Intro - The Plan

Welcome!

Presumably, you've arrived here because you're drawn to two of my favorite hobbies: losing weight and saving cash. Until 5 months ago, I thought that each of those two things were incompatible with the other. I always thought that being fit meant either getting used to shelling out big bucks for expensive gym memberships and overpriced health food, or that saving money meant getting used to back pains from your wide-ass sitting on a fat wallet after passing over the high-price hipster wrap shop for a $1.50 McDouble.

Well, I'm happy to report that you can indeed lose weight on the cheap with minimal sacrifices to your current lifestyle. On July 10, 2017 I weighed 198 lbs and as of December 21, 2017, I now weigh 160 lbs. I have not set one foot in the gym, on a treadmill or lifted any weights, and I have saved several thousand dollars in food costs.

I'm not here to sell anything. I'm just sharing my strategy. The weight loss industry is built on such a mountain of lies that I feel like I'm doing a public service by shining a light on their deceitful business practices. Ok, yes, there's nothing wrong with going to the gym, and if you have specific athletic goals apart from losing weight - like you're training to climb Everest or something. Fine. But, most people are in there to try and reshape their bodies. The gym industry's whole marketing strategy is centered around this idea.

Going to the gym should be the last thing you need to worry about. In fact, you should go ahead and cancel your gym membership now. It's a waste of money, and you already have everything you need - a living human body with two working legs. In fact, you're already burning calories just sitting there reading this.

Yes, you can lose weight if you exercise like a pro-athlete or a Hollywood actor training for a specific role and don't change your diet, but most of us have other things to do. Depending on your activity levels, diet is about 70-90% of your success. That also means that if you work out 7 days a week but use that as an excuse to eat 10-30% more than you should, you can expect to wipe out all of your gains (ie, fat losses). All you need is a pedometer or fitness tracker, and you should really hit 10,000 steps every day at a minimum. Walking is easy, and you don't feel like a ravenous animal after a leisurely stroll.

The good news is that you can literally eat whatever you want - I deprive myself of nothing. The bad news is that you'll have to start calorie counting. There's no getting around it, but it's A LOT easier than you think. I spent several years fatter than I should have been because I foreclosed the idea of calorie counting on the belief that it would just be too difficult and onerous. If you just hang with me, and I'll explain why I was so wrong.

Weight loss really does come down to math. If your calories out are greater than the calories in, you lose weight. In fact, you could lose weight if a Texas Double Whopper large value meal was the only thing you ate every day. The problem, of course, is that if you tried to do that you'd spend most of the day hungry and end up eating more.

Your goal is to get to full for the lowest calorie hit. If you decide to start my plan, you'll figure out the foods that'll get you there and you'll find yourself being a little more judicious with when you eat the ones that don't. You'll also find yourself discovering substitutes that satisfy your specific fix. For example, my sweet tooth go-to is the McDonalds Vanilla Cone - only 200 calories and costs a buck and a half!

The biggest thing is just to get started counting, and even if you start out still eating the same garbage, the key is to get into the habit of logging it and be honest with yourself. I ate like crap for the first month or so, but even just the check on myself of logging everything made me cut out some of the really gratuitous indulgences, which was enough to start seeing some progress. The progress was motivation enough to eliminate certain things and finding acceptable substitutes for others and it kind of snowballed into the success story that I'm sharing with you now.

The hardest part is by far the first month, so it's going to take some level of motivation to stick with it. Your body is used to eating ridiculous amounts of calories and freaks out when you start disrupting your routine. It gets a lot easier after about week three, so just be prepared to weather the storm. This could be mitigated by doing a more gradual weight loss, but I wanted to move quickly. When I started, I was probably eating about 3500 calories a day, most of which I spent eating out. I was spending easily $20-$25/day or more on breakfast, lunch and snacks at work. I pack my own lunch and snacks now, and my pre-dinner food costs are probably about $3/day.

The thing of it is, it's kind of hard to count calories if you're eating out all the time. This isn't always the case now as a lot of restaurants like McDonalds or Subway will include nutrition info, but for non-chain restaurants, it's going to take some more ballparking. You'll also end up paying more than if you prepared your own food, but at least with chain restaurants you'll know how many calories you're eating and can more accurately hit your targets. Otherwise, it's like horseshoes - getting close is good enough.

As far as calorie counting, I use my Fitbit, but you can use any kind of nutrition tracker. MyFitnessPal is free and also a really popular one, and I think their database might be more robust than Fitbit's. I like the Fitbit system because it integrates my step tracker, nutrition input and weight seamlessly into a single app and dashboard.

If you prepare your own food, you'll eat a lot of the same stuff, so it makes entering calories super easy. Yeah, there are days where you don't really have control over what food you're served and have to ballpark it. I do this a lot during the holiday season. I have a "Christmas Party" custom holiday food that I set for 1000 calories and estimate it up or down depending on how much I stuff my face with free food at those events. My target is 2000 calories every day. Some days I blow the roof off of it, but most days I'm in that range.

The only other thing I would tell you is to get used to weighing yourself in the morning every day and logging your weight. Yeah, there will be days that it can be totally dispiriting, but your body weight can fluctuate a LOT every day, especially if you've been eating a lot of salty food the day before. After one recent Christmas party, I no joke weighed 6 pounds more than I did the previous day, and a couple of days later it was back to normal. A gallon of water weighs 8 pounds, so don't be surprised if your weight fluctuates wildly. Watch your weekly average weight to get an idea if you're heading in the right direction or not doing enough.

Anyway, that is the outline of my plan. I'll fill it in with more blog posts in the near future with more detailed tips and strategies for how I stay full and lose weight while saving some scratch.