The Cheap Man's Weight Loss Plan

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...