Goal!
After putzing about for the summer, I had dropped my weight from 160 to 158. Bleh. We – the culinary we – got serious at the beginning of August. The objective was 5 pounds a month. The method was straight-up calorie count. My in-house nutrition advisor doesn’t hold with variety diets. It all turns into the same sludge in the end. The question is how one wishes to ingest those calories.
He feels the problem with sugary foods is not any inherent evil, but that it is so easy to snarf down way too many calories in one go. A few weeks ago, someone brought glazed donuts to fire meeting. I had two. I was appalled when I got home to find out that I had inhaled a dinner’s worth of calories (380) in under a minute.
Daily allotment was 1500 calories a day. Three meals totaled 900 to 1000 calories. Daily doses of o.j., V8, & cranberry juice came to 200. That left me ~300 calories to play with. Some days it was Gatorade & raisins. Most days it was Coke. Despite my brave words back in April [Motivation], I still can’t shake the red can habit.
I had a few days under 1500, a few days over 1500, and one or two days way over. The overall trend was downward and under 2000 calories. Of course, this works best if one has a personal chef who is willing to make tasty 300-calorie meals.
Oddly, before swimming I weighed 150.1. The photo was taken after swimming, dry, with slightly damp hair. The body absorbs half a pound of chlorinated pool water? Creepy.
What does this have to do with horses? The entire drive behind the body modification was so that I could button my show vest and not look like a sausage in my jods.
Virtual Brush Box 
Did you know the your hair is a sponge? Try keeping your hair absolutely dry and then see what the difference is. Or, soak it before and after.
In Water Ballet at school, we always wore a bathing cap. Nevertheless, my pony tail would freeze walking between the pool and the dorm.
BTW, congratulations to you and the chef.
Well done. I need to kick my ass in gear again and shed another 10lbs.
Yeah, you!!! And kudos to the guy who is making your meals. The hardest part I find with maintaining a healthy physic as I age is that I am feeding growing people. They require more than I do in both volume and diversity: I need to provide for them without over indulging myself. Tricky balance. Having in house support makes a huge difference.
Congrats on the loss, no matter how it was achieved. That said, I have to disagree about the white stuff. After 35 years in the fitness industry I’m well convinced that sugar (in all it’s many forms) and starchy carbs are about as evil as it gets. And they’re the mainstay of almost every American diet. So unless you really want to go bare bones, it’s pretty tough to totally eliminate them. (While I seldom eat rolls or bread, try finding hamburger buns that don’t have HFS or some form of solidified oil in them!) I strive to remove these things from my daily choices and not obsess about the things I have to eat from time to time that are or have crap in them. (FWIW, I’m a strong and muscular 5’4″ and weigh 132)
Congrats to you! And happy you have such good support -he’s such a gem!