A month ago my weight was in the hight 160’s. I weighed myself the other day, and my weight had increased to 178 lbs. Ouch!!!! Yeah, I have been eating badly. I had taken a trip to Las Vegas, and ate at Jack In The Box multiple times. I love those Jumbo Jacks! *droool* And the Ciabatta breakfast sandwiches were awesome. And then there were the small mexican restaurants where ate these fabulous burritos and chimchangas! Yummy! And the all you can buffets! I can eat a lot…And that was all in EARLY December. Then come the holidays with catered lunch at work, and everyone bringing in snacks. And going with friends for lunch at Red Robin. And for some stupid reason I bought a bag of Butterfinger candy bars and a bag of M&Ms…stupid, stupid, stupid! I ate them all in like two days. If the junk is around, I will eat it.
But now that we are passed the holidays, I am going to make every effort to start eating low-fat again, and reasonable portions.
I am continuing to workout. After running the Las Vegas Marathon (I finished in 3:36:30) on December 2nd, I jumped right back into training for the Shamrock Marathon on March 16th. But just because I am running 30-35 miles a week, and doing martial arts classes, and spinning, etc, doesn’t allow me to eat anything I want. My weight still starts to creep up if I don’t keep an eye on it. So I am going to get back to work eating healthy again, and get this weight back off. I want to be below 170 when I run the marathon in March. I am going to need all the help I can get in my effort to break three and a half hours so I can qualify for the Boston Marathon.
Jared lost over 200 pounds by simply eating Subway sandwiches. Is this possible? Sure it is. Of all the big chain fast food restaurants, the best one for low fat food is Subway! Subway has 7 sandwiches with 5 grams of fat or less! McDonalds and Burger King’s lowest fat sandwiches are like 10 grams of fat!
My favorite Subway sandwich is the Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki sandwich which has 370 calories and only 5 grams of fat! I usually get it loaded with veggies. You can get whatever you want, but I get mine with lettuce, tomato, green pepper, onions, and black olives. Oh yeah, and sweet onion sauce.
Other low fat sandwiches are the Veggie Delight, Ham, Turkey Breast, Roast Beef, Subway Club, Turkey Breast & Ham, and the Roasted Chicken Breast. Just be sure to use a low fat dressing. If you glop a bunch of mayonaise on it, they will no longer be low fat.
A friend who knows I read a lot, and that I recommend the Susan Powter approach to weight loss asked me whether she might be eating too few calories. She said she hadn’t felt very good the previous day, and had a loss of appetite. She had only consumed 1200-1300 calories of low fat food, and she had worked out for an hour and forty minutes. She was concerned that see might be burning muscle instead of fat.
I told her that when you eat less calories than you burn, you lose weight. In fact YOU HAVE TO eat less calories than you burn to lose weight. You need to burn 3500 more calories than you eat just to burn one pound of fat.
When there is a deficit, your body goes to the easiest source of fuel, your body fat (kind a fuel storage system). It will burn the fat, before it goes after muscle. If you go too low on calorie intake, your body might turn to muscle, but you would probably have to go really low. You body does need glyogen (sugar) to aid in the burning of the fat. Kind of like lighter fluid to get the charcoal burning. When you hear about people hitting The Wall, they have depleted their stores of glycogen.
I told her to keep eating healthy, and working out. You are doing a great job!
I recommended that she train with a heart rate monitor? With an HRM, you can train efficiently, and stay aerobic where your body is burning mostly fats. As you go harder into the anaerobic zones, you body can’t burn fat fast enough, so it swtches gears, and starts burning more glycogen, and less fat. Your body also starts producing lactic acid faster than you can get rid of it. Lactic acid starts breaking down the muscles. When you break down muscles like this, you need to rest for at least 48 hours for the muscles to rebuild. If you do alot of hard anarobic workouts abck to back with no rest, you are breaking down your muscles, and not giving them a chance to rebuild. This is a major cause of injuries.
Keep in mind, I am just regurgitating things I have read. There are lots of people on the message boards who are far more expert then me. But then I also dropped my own weight from 230 to current 170, and am one of the most physically active people I know. So I must be doing something right.
I got up this morning, played on the computer, then realized I hadn’t even grabbed a Diet Pepsi. So I grabbed one, played a bit more, took a shower, then headed off to aikido class. I was at aikido class and dragging. I realized that I forgot to eat breakfast. I managed to get through class, but I was tired feeling. When I got home I ate a couple of Fat Free Beef Franks from Ball Park. I played on the computer a bit more, then I took a long nap. After my nap I got up to start my 9 mile run. I ran a mile and I was slogging. So I ate a Peanut Butter & Jelly sandwich. I got on the treadmill, and ran another mile. I was still hungry, so I made another PB&J sandwich. Oh yeah, and a small orange. I feel better now. I need to buy some bananas so I can at least have something around quick to eat.
Every week I have been looking through grocery store ads for various healthy microwave meals to be on sale such as Healthy Choice, Lean Cuisine, and Weight Watchers. I didn’t manage to pickup last Sunday’s paper, so I didn’t get the circulars. When my wife went to the store I asked her to check for any of the meals on sale, but she said they weren’t.
But today I was online, looking at some of the local grocery store circulars. I found Healthy Choice dinners on sale for $1.69 each. They are normally $2.69-$2.79 each. And they also had boneless skinless chicken breasts on sale for $1.79/pound.
So I stopped at the store on my way home. I grabbed a cart, and went shopping. I picked up 4 club packs of boneless skinless chicken breasts for about 21.25 pounds!
Then I headed for the freezer section. I started loading up the cart. I was grabbing a handfull of each flavor. I bought 58 of them total!
Here is an inventory:
3 Lemon Pepper Fish, 4 Creamy Dill Salmon, 12 Beef Merlot, 6 Mesquite Chicken BBQ, 1 Salisbury Steak, 2 Beef Tips Portabello, 2 Country Herb Chicken, 4 Honey Balsamic Chicken, 8 Chicken Broccoli Alfredo, 4 Sweet Bourbon Steak, 6 Grilled Chicken Marinara, 6 Traditional Turkey Breast, 6 Grilled Chicken and Roasted Red Pepper Alfredo
I think this is accurate! I was just grabbing stuff that looked good. I skipped a couple the Healthy Choice meals that had 8 or 9 grams of fat. They looked good, but I didn’t need the fat!