Ah yes, my kinda thread.
Well a very brief history if I may.
After starting the new millenium at 5'10 and 175 pounds (mostly of muscle as I just got out of the Marines) I picked smoking back up (cus my momma didn't raise no quitter) and decided to eat what I want, when I want (or can due a quite hectic schedule) and have sleep patterns that would make someone with OCD swandive off the Golden Gate.
Pair that with absolutely no organized exercise and in ten short years I had the body of a GOD!
Well, Buddha that is.
220 pounds with a definate gut and a neck that I think I accidentally left at a Burger King drive through never to be seen again, leaving me with that wonderful 45 degree slow inverted drop from what used to be my chin to my chest. Oh so sexy and appealing!!!
Well after years of telling myself that I will eat better and go to the gym when I quit smoking and I will quit smoking once I get past this project or that deadline or this family gathering or that...
I finally looked in the mirror and asked my multiple chins: "Chins, I am buying you a ticket back to the Great Wall."
I got an e-cigarette (yes I know it ain't quittin cold turkey but as opposed to the patch and gum, it worked.) and that day was the last day I even craved a real cigarette. If you want to know the brand, pm me.
So with smoking "kicked" I turned to my diet and exercise. I joined the local gym and play racquetball with the s/o every other day. As far as the diet, I found this wonderful little app for my iphone (I believe it is availble for android and just regular PC as well) called MyFitnessPal.
There is no miracle diet or carb good/protein bad or vice versa hooey. After answering some simple questions and telling it where I want to be and how quickly it calculates out what my daily caloric intake should be. It has a VAST database of foods that you can just enter a name and it knows the calories you took in by eating them. It also knows the key ingrediants so it can tell you if you are eating too much or too little of a given vitamin, fiber, etc.
More importantly, it also has calories burned for just about every exercise I have been able to muster and it tracks your progress for you.
For me what it does is train me to just make wiser choices about what foods I eat.
I mean I can eat a double quarter pounder with cheese but that would pretty much be my entire allotted caloric intake for the day, or I could have an egg and canadian bacon muffin in the morning, a nice homemade salad for lunch and a decent dinner and get the same amount of calories.
No stress, no muss, no fuss.
So where does this leave me, you ask?
I started this program in June of 2011 at 219 and this morning I was 180lbs. I am consistanly dropping about 1-2lbs per week and keeping it off. I eat what I want, when I want and honestly, having to enter the info in my phone is pretty much second nature to me, and since it has a feature to store commonly eaten recipes and such, most of it is just a couple of seconds.
My goal is about 155 which I plan on reaching by years end. Slow and steady wins the race as from what I noticed, weight dropped quickly is also weight gained back just as quickly. Unless you change the lifestyle choices that got you there in the first place, you are just going to frustrate yourself to pieces wasting time and money on hopeless "wonder diets."
