I’ve somewhat spontaneously decided to go on a somewhat extreme diet. I thought I might start a thread to track my progress if anyone is interested, and answer questions/offer advice, as I’m fairly knowledgable in nutrition and excercise topics, and I’ve accomplished fairly remarkable feats in that area before.
About 6 years ago, I was 17, I weighed somewhere in the area of 370 pounds at 6’2 or so. Pretty bad. I decided to do something about it - although for strange reasons, I didn’t care about the weight so much in and of itself. I learned about nutrition (and physiology to a degree) and decided that low carbing would be the best route to take.
It was, certainly. I enjoyed success beyond what most people even believe, but I had to work my ass off (literally, I suppose) for it. I lost about 150 pounds in the first 6 to 7 months. Not only did I lose that, but I was working out pretty strenuously and gained a lot of muscle during this time, so I effectively lost more fat than that. In the next 3 months I lost another 50, and I was pretty much in great shape. I still had a bit of a gut, but I had a lot of strength and endurance.
Long story short, it didn’t do much of anything to improve the quality of my life, so I stopped doing it. I meant to work out more to maintain being in decent shape, but I ended up getting one long-healing nasty injury after another for the next few years, and here I am, back up to roughly where I was before, at about 365.
I’ve decided to lose a bunch of it. Why? I’m not really sure, to be honest. I don’t care a whole lot about the weight - I’d like to be less out of shape, certainly, but it isn’t a huge motivator for me. My best guess is that I’m doing it for the goal, to have something to work towards that’s somehow meaningful, and for the routine. Weird reasons, indeed, but it has helped to improve my general mood thus far, so I’m going with it.
When I did this before, I severely restricted my carbs with no deviations (I never splurged once in the first 7 months or so, nor did I ever miss excercise. After that, I developed, IIRC, a one weekend a month splurge policy to help with my sanity.)
I ate as much as I felt like eating (your body is better at telling you when you’re actually hungry when you’re low carbing, because you don’t get blood sugar crash based cravings), and so my caloric intake was pretty high during that whole period.
This time around, I’m going to see if I can do the same thing, only more intense (yeah - 30 pounds a month is no longer sufficiently intense for me). I’m going to follow the same nutritional guidelines, generally… only I’m going to eat less. I’ve been eating an average of 900 calories a day for the last 5 days, and I’m hoping to drop that a bit lower when my body is in full lipolysis and the cravings go down.
I’m going to try to work out every day to the point of near exhaustion. I’m limited in what I can do now, because I’m so out of shape, so I’ve been doing a swimming routine I designed about a year ago.
My cardiovascular health is pretty poor, and so normal lap swimming with interrupted breathing leaves me depleted of oxygen and needing rest pretty quickly. So I developed a fairly strenuous excercise that allowed normal breathing - basically, I tread water with my legs (upright) while I quickly move about 6 feet back and forth with alternating modified breast strokes and back strokes. I do this after a few laps of other strokes, so my heart rate is up, and this keeps it going pretty well. I use long, inefficient strokes that tax the muscles in my arms pretty intensely. Because of the switch in directions and the long strokes, it works the upper abs and lower back muscles quite well, too. Until I get into better shape, doing this constantly for 30-40 minutes is better than having to rest all the time during laps due to oxygen depletion.
Within a week or two, I should be feeling good enough to integrate strength training excercises.
My concern is, of course, being able to maintain good health conducive to muscle growth on such a low calorie diet. What I do eat is very nutrient rich, and full of protein… eggs will become a staple of my diet, along with non-starchy vegetables.
My goal is to lose between 40-50 pounds per month. Sounds really ambitious, I know, but if I’m going to do something, I want to kick the hell out of it. I lost 30 pounds a month consuming many more calories, so I think it’s possible. My concern is that my body will kick over into a starvation metabolism because of the low calorie intake and that will inhibit my weight loss. Well, we’ll have to see, I suppose.
Anyway, if anyone has any questions about my experience, plans, or knowledge, feel free to ask.