36 Pounds in 78 Days

faux109

Hey Everyone

I have only lurked on this forum, but appreciated the tips and ideas that others have left.

Yesterday I hit my goal weight after sorting myself out this year, I thought I'd give back by sharing my journey.

The Start

---

Beginning of the year after a particularly hedonistic Christmas season I got a rude awakening on my first day back to work, the new shirts I bought felt like a corset and I'd definately gone up a trouser size. Cue a trip to the scales and I'd hit 16 stone for the first time, I'm a 6' 2 male and so was hiding it in my suits to some extend but it was certainly the heaviest I'd ever been. So cue a trip for new trainers and a fitbit and some resolve.

The Regime

---

I'm a pretty goal driven person and checking out sensible BMI for my height saw 14 stone the top of the limit for healthy, so I was going below that and settled on 13st 7lb as my target, it was also a round 2.5stone to lose. So regime was:

1200-1400 Calories per day but try to keep to as close to 1200 as possible.
No Alcohol
No Chocolate
No Food before 12:00 noon
No Snacks

400 cal lunch, 600 cal Dinner and then something before bed.

10,000 steps, burn 3093 calories

The Journey

---

Pretty much I stuck to this, had a couple of glasses of wine at two dinner parties over the period, a few Jack Daniels and cokes at a wedding, kept very strict to nearly everything else with breaching 1400 cals on only two occasions. Didn't have any day under 10,000 steps and pretty much the weight come off at a fairly regular 3 pounds per week. No treat days or anything, logged everything and my wife was very supportive in my obsessive calorie counting.

Running/walking every day for at least 30 mins, either treadmill or to the local path. I can now do 5k in under half an hour having been pretty much a slob.

804km in total

What I learned

---

This level of regime is tough over a period of months, it wasn't fun and pretty miserable in all honesty. Running sucks.

Eggs are your friend, a 2 egg omlette with salsa and pastrami is less than 200 cals.
Sushi is a good lunch
Naked bars taste decent
Switch to green tea to save 100 cals in milk a day!
Portion size is everything, don't estimate if at all possible
After you get fitter you need more steps, by the end I was needing 14k a day to burn my calories
Get moving early at the weekends, it can be a nightmare if its 3:00pm and you have only 1k steps down.
Walk everywhere, into town is 10 mins drive, WALK, going to take the bus, WALK I killed quite a few days of steps just doing errands and made a lot of steps walking to see people at work rather than phoning or e-mailing.
There are 22 calories in a Jelly Baby (I did not eat it)

It can be done with willpower!

Anyway its been tough but worth it and I'm happy to have dumped the weight. I now fit into that shirt. Trying to work out my maintenance is next as my body seems very confused by the 1900 calories I fed it today.

SalinitySally

Good job. Brace yourself for the flood of people taking issue with your low caloric intake. For what it's worth, I'm doing something very similar and I'm not suffering. (I don't go nuts being hungry.) One thing I can't do is wait until noon to eat.

mayas135

That is amazing! Congratulations and thanks for the suggestions!