When my wife suggested I write a book about my weight loss odyssey, I laughed and told her it would be the world's shortest book (besides, I'm not the only guy ever to lose weight). Because it turned out to be so easy. It’s one of those epiphanies that you get and think, “why the heck didn’t I think of this before?”
Here it is in a nutshell: It’s all about calories, stupid! I quickly discovered that although I was riding my bike a lot, I was also eating a whole ton of calories during and after my rides, in the misguided belief that because I was riding hard, I could pretty much eat what I wanted. I’ll tell you right now, if you read some of the road biking magazines, they’ll sometimes have these little side bars where they give you a ride distance and speed and tell you what the equivalent you can consume in beer or Snickers bars. Don’t even look at that, if you’re serious about shedding the pounds. ‘Cause you’ll end up eating those Snickers bars and wonder why you gained weight!
I went to see a nutritionist in March and she gave me all sorts of information about the types of foods that I needed to eat, the proportions of carbohydrates, proteins, etc. There were simple sugars and complex sugars. Some turned into glycogen, others didn't. It seemed way too complicated. So of course, that all went in one ear and out the other. The only thing that rattled around in my brain was when she said, for your weight, you need to eat a net 1,900 calories every day to lose two pounds a week. She gave me a whole list of foods on about six or seven pages with the calorie counts for different servings so that I could figure out how many calories I was taking in.
That's all well and good, but how accurate was it really? The foods listed were pretty general (is it a big apple or a medium apple?) and I wondered how accurate the list was. Also, what about my workouts? How could I factor those burned calories in? How did I even know how many calories I burned during a workout? There had to be a better way to quantify all those calories so that they made sense to me.
Using the lists from my nutritionist, I felt I could easily be as much as 500 calories off in my calculations. I felt I needed to accurately measure and quantify what I took in and burned every day with a relatively small margin of error. As it turns out, it very possible with today’s technology. The key is to first be able to accurately measure the calories going in, second, accurately measure the calories going out. As I mentioned, it’s very easy to do with today’s technology.
I’ll digress here a little bit because I don’t want to give the impression that I totally ignored my doctor’s advice on the type of foods I was to eat and the proportions of carbs to proteins, etc. She was concerned about the possibility of diabetes setting in and aside from the weight loss aspect, she wanted to make sure I wasn’t going eat a lot of “crap”. I really wasn’t too worried about the type of food I was eating, because as the appointment with the doctor progressed, it turned out that my diet wasn’t so bad. I was more or less eating the correct foods, with some splurging here and there with foods I shouldn’t be eating. So I decided that I wasn’t going to worry too much about the type of foods I was taking in and worry only about my net calorie counts for the time being. I rarely eat white bread, for example, only whole grains. I rarely eat white rice. I eat a lot of nuts. I eat a lot of fruits and veggies. I never eat at fast food restaurants, and I don’t drink sodas. I always made sure that I had a lot of fiber in my diet. Believe me, when you’re in your 50s, fiber is all important! My main problem was that I simply ate too much for the level of activity in my life.
After muddling through a week after my appointment with the nutritionist, I realized that unless I knew with some degree of accuracy what was going in and out, it would never work. So I set out to find a way.
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