Weight Loss Part 2

Three hundred and eighty pounds, I am glad it wasn’t much more, because the scale had a 400 lb limit. Just the act of saying 380 pounds made me tired. I had tried dieting before and had limited success. At one point in 2003 I was injured at work and when I went to the doctor’s office I weighed in at a tremendous 430 pounds. So over two years I was able to take off about 50 pounds by cutting down a little bit. But exercise never really took off with me. I remember when I bought a new bike; I purchased a cheap one from Wal-Mart because I was not sure how much I was going to use it. That turned out to be a good call financially. The first time I got on it was to ride approximately 150 yards to get the mail from my mailbox. When I got to the box I had to get off the bike, sit down, and rest. It literally exhausted me to a point where I could not walk. I didn’t ride the bike again for almost a year.

As I said, I joined Weight Watcher’s and started to really investigate what their program was all about. A person starts out with so many points of food available on a daily and weekly basis. As they eat certain foods, they use up points, until ideally they have zero points left at the end of the day. As a person loses weight and reaches certain weight goals the daily available points reduce. The points are based on a formula that takes into account a foods total calories, total fat, and total dietary fiber. I started out at 34 points [One point = (calories/50) + (fat grams/12) - (min{r, 4}/5)], Where p is the number of points, c is the number of calories, f is the grams of fat, and r is the grams of dietary fiber (if the dietary fiber is greater than four, use four). As it turns out, 34 is the maximum amount of points available on this system. I would have to lose almost 50 pounds before my daily points went to 33.

I spoke to my friends about the program and they gave me several ideas about what kind of foods to eat. Basically, chicken breasts, turkey breasts, and several different kinds of fish, were best on this program. But the most important part of meal preparation was portion size. I needed to know how much of each, calories, fat, and fiber I bought a small food scale along with the food that I would be eating. For every meal I would need to weigh each food and insert that into the WWO website to get the amount of points for the meal. While this sounds tedious, weighing the food helped prepare me for what was to come better than anything else. The first week I decided to have a little fun with Dawn. I ate a little less for breakfast and lunch so I had over 25 points available for dinner. My wife was working that night so I was able to get just about anything as I would be eating alone. I went to McDonalds and ate a Double Quarter Pounder/ w cheese and a medium fries. I think it totaled out at 20 points. I remember enjoying informing Dawn that I was able to eat McDonalds and still stay on the program. Needless to say she was disgusted. I lost 5 pounds the first week.