essentially the degree to which your muscles are tensioned/flexed at rest and correlates to the amount of innervation present, which increases with frequent use). Since I'm rather FAT at the moment, vigorous exercise mostly just pisses me off because I feel so winded and fatigued compared to my Adonis years. For this reason, I will be abstaining from an exercise routine until I hit the 200 lb mark. Another reason for this is that exercise induces hunger, which is something I do not want to worry about while I'm settling into my new eating routine.

Believe it or not, as a nurse teaching heart attack patients about exercise, I recommend a minimum of 30 mins TOTAL activity for the day to meet one's exercise requirements for the day. That means if you are up and walking for 5 mins, 6 times a day, you have done 30 minutes of walking exercise. I preach it, but I don't necessarily buy it. 5 minutes of walking is hardly enough to elevate one's heart rate or metabolic demand. But hey! Whatever medicine tells us on any given day must be right! Right?

My weight loss goal for this year is 73lbs, that will land me at 170lbs, which is the weight I felt the best at. A formidable feat, since I've only been 170lbs twice since high school. The first instance was immediately following an LDS mission to Hong Kong where I was out meeting people on the streets for 12-14 hours everyday in the heat and cold. Because LDS missionaries are volunteers and money was tightly budgeted, I skipped public transit whenever I could and would walk whenever possible to meetings. Good missionaries don't saunter from one place to another either, time is precious, and a brisk power walk is the standard, and I like to think I was a good missionary. The second instance, following healthy weight gain after my mission, was as a pest control sales person in Florida during summer break from BYU. I went to Florida with $250 in my pocket, and so limited myself to 2 junior bacon cheese burgers a day until my first paycheck, 3 weeks later. I lost 20lbs my first week of door to door hotfooting in the heat of the Florida summer.

I like to think that losing 20lbs a week is probably not a good thing. In the absence of calories, the body resorts to using not only fat stores, but also protein catabolism for energy, and that protein comes from your muscles. Too much protein break down in a short period of time floods your circulatory system with pigments and by products that can be hard on the kidneys. Rapid increases in ketone bodies from fat metabolism can also result in metabolic acidosis which can be a dangerous situation as well. Therefore, I'm aiming for a weight loss rate of 1.4 per week, which is well within the 1% of total body weight per week commonly recommended. Of course, that is an average rate of weight loss, individuals sometimes see a faster rate in the first couple weeks as water weight is shed.

2) Ketosis accelerates the body's use of fat stores in the absence/ deficiency of glucose and insulin. This will theoretically magnify the effects of my calorie deficient diet as the body adjusts to prefer fat to glucose for energy needs. Dr. Atkins predicts an advantage of about 950 cals/day while in ketosis. To maintain ketosis, I will need to take as few carbohydrate calories as possible, and prefer protein and fat sources to fill my caloric allowance. Water intake will be very important if I am to safely maintain a state of ketosis, as ketone bodies produced during fat metabolism are acidic and can cause metabolic acidosis if there is inadequate hydration to allow the kidneys to dispose of them.

3) If I can increase/ maximize my bodies BMR, so much the better, the increased differential between intake and output will quicken my weight loss. It is estimated that the GI tract accounts for 20-25% of the BMR. Fasting would obviously cut that 20-25% out, so my diet should include frequent eating times to keep the GI tract active.

4) Staring at the fridge knowing that you can't eat anything out of it when you're starving is a sad sad place to be. Therefore, I'm going to incorperate foods that I can eat in unlimited quantities. What!? you exclaim, How are you going to lose weight if you gorge yourself on anything at all, after all, everything you put in your mouth has calories. WRONG! I retort. SO wrong. There are many foods that have no calories at all! Some foods theoretically even provide fewer calories than are necessary to digest them, resulting in a net deficit of calories!

5) I'm a social fellow, and that means food. Social=food. For those of you with no social life, learn this lesson, if you know how to make food, you will have friends. Because my diet is calorie restricted, I mainly need to focus on avoiding foods that increase my blood sugar quickly. But really, it's about the calories, if I scar 400cals of spaghetti, it just means it will take a couple days for my body to get back into ketosis. As long as my calorie intake is less than expenditure, I'll still lose weight, just not as quickly as if I had that 950cal ketosis advantage