36 Pounds in 78 Days

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.