They say if you love something you should let it go and if it comes back it loves you too. I love food, all types of food. And because of that love, excess weight came with it. So I said goodbye to certain foods and hello to a lot of exercise. I was beginning to think that my extra weight and foods really loved me. Because every time I let them go, they always seemed to come back to me.
Relationships with food can be incredibly complicated. Food plays with our emotions. Not only does it impact our physical selves, it impacts our psychological selves too. The wrong food makes us feel good at night and leaves us after a one night stand with a note on the pillow saying thanks for the good time and sorry for any negative consequences I left you with. For many...this happens night after night.
Over the course of my life I've gained and lost over 100 pounds. I'll never forget my first affair with weight loss. I was 25. Just married that year to my amazing wife. We were planning a trip with friends to the beach at the end of the summer. Myself and some friends decided on a weight loss challenge for the 2 and a half months prior to the trip. Game on. I weighed in at 211. I'm 6 feet tall so I wasn't that overweight. Although I'm pretty sure I had visible six pack abs 2 years prior. Commence severe calorie restriction, massive will power and two hours or more a day at the gym or exercising. Easy to do when you have a flexible work schedule, don't have kids, and there is money and bragging rights on the table. It worked, I lost 36 pounds. Weighed in at 175. Though, I didn't win the competition.
I can't say I remember for certain what my diet looked like. I know I didn't give up drinking Miller Lite. Pretty sure I stuck with mostly vegetables and chicken. Lots of salads, yogurt and granola. No fast food but an emphasis on low fat and low calorie. One thing I'll never forget is that first stop on our trip the Outer Banks. We all went to IHOP. I felt lost. I felt like I was betraying all that I had worked for. I don't know what I ate, but I remember the feelings. And after that meal....It was game over. No more dieting. I let loose that week on all things food and drink. In a way, it was good to not stress about food. But over the next year, my weight crept back up. I couldn't sustain the work I had done to lose all that weight. Nor did I want to continue restricting the amount and kinds of food to be had. This only confirmed what I thought about losing weight was correct, that I needed to eat food that I didn't really like, be hungry, and work out a lot to lose weight.
The next affair with weight loss came when a friend told me about this "paleo" thing. Basically a caveman diet. So I tried that. I set a goal that if I got down to 180 I could buy a pair of Vibram Five Finger shoes. My rules were simple. If a caveman could eat so could I. Well, apparently I thought cavemen could eat popcorn, salad dressing, cheese and beer. Regardless, I got to my goal weight over the course of a few months with lots of exercising mixed in. After I got my shoes, all progress was halted and all weight crept back.
I'm sensing a pattern. Eat whatever I want, gain weight, get frustrated at weight gain, put a reward out there for me to get, cut calories, exercise a lot, lose weight, get reward. I had several of these weight loss affairs usually lasting a few weeks and 10-15 pounds at a time. I never found anything that stuck. Why could I not maintain? Why could I not continue? I assumed it was because I lacked will power.
But I was wrong. That way doesn't work. But I didn't know that. Diet and exercise...it made me believe that was the only way because it worked for me. But only for a time. I didn't want to do that the rest of my life. I thought fat was bad and it made you fat. I didn't even know what carbs really were and protein was what you ate for muscles.
My next fling I decided to run a 77 mile ultra marathon. If I just ran a lot I could eat whatever I wanted, right? I was about 30 pounds overweight at the start of 2015 I started running. And run did I ever. Up through August of that year I had completed about 6 marathon distance trail runs with nearly 15 half marathon distances tossed into the mix. Let alone all the single digit mileage runs. And I ran myself right into an injury. Though having run all those miles...I still had quite a gut on me. You could call me fit fat.
I had gotten to a point in my life where I had given up. My wife and I had children now. We both had careers we were busy with. We both had life stress. Food and exercise were the last of my worries. I wrote off every being fit again and tried to settle into this new life. At this point food was my drug. I loved craft beer and whiskey. I kept Jelly Belly jelly beans with me all the time. I was really overweight and my mental health was in decline. I didn't want to give up what I was currently eating.
But in the beginning of 2016 I got wind of this thing called the ketogenic diet. Give up carbs? I don't know if I can. But I knew something had to change. I was going downhill fast. So May 9 2016 at lunch time I ate a salad and had a beer and decided the keto diet was what I was doing. I was committed from day one knowing and believing it would work. And it did, I lost about 35 pounds in 3 months with most of that coming off in the first month. I listened to audiobooks and podcasts about the ketogenic way of eating and joined several Facebook groups about the ketogenic diet. I also co-created a keto Facebook group of my own with over 400 members and we've lost a combined total of over 3000 pounds to date. For almost a year now I've been maintaining easily. I eat foods that I enjoy and plenty of them. Now that I finally learned how the different macronutrients work in your body, maintenance is easy. I followed a strict 20g of net carbs per less a day for almost a year and have since dialed back a little to around 40-50g of net carbs per day. Though I'd venture to guess I'm still around 25g.
Throughout this journey I've done very minimal exercising for the purpose of losing weight. I exercise for fun now, as it should always be.
Ketosis and the Ketogenic way of eating has been a life saver for me. My energy levels have stabilized. I can enjoy long runs and bike rides without having to worry much about fueling. Inflammation is a thing of the past. Mental clarity is astounding. Plus a plethora of other benefits that came along with it. Whether you are trying to clean up chronic conditions, autoimmune disease, or just looking to lose weight, I highly recommend learning the ways of KETO!
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