the plan

I think it's a pretty safe bet to describe myself as a nerd.

In particular I'm a scientist, having a degree in Physics. And that meant my plan was going to be one that utilised science. Or, to be more specific, I was going to do some research, come up with a plan - a theory - and to try out various methods to test it.

I've actually talked a lot abut this over the months, especially when I was starting out, so I won't go into too much detail. If you're interested you can look up the posts tagged with weight and walking.

What I will say is that there's a lot of stuff out there on the web, much of which conflicts. Obviously, there are loads of sites promising a miracle diet, but the basic point is that to loose weight you need to consume fewer calories than you use up.

What makes this tricky is metabolism, but perhaps not in the way most people tend to think. See, a classic argument of fat people is that their metabolisms are slower - if they ate the same amount as normal people, the argument goes, they'd still put on weight, as they're burning calories at a slower rate.

But that's cobblers - metabolism is mostly to do with the fact that we're warm blooded animals and must keep our bodies hot. Therefore, if you're bigger and have more mass to keep warm, this actually consumes more calories, so you have a higher metabolism.

As I say - it's complicated in the detail, but simple at the higher level. Since I was very fat, ate a lot a high calorie foods and did no exercise at all, I was gaining weight. By eating less and doing some exercise I would loose weight.

And that was the plan - I would devise a calorie controlled diet that worked for me and I would do some exercise. I would also set myself some realistic targets that meant loosing weight at a steady rate that was achievable.

The exercise proved to be the easiest to decide on - I would walk. I've talked a lot about the walking in previous posts, but what I thought I'd mention here is how far I've walked. As part of my plan and as a sop to my nerdishness I bought a pedometer and have noted down the number of steps I did every day since my first weigh in and I can reveal that I've taken a total of 997,555 steps. This equates to approximately 600 kilometres or 1.5% of the distance around the earth!

In terms of diet, my first attempt was pretty much just to switch to eating salads in the evening. Looking back on it, this seems daft, but at the time I thought it was genius. But after that first weigh in I put together my spreadsheet with my targets and to monitor my weight and steps and as part of this I did some calorie counting.

I therefore got the shock that what I thought was a diet was actually roughly equal to the recommended number of calories an adult man is supposed to consume - around 2,500.

See, this, it turns out, is one of the problems with fat people. We (or certainly I) have a distorted perception of what normal portions are. I'll give you a classic example - I used to regularly eat 3 Weetabix for breakfast, where the recommended portion is 2. I did this because of some perception that these normal portions were always "too small for a normal person".

Why ever did I think such a stupid thing? I now eat two and am perfectly happy with it, because what my diet has done is shrink both my stomach and my perceptions. And that was probably the hardest thing - the hunger.

For the first month of the diet I was properly hungry all the time. Now to be fair, I was experimenting with various things, but the main reason for this was simply that previously I had always eaten way too much and now I was eating too little, so it was a really big shift.

As for the last part of the plan - the target - I will discuss that tomorrow.