The Cheap Man's Weight Loss Plan

The stretch between Halloween and New Year's is one of the best but also the toughest times of the year for the cheapo. Between Christmas parties, Christmas party leftovers and people dumping off candy and sweets in the kitchen areas at work, it's extremely difficult to keep off pounds when you're constantly bombarded with free food. I cannot recall the last time I spent any money on food at work that weren't snacks that I keep in my desk to stretch out over time. I've been saving a lot of money, but it's only because I've been walking through a free calorie minefield every day. Throughout most of the year, approaching your food spending budget with the mindset of a homeless person will translate into easy and dramatic weight loss, but the cheapo diet isn't meant to withstand this kind of free food bonanza. Not only is all this free food keeping me from buying lunch at work, it's cutting down on my grocery bills! Sure, there's some fruit the

Well, the summer of unavoidable calorie bombshells is over, and while the good ship Cheapo held up through most of it (look at that beautiful flat line in late August), by the end of the summer of nonstop weddings and travel, I caught myself at 167 pounds. That's 9 pounds higher than my target weight. I actually probably crossed the 10 pound Rubicon at one point, giving back a full 25% of my total losses (yeesh) had I had the nerve to step on the scale immediately following the last wedding of the summer in which I practically single-handedly destroyed the buffet. Destroyed! My clothes were starting to feel a little tight and I subconsciously found myself reaching for my larger fitting clothing. Not good. I've slipped out of my Navy SEAL lite training program. Also, not good. I missed a few consecutive days of calorie logging - red flag. Since I hit my 158 target earlier this year, I gave myself a little more leniency with weekend indulgences, but the 80% rule sho

As I've told ya - sodium is a real sonofabitch. Fortunately, it doesn't take long to flush it all out of your system, but it can cause some crazy weight swings after weekends of ridiculous eating and drinking. I'm pretty sure knowing what I know now, I could put back on all the weight I lost and kick some serious ass on The Biggest Loser. Load up on salty foods before your first weigh in to protect you from elimination in week 1. Then just start count calories and walk around all week while others are busting their asses in the gym.

The Fitbit ecosystem has served me well, but I've finally decided to leave it behind for Google Fit and MyFitnessPal. There are definitely some tradeoffs that I'll get to in a bit, but it's been kind of a worrisome transition. Like most people who've lost a lot of weight, you become paranoid about changing from the formula that got you to where you are and gaining it all back. The simplified Fitbit system made keeping track of things easy, whereas Google Fit only tracks your activity. You need to hook in a separate nutrition app, and the dashboard just isn't as clean as Fitbit's. The thing that annoyed me most about Fitbit was step count accuracy. If you're wearing a hip mounted tracker, it was always going to be a lot more accurate than something worn on your wrist. Your wrists are constantly moving and doing various tasks, and while they've done a pretty good job at tuning the gyro in it to eliminate most of the statistical noise, I don't th

So, I may have given the Ionic a little bit of the short shrift. It has remained on my wrist since I wrote that last review, and it is starting to grow on me thanks to a configuration change. On my initial test with all the default settings in place, I was getting about 3-4 days of battery life. As smartwatches go, that's fantastic, but as someone who is obsessive about checking the time, I was starting to wonder if that would be the top end of my battery life once I started checking it checking it as often as I'd like to know. One of the problems out of the box with the Ionic, and this seems to hold true with the other "wake to rise" sport watch I tried once - the LG Watch Sport, was that it would light up on its own all the time in the shower and just through normal wrist movements but only part of the time when I was actually raising my wrist to check it. I wondered how much battery that was wasting, so I set it to manual wake (ie, I have to hit the menu but

Now that the Fitbit Ionic has been in the marketplace for the better part of a year, I figured it was a good time for the cheapo to go ahead and review it. The Fitbit Ionic debuted late last year with an MSRP of $299, and the Fitbit store is still charging this inflated price. Amazon has it discounted down to $280, but this is still way too much. $200 seems like a pretty fair price for a new Ionic, but since they just released their Versa model watch at that price point, I guess they feel like they needed to keep the Ionic as their premium/GPS model. El Cheapo picked up his Ionic for $150 used on Craigslist. My impression of the watch falls somewhere between meh and good. I'm going to compare it to the Fenix 5X because that seems to be the best basis of comparison even though most people in the market for the Ionic are probably deciding between it and the Apple Watch 3. I haven't tried an Apple Watch and will never buy one. I've tried an Android LG Sport Watch for

I'm closing in on a year since I started this plan, sort of on lark. I finally feel like the person I always was and not who I allowed myself to become, getting pissed off in the moment seeing photos of my fat self and then resigning myself to the idea that changing would be next to impossible as I got older. I have no regrets. I miss nothing because I deprive myself of nothing. I've scaled back from the more austere weight shedding calorie budget and phased in some additional light workouts in exchange for turning off the calorie meter for big weekends and big events. I still count calories as best I can during the week and weigh myself every day that I have access to a scale. That's really the key: the knowledge feedback loop prevents you from gaining weight because you know exactly when you're over-indulging and need to start making adjustments before you snowball back into relaxed fit jeans. I bought a tux for the couple of family weddings I have this summer (chea

Eventually, the thrill of success on the scale wanes and you find yourself just looking to maintain your new waistline. You're not really losing any more weight when you have a string of low calorie, high activity days, and you don't really gain much if you pig out here and there. It's easy to become complacent. Unlike many other plans, the Cheapo lifestyle does not require long gym workouts just to keep your weight in check. Workout-centered diet plans always struck me as a huge liability as it would seem that you were always just one extended nagging injury away from ruining everything. When I was in my 20's, I was a maniacal runner, logging about 40-50 miles a week. I wasn't on a "diet" per se. I used to eat somewhat reasonably, but I just was a serious runner. That's all you needed if you wanted get in and remain in great shape. I used to love going to the gym and being the fastest runner on the treadmills while getting on before others started

I've spent a lot of time talking about how gym memberships are a complete waste of time and money. For most people, they make about as much sense as skipping all your errands to spend the day taking joyrides up and down a toll road. The fact is, we all have chores that need to get done around the house which all represent opportunities for exercise and cost savings by not paying someone else to do them for you. They may not be as physically demanding as splitting wood, but they all involve doing things that need to get done anyway and, more importantly, occupying your time by doing something other than eating, the leading cause of fatness. Now, I'm not proposing that you start tilling your garden with a fork just to keep yourself out of the kitchen. There's always a delicate balance between efficiency, exercise, cost savings and enjoyment of the task at hand when deciding where to spend extra money for efficiency's sake. For example, I know that I could get my

I'm back in the swing of things with the Cheapo regimen. I stepped on the scale this morning and clocked in at 160.0. I touched into the 159's a couple of times this week, but I'm pretty happy with where I am. I've been hitting my 2500 calorie targets every day, and my weight has normalized again after creeping up 2-3 pounds after back to back family weekends earlier this month. I'm sort of back on track with the SEAL training too. I've basically been running a couple of miles a day on my training days and doing 2 sets of 8 pull-ups, 5 sets of 25 sit ups, and 5 sets of 25 push-ups. My push-up strength has almost all returned after my travel and my stretch of family time. So, I think another week or so of doing these reps, and I'll start jumping back on the SEAL program schedule. I'm pretty sure some of my weight losses have been offset by muscle gain since it's almost mathematically impossible for me to be gaining fat with my daily calorie input/ou

My car finally died on me. It was a nice looking Subaru Forester - only a 2009 but had 191,000 miles on it when she passed away this past week. She carried me on her final trip back from WV when the engine literally croaked driving up the hill to my house. She stalled out a couple of times and was done. My mechanic checked it out and the engine was officially blown. I got a really great cheapo deal on it back in 2014 - $11,000 with 136k miles - loaded with leather, NAV, huge sunroof, etc. It ended up needing several thousand dollars of work, making the car total cost probably about $15,000. There were other signs that it was getting to be time - a little bit of transmission tugging on steep hills, some stiffness in the power steering while getting it warmed up. So, it was nearing the end. I just sold it to a guy who I think was going to swap the engine and resell it, so I let it go for $1000. All in all, that amounts to about $3750/yr. which I think would rival the depreciation

Things have been super busy between travel and family events, so apologies to my millions of dedicated readers for hitting refresh 50 times a day only to find no new content. I'll try not to let it happen again. I recently went to Columbia with my wife on a 12 day trip. Unfortunately, that kind of sidetracked my SEAL training. Most of the trip was at high elevation and not very conducive to running at all, let alone 8.5 minute mile paces. I figured I'd give myself the time off from working out anyway. One cool thing about Columbia is that they've got a bunch of really cool exotic fruits. We did a fruit market walking tour in Medellin, and tried something like 20-25 different fruits: The trip overall was pretty cheapo friendly. Lots of available fruit, very favorable exchange rate and lots of walking. One of the hotels where we stayed toward the end of the trip had a scale, so I was pleasantly surprised to see my weight hadn't budged from 158 (aft

Apologies to my loyal readership for the long delay in posting. The Navy sent me over to Afghanistan to handle a job, and this is my first real opportunity to get another post up here. SEAL Training is going well, and I'm able to keep up with the escalating difficulty of the schedule. My weight has totally flattened out, but I must still be losing body fat since I'm now down another notch on my belt. I can't imagine how much harder this would be if I had a pool to do the complete circuit. I'm starting to get the outlines of my old high school wrestling physique back, which I guess shouldn't be much of a surprise since many of the workouts are the same. Doing all these push-ups is giving me flashbacks to my teenage years with my off-day wrestling conditioning coach, an NYC firefighter, who used to crush us with push-ups. Literally, guys used to groan when they'd show up at the wrestling room and see this guy since you knew you were doing every kind of push-up

Week three of Navy SEAL training went pretty well. I got a break from running this week, but that's about to change. I know it'd be somewhat harder if I was able to swim every day. I kicked around the idea of trying to sweet talk the nearby 24 Hour Fitness into giving me a trial membership in order to get access to their pool, but that'd probably be more trouble than it's worth. Quitting gym memberships is often like trying to quit the mob. Fortunately, I'm not having trouble with any of the workouts now except the push-ups. The sit-ups were pretty tough the first week, but my abs have adjusted pretty quickly. However, 5 sets of 25 push-ups is incredibly hard. I ended up having to break up the last 2-3 sets into smaller sets, but yesterday I was able to complete them all without splitting them up. I can't imagine trying to do this while 40 pounds heavier. It'd be humiliating. I cleaned out my home gym, selling both the elliptical machine and my Bowflex clo

This car has too much horsepower. This TV is just too big. This computer is too damned fast. This watch is way too advanced. These are things I've never imagined myself saying, but I think I may have finally met my match with the Fenix 5X. The fitness tracking capabilities are top notch. Battery life worries are practically gone. The sapphire crystal is basically unscratchable. It looks exceptionally sharp and clean. And yet... I'm not in love with it - at least so far. I've worn some large watches, but this watch requires that you reset your expectations of what a large watch looks and feels like. To give you some perspective, here is a side-by-side of the Fenix, my Casio ProTrek and my Citizen Eco-Drive field watch that I've been wearing recently: It's hard to appreciate the massive size of this thing, even by this picture. Not only is it the widest watch I've ever tried on, it's also the tallest. I don't wear dress shirts that often,

Week one of BUD/S training is going OK. I can do everything but all the sit-ups (and of course the swimming, due to the lack of pool). The best I could bang out with sit-ups were 2 sets of 20, 1 of 15 and 1 of 10. But, at least I haven't experienced any soreness yet. Just the little bit of additional activity has me losing even slightly more weight. I'm holding my weight under the 40 pound loss benchmark on the scale every day now, and I'm feeling really good. I've almost forgotten how much I enjoyed running, which I'm sure has a lot to do with how much less of a strain it is on my body. I'm not going to lie - it was nothing short of exhilarating holding down the weight button on the treadmill for as long as it took to reduce the weight setting from 198 to 157- my weight from the last time I set it. It was definitely a bizarre experience. After the PowerWatch bust, I decided to try out another activity tracker watch. So, I ordered a Garmin Fenix 5X. It's

Overexposure to your kitchen can make it difficult to stick to your calorie budget. A lot of my snacking is not because I'm necessarily hungry but food is just there, staring at me, taunting me. If every thought you have is interrupted by a visual reminder of your food source, chances are you'll find yourself snacking a lot more than you should. I try to alleviate the temptation by keeping myself away from my food sources after I've eaten. On days that I work from home, I try to keep my laptop either in my office or in the den. You'd be surprised how much you forget about food without a visual reminder. I have a bag of Twizzlers in my closet that I haven't touched from before I started the cheapo plan. I keep forgetting that I have them - something I never used to do. Today, I happened to be cleaning out the fridge at the weekend house, so keeping my work outside the kitchen area wasn't an option. And, wouldn't you know it, someone left one of those raw

It's funny how we've grown so accustomed to having modern conveniences do things for us that doing things the old way becomes an unheard of, revolutionary act. We get so wrapped up in the ways the health industry has told us how to live healthfully - usually involving big cash outlays for gym memberships, expensive in-home exercise equipment or premium health foods that we develop a tunnel vision to their self-serving fitness paradigm and cannot understand why it barely works or not at all. We keep blasting away at the square peg in the round hole because brute force is how you achieve your goals. "Hey, no pain, no gain, man" - or so they tell us. And, I say this as someone who currently owns 3 workout machines and who once bought an ab-roller. Now, don't get me wrong: like any activity, workout machines and gym memberships can be great supplements to the Cheapo lifestyle if you apply all the other blocking and tackling principles of nutrition management that th