Weight Loss Wednesday: Week 1

First of all, I’d like to say thanks to the sizable majority of folks who have wished me luck in public and private as I move forward with this. Most people have been very cool about the whole thing, very understanding and supportive. There are also plenty of people in the middle who may or may not think what I’m doing is a good idea, and offer their thoughts one way or the other; I’d like to thank those people, too. Then there are the douchebags.

Turns out everybody has an opinion (shock!) and a small but unfortunate number of folks have rolled their virtual eyes at me and essentially called me an idiot. Some people reacted like those self-righteous parents everybody hates, who offer snide unsolicited advice to all other parents because their way is like totally better. Generally I’m fine with that—I never claimed to be much above an idiot and I don’t mind listening to other people’s opinions (even when they’re obviously delivered with the intent of aggrandizing oneself rather than helping me)—but to save future know-it-alls from commenting and emailing the same snarky advice, I would like to take this opportunity to address some of the most common whines.

• BMI doesn’t mean anything, you idiot. I’ve heard this more often than just about anything, and while I agree with the underlying sentiment that BMI is not by any means the be-all-end-all in determining your level of health or obesity, I am compelled to ask of the whiners, “Where did you get your medical degree, Quincy?” It is true that one’s health risks might be more clearly ascertained by pulling out the tape measure and going around the belly and hips, and doing a comparison—belly:hip ratios greater than 1.0 in men and 0.8 in women may give a better indication of increased risk. But I’ve never seen a doctor do this, and I don’t need a tape measure to tell me my belly hangs out limply over my waist like the wrist of a queened-out prancing fairy at the pride parade. My doctor uses BMI (plus, you know, looking at my fat ass) as a guideline to determine potential risk, and that’s good enough for me.

• Weight doesn’t mean anything, you idiot. Spoken like a true not-fat person, or perhaps a jaded reformed fatty. While I tend to agree that weight is kind of useless as a comparative metric between people, even those of similar height and proportions, I think it is vastly useful to plot trends and do comparisons for one person. For one thing, I know how I looked at 170 and would like to look like that again; but aside from that, tracking it now will help chart my progress, while tracking it long-term after the weight loss will illustrate on paper which things create peaks and valleys (we’re mostly concerned about the peaks) on the scale. Why would I want to do this? As America’s blubbery waistline can attest, it’s way too easy to eat more than you should and when this thing is over I have no intention of becoming some anal calorie counting maniac. Rather, I intend merely to keep a closer eye on the scale so that when those 5 or 10 pounds creep up I can abolish them immediately instead of waking up one day (again) and saying, “Holy shit, I’m fat!” Control seems to be the key, and trust me, it’s really easy to ignore the pounds packing on until you find yourself grunting and straining while you tie your shoes.
• Prepackaged foods are evil, do it yourself you idiot. As a serious home cook with an overwhelming preference for fresh, minimally processed ingredients, I can totally sympathize with this. In fact, just a few weeks ago I might have given the same advice; when Joel posted about his success with prepackaged foods back in October, I tended to agree a bit with commenter Grady, who said, “Buying prepackaged food is horrible advice…” We all know the processed stuff is loaded down with sugars, salt, trans-fats and various other nastiness, and is about as far from its natural state as anything one can aspire to consume. While MediFast is not even close to your standard TV dinner diet in that regard, it is nonetheless highly processed, and I had to do some serious internal debate before deciding to take the plunge. The main factor in my decision was the wretched tedium of counting calories, which I did for a few weeks before becoming completely burned out on it. The MediFast product promised to be, above all, easy. Much easier than weighing and measuring and tabulating every meal every day, and faster to boot. Plus, it’s entirely temporary. Many people eat fast food every day for years and don’t keel over, so I doubt eating prepackaged, highly processed meals that are formulated to be as healthy as possible, for a mere few months, is going to do me any long term damage.

  All that said, I did come away from some comments debating about what measurements to include in my updates. Weight is a given, and BMI I will probably stick with, too. I had thought about adding body fat percentage, and I may go ahead and do so at some point, but for the moment I decided instead to break out the tape measure and give the old belly a good measuring. So last Thursday, the day after the first Weight Loss Wednesday, I measured in at 45 inches at the bellybutton, including the pudgy flabhandles hanging around the sides. Just so you know.

  With that out of the way, I’d like to talk a bit about the program itself. I was expecting my body to fight back a bit, but the first couple days were at worst a little bit uncomfortable as my body adjusted to the dramatically reduced calorie intake. I have been under around 1,000 calories every day so far, and for the past 5 days or so I have not only not been hungry, I’m actually finding that I have to keep a close eye on the clock or I forget to eat entirely. Not really what I expected, but in reading the support forums apparently this is not uncommon.

  As for the “Lean and Green” portion of the diet—which for those not familiar, is a daily meal you cook yourself within specific guidelines: 5 to 7 ounces of lean protein plus 1.5 to 2 cups of green veggies—I have been finding that 5 to 7 ounces of lean protein is actually more than I want, which came as rather a surprise, so I will be talking to the MediFast Nutritional Support staff to see if there’s anything I should do to substitute. Indeed, while the first few days of L&G left me hungry and wishing for more, the last several have left me surprisingly stuffed. I’m not sure whether my stomach has shrunk or what, but something has definitely changed. As far as what I’ve been eating, I went ahead and picked up this smoker, which I’ve used almost every day since last Wednesday. It is absolutely fantastic, and imparts the delicious smoke flavor I have come to crave after years of being spoiled by Kansas City barbecue. So far I’ve smoked chicken breast, lean ground beef patties (the hickory smoked hamburgers almost made me cry) and pork chops, all with great success. By far the best were the burgers, which I kept moist by introducing salt, diced onion and raw portabellos into the patties prior to smoking. Just thinking about them makes my eyes well up.

  Now for the updated statistics:

  Date: 03-21-2007 (Days on program: 7)
  Weight: 216 (Total lost: 11 pounds)
  BMI: 32.8 (Category: Obese)
  Belly: 44″ (Started: 45″)