The Cheap Man's Weight Loss Plan

It's been 4 years since I updated this blog, so I feel like I finally owe my legions of readers who refresh this site every day in hopes of seeing some kind of update with their long-awaited payoff. In that time, the good ship Cheapo sprung many leaks and ran aground several times but through it all remained somewhat in tact. One of the key lessons I learned along this journey is that making a series of life changes, even if you fall off the wagon with a lot of them, the ones that you stick with will  at least hold some of your progress together.  For me, it was the routine of eating my balanced power breakfast every morning. No matter how many sedentary, unlogged gastronomical disaster days I would have, sticking to my power breakfast routine every morning meant that there was at least one meal that would help somewhat contain the damage of even the worst days. Another lesson that I learned is patience and persistence are at least at odds with if not enemies of perfection. I...

I'll be a first time dad in the next week or two, and I'm already dealing with the time crunch and cheapo routine disruptive life events. Being a cheapo means improvising, so sometimes you need to rethink methodologies to adapt to changing circumstances. My 9 month pregnant wife has been joining me on my dog walks in order to get some exercise herself, and she can't go as far as I can for as far along as she is. Also, she has a hankering for dining out more often than we normally do, so it adds a little more guesswork to my calorie estimates when my margins are already running pretty thin. Add in doctors appointments, chores and other prep tasks, and a lot of my extra time for walking is just vanishing. It's only going to get harder once this baby gets here. It's my fault for allowing my weight to run away from me such that I'm in a position now to where I'm trying to lose a lot of weight quickly before the baby arrives. I'm losing weight steadily...

I've made some headway since setting up my new dashboard, down 2-3 pounds since then. I'm safely and consistently under 170 now, but my weight loss has again started to stall. At least this now comes as no surprise since it is consistent with what my new widget dashboard has indicated. I had off on Friday and with President's Day on Monday, I've been off my bike for 4 straight days. Today makes day 5 since the weather this morning was especially bitter. Tomorrow looks like snow, so it may be next week before I'm riding my bike into work again. I also didn't really rack up the steps this past weekend, eclipsing 10k every day but not much more. I also went out to restaurants twice, though at least making the healthiest selections I could find and only drinking diet cokes (free refills down here in the south, so at least it's kinda cheapo-friendly). All in all, I guess I should be thankful that I didn't gain any weight, but it's still frustrating to...

Along the cheapo journey, you'll try out different tools and tricks to keep you on track. You'll learn quickly that some of them prove to be crucial and while some of them are just nice to haves. You'll also discover that some things you think are somewhat or pretty important are actually crucial. Unfortunately, it's only until you try to do without them and things start falling apart when you realize just how critical they are to your success. My dashboard example from the other day is evidence of that. I've already started seeing a weight improvement, bringing my weight back under the dreaded 170 mark the last 2 days. I'm confident now that I'm back on track because there's no mathematical way I can gain weight as long as I'm running calorie deficits every day. Like a sticky note on my screen whenever I unlock my phone, I now have a single dashboard showing me my input/output at a glance. I underestimated the importance of this when I left Fitbit...

Man, this is tough. It's funny how quickly your body readjusts to higher calorie consumption and how it freaks out when you try to run deficits again. My hunger pangs at night are fierce just like old times. They kind of masked themselves for a while behind high step counts and a calorie logging vacation as my weight started drifting away, but try and get back in the swing of things and your body gets PISSED. My calorie intake was elevated over the weekend - about 2900 per day. However, I racked up over 70,000 steps from Friday-Sunday, that includes a 5 mile run, and STILL couldn't budge the needle. So, I'm going to have to make some adjustments. I haven't been getting much help from the weather this week with cold temps and icy and rainy weather keeping me off my bike and limiting my dog walking. I'm going to have to start getting creative. One really annoying thing is that Google Fit seemed to remove the nutrition card from their dashboard for some reason. I...

You've been cruising along, living the cheapo life, counting all the money you've saved up over the last year and laughing at the chumps who signed up for gym memberships that have already become nothing more than a monthly insult on their credit card statements. You've been cutting a few corners here, missing some weigh-ins there, kind of keeping a mental track of your calories but still somewhat sticking to your plan. Your schedule has been turned upside down due to life events, and you've lost some of the additional slack in your clothes. You know your weight is slightly elevated. Your previous "oh crap" weight has become your new normal. However, you're still within spitting distance of your target weight and figure that you can return to glory with a couple of good weeks of cheapo discipline. You figure that once all the upheaval in your life gets sorted out, you'll be back where you want to be. Then, you step on the scale one morning and....

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...