Well, as any of you that have seen me in the past few months or so know, I’ve been on a diet for quite a few months now. It has worked out very well for me; I’ve gone from about 235 pounds to roughly 175 pounds. I may weigh less than that now, but I’m not sure, I haven’t had access to a scale since I moved to Colorado.
My original diet was The Hacker’s Diet. It’s basically nothing more than a calorie-restrictive diet with an exercise plan. Nothing too revolutionary, but it got the job done.
Unfortunately there is a problem with long-term use of calorie restriction to lose weight: your body will down-regulate itself to compensate for the reduced calorie intake. I’m pretty sure this has happened to me over the past two months or so, because I’ve only lost a few (maybe 5) pounds over the whole time period. So I’ve decided to do something different, since I think it just might work.
What I’m switching to is a slow-carb diet, not to be confused with the most popular low-carb diet around: the Atkins Diet. The idea behind the slow-carb diet is that you eat things that are more difficult for the body to break down. It’s also known as a low Glycemic Index diet. I got the idea from these two blog posts by Tim Ferris:
Now that’s inspiring. I’ve sorta been doing a combination of both diets described, as well as the high intensity exercise. I really need to go down to the gym at work and get signed up, so that I have real weights to work with. I think I’ll do that tomorrow.
The food on this diet is great. I’ve been eating a lot of beans, taco meat, and yesterday I even made my own Carne Asada. (Which turned out pretty good if I do say so myself :-)) I’ve got some Chicken Fajita meat in the fridge too. I’ll have to cook that up pretty soon. I’ve also been eating lots of frozen mixed vegetables (which I despise) and frozen broccoli (which I like), in addition to the usual salad that I always have.
So far so good. Despite a relative lack of energy, due to the decrease in easy-to-process foods and a lowering of blood glucose, I’d say I’m doing well. The energy loss is most probably from the switch between diets. I’ve noticed that I’m starting to get better already. (It’s the 5th full day on this diet.)
Sounds good. That reminds me of basically the diet our wrestling coach perscribed. I remember doing well on that and that tends to be my normal diet now, habits die hard. It just gets me into trouble when I’m not exercising enough. We would work out on that diet and then eat high energy easy to digest carbs the day of the match. You get a bit wired, but you have to watch out that you don’t crash right before your match. that happened to me once. >.