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Hi all,
First, a big thanks to everyone for the amazing warm welcome I've experienced here. What an absolutely wonderful way to start off.
DISCLAIMER: This is painfully long and rambling. I'm trying to compress fourteen monthis into one post, so it's a bit poorly organized in places. My apologies for that, and you have been warned.
I've had a few people PM me asking me to detail how I lost so much weight so fast. I'm more than happy to do so in the hopes that someone else may find something useful in my experience, but I've decided to reply here in the public forum so that my response can be vetted by those with more experience. I'll be overjoyed if something I've done can help someone but the flip side of that is that I would really not like myself if I brought someone harm.
In retrospect, parts of what I did was probably way past overkill. You can judge whether I was reacting or over-reacting.
A little background (very little)
I had been concerned about my weight for a while. I was hovering around 350 pounds, and while I have an extremely large frame there ain't no frame 6'2" tall that can explain 350 pounds. My doctor was on me to lose weight. I had tried various diets on my own with no success. I had a nutritionist design a diet for me that I followed slavishly for two months. At the end of the two months, I had lost four pounds and had been absolutely miserable for sixty days.
A co-worker started on Atkins and loaned me her copy of DANDR for a few days, more than enough for me to be hooked. I ran out that weekend, read the book during the next week, ran it past my doctor Friday (she was very supportive) with accompanying blood work which was even more incentive to do something. I started induction Saturday, having bought my Atkins 14 day starter kit on the way home from the doctor's office. If I was going to do this, I was not going to do it halfway.
I've detailed the results I got previously, here's a combination of what I learned and how I did it.
1) Hydrate. A lot. I was in the bathroom so often I thought I was going to wear out a part of me that I'd rather not wear out.
I had always hydrated fairly heavily, but up to this point it was iced tea, a gallon plus or minus a day. I'd gotten off sugar a while back and was using Splenda. After reading DANDR the tea went out the window along with the Splenda. Nothing but water from here on out I swore, with an allowance for my morning coffee which would now be taken without sugar, with heavy cream but not too much of either.
2) Did I mention the importance of hydration?
Drinking freely whenever I was even vaguely thirsty, I stabilized pretty quickly at about 170 ounces a day. Having heard somewhere that you should try to set your water intake at half as many ounces as your weight in pounds, that was about right and I wasn't even having to monitor it closely.
3) Carbs are sneaky little SOB's. The manufacturers of packaged food are even sneakier. Read every last label on every last food item you purchase. Just because it was ok last week doesn't mean the miserable SOB's haven't changed the formula. About the only ingredient list I wouldn't read was the one on the salt canister. Don't think meat has an ingredient list? Maybe, maybe not. Trust no one, trust nothing. They don't care about you. They care about your money.
20 carbs a day? 20 gram days were a failure to me. 10 was a good day, less was even better. Meat and eggs, cheese in moderation, and a small green salad with dinner every day. After a rampage through the supermarket, I figured out real quick that if I was going to be serious ANY premade foods were pretty much out. Bacon? Oho, that's got sugar and/or dextrose and a few other things that I was trying to avoid. (look up the term "excitotoxin" on google) Sausage? Wait, there's no way something that's supposedly made from meat has that many carbs. Filler? What exactly *is* filler, anyway? And there's the sugar again and that was in the sausages that didn't actually have high fructose corn syrup, plus other things I'd rather avoid. By this time I was maintaining a steady stream of obscenities and speculative researches into the genealogy of the people responsible for this under my breath, Yosemite Sam style. By the time I got through the salad dressing it was no longer mumbled and it was in several languages.
By the time I left the store I had a shopping cart full of meat, eggs, meat, cheese, meat, salad dressing ingredients, meat, and two small bags of precut salad, enough for seven days and a nicely accurate electronic kitchen scale.
I spent most of Saturday night figuring out how to make decent Italian and Bleu Cheese salad dressings. I spent hours going back and forth between the USDA nutrient database and a spreadsheet, figuring out EXACTLY what those dressing were going to cost me in terms of carbs. No carb went unscrutinized. If I was going to be consuming something that even vaguely looked like it might have carbs in it, I wanted to know exactly what it was and what it was going to do for me. If I was going to eat something that might have a carb in it, it was going to be worth it.
4) Hydrate. No, I mean it. Right now. Go. NOW! Get some water. I'll wait.
I spent the rest of the weekend cooking and figuring out how to cook all over again. I was (and am) an excellent cook, but I was not used to dealing with the low carb thing so there was a bit of learning there. (Side note: I have no sympathy for anyone, male, female or indeterminate who cannot cook. It's not that hard if you stop and think a little bit and learn to read a cookbook.) The grill was glowing like the surface of the sun and a steady stream of meat was transformed into goodies for the frigde. One of the many things that I took to heart from DANDR was in the survey you take after the two week induction. One of the questions is "Were you hungry" and the answer (and I paraphrase) "Moron! If you're hungry, EAT SOMETHING!!"
5) Take the supplements religiously. Do not skimp and do not skip. You're cutting a lot of nutrients out of your diet when you go into deep carb reduction so you'd better be making them up somewhere. I did the full kit, Accel, Dieters Advantage, Basic 3 and Essential Oils exactly as the directions said. Take it an hour before eating? I'd be eating between 55 and 65 minutes later.
Remember, I was shaving every last trace of carb that I could find. By this time I was four days in, over the induction flu, and had so much energy I glowed in the dark. I felt absolutely fantastic, plus the mental high of watching the scale change almost as I watched it was unreal. I hadn't felt this positive about myself in a long time. Hungry? Not an issue at all. If I felt even the slightest hunger pang I was off to the fridge for something meat. I kept a platter of grilled chicken breast strips just for Scoobie Snax. I kept burger patties in the front of the freezer. Between a frozen patty and a gas grill, you can have a lovely hot snack in ten minutes flat.
The cheeses were reserved for breakfast, the salad for dinner. I weighed EVERYHING except the meat and eggs. I weighed the salad, I weighed the homemade Italian dressing, I weighed the bleu cheese crumbles that went into my omelet. If I was planning on having bleu cheese dressing that night, I'd go light on the cheese for breakfast.
All the while, it seemed like every time I stepped on the scale I weighed less.
6) Exercise. I never bothered with a formal workout regimen. I live in the country. I don't have time. Need some aerobics? Grab the brush hook and head for a fence row. Need some weight work? Don't use the tractor to move those logs. Do whatever works for you, but get the blood moving and the respiration up.
At the end of the first week I had lost 25 pounds. My pants which previously were uncomfortably tight and did not need a belt were so loose they had to be belted. I felt great. I had so much energy I couldn't sit still.
Ok, there was a week gone, time for a bit of inventory. Weight? Excellent. Blood pressure? Hmm, can't quite tell but it seems to be just a little bit lower. A few other annoying problems? Either gone or greatly reduced. Ok, the "other annoying problems" were the four o'clock crash (just like in the book) and the world class flatulence. Before I started the diet, I had so much gas the DoE was registering me as an emergency fuel source. Sometime around day 6 that pretty much just stopped, all by itself. Plus I can call a 16 oz steak diet food!! What more can you ask?
7) Hydration ain't just something you do in the house. Take it with you, and not some cute little pint bottle. I still do not go out the door to do anything around here without at least two quarts of ice water in a cooler.
So on into the second week, more of the same. All the protein and fat I wanted, squeezing every last little fragment of carb just as hard as I could, abundant hydration, exercise (which was easier and easier with the extra energy), and the four Atkins supplements exactly as the good doctor ordered. I know the Accel is described as something to take if you need it, but I was not about to mess with that sort of success. At the end of the second week I had lost an additional 10 pounds. I was expecting a slow down so that was fine with me.
Now, here's one place where I deviated a bit from exactly what the good doctor said. He suggests going into OWL and experimenting with your carb levels until you find that balance point (sorry, don't remember the acronym) after induction. Weight was pouring off me like water over Niagara. Why on earth would I want to tamper with that? Remember, I started at 350 so 35 pounds later I was just really really overweight instead of really really extremely overweight.
I stayed hard on the induction phase, keeping the carbs as low as I possibly could, taking all the supplements. I continued to lose almost a pound a day until I hit the plateau described in another post.
I did have one worrisome incident after about the eighth week on the diet. I could not stand up without getting dizzy, really nasty nauseatingly dizzy so I headed straight for the doctor. She poked and prodded and drew blood and did all those other cool and groovy things that doctors do and announced that she knew what was wrong.
I was taking too much blood pressure medication. In eight weeks, I had changed my health enough that she had to cut my blood pressure meds IN HALF. The blood work showed that my LDL had lost forty points or so IIRC, my HDL had raised 5 points.
She was ecstatic and so was I. I looked SO much better than I used to, I felt amazing, joint problems started to eliminate themselves (hauling a sixth of a ton around is hard on the knees).
I never really got off the inducion phase of the diet. It was a diet that I enjoyed plus all the health benefits. Meat, cheese, eggs, and a tiny bit of veg. Perfect. As grandpa said, "Feed the vegetables to the cow. I'll eat the cow." I had to make periodic adjustments to how much I would eat, and the weight loss slowed down quite a bit after the plateau but it never stopped shrinking again while I was on the diet.
In about 14 months, I lost 130 pounds. I had to buy new clothes. I stayed with quarterly visits to my doctor and the blood work and blood pressure continued to improve. I was down to about 20 pounds from goal (200 at that point) and I let my guard down for ONE LOUSY MEAL. That was all it took to trigger the carb cravings, the rationization, the excuses, the laziness, the selfishness. The diet did not fail me. I failed the diet.
Meh, maybe doing induction to the extreme that I did was a bit excessive and maybe staying on induction for 14 months was a bit excessive, but the results were so good.
So there it is in a very large nutshell. Hope this does someone some good, either in the diet itself or in helping some one stay away from cheating. 130 pounds of weight loss and I threw most of it way for essentially nothing.
QSECOFR
327/315/199, five days in. 37.66% body fat according to MyBodyComp.com
First, a big thanks to everyone for the amazing warm welcome I've experienced here. What an absolutely wonderful way to start off.
DISCLAIMER: This is painfully long and rambling. I'm trying to compress fourteen monthis into one post, so it's a bit poorly organized in places. My apologies for that, and you have been warned.
I've had a few people PM me asking me to detail how I lost so much weight so fast. I'm more than happy to do so in the hopes that someone else may find something useful in my experience, but I've decided to reply here in the public forum so that my response can be vetted by those with more experience. I'll be overjoyed if something I've done can help someone but the flip side of that is that I would really not like myself if I brought someone harm.
In retrospect, parts of what I did was probably way past overkill. You can judge whether I was reacting or over-reacting.
A little background (very little)
I had been concerned about my weight for a while. I was hovering around 350 pounds, and while I have an extremely large frame there ain't no frame 6'2" tall that can explain 350 pounds. My doctor was on me to lose weight. I had tried various diets on my own with no success. I had a nutritionist design a diet for me that I followed slavishly for two months. At the end of the two months, I had lost four pounds and had been absolutely miserable for sixty days.
A co-worker started on Atkins and loaned me her copy of DANDR for a few days, more than enough for me to be hooked. I ran out that weekend, read the book during the next week, ran it past my doctor Friday (she was very supportive) with accompanying blood work which was even more incentive to do something. I started induction Saturday, having bought my Atkins 14 day starter kit on the way home from the doctor's office. If I was going to do this, I was not going to do it halfway.
I've detailed the results I got previously, here's a combination of what I learned and how I did it.
1) Hydrate. A lot. I was in the bathroom so often I thought I was going to wear out a part of me that I'd rather not wear out.
I had always hydrated fairly heavily, but up to this point it was iced tea, a gallon plus or minus a day. I'd gotten off sugar a while back and was using Splenda. After reading DANDR the tea went out the window along with the Splenda. Nothing but water from here on out I swore, with an allowance for my morning coffee which would now be taken without sugar, with heavy cream but not too much of either.
2) Did I mention the importance of hydration?
Drinking freely whenever I was even vaguely thirsty, I stabilized pretty quickly at about 170 ounces a day. Having heard somewhere that you should try to set your water intake at half as many ounces as your weight in pounds, that was about right and I wasn't even having to monitor it closely.
3) Carbs are sneaky little SOB's. The manufacturers of packaged food are even sneakier. Read every last label on every last food item you purchase. Just because it was ok last week doesn't mean the miserable SOB's haven't changed the formula. About the only ingredient list I wouldn't read was the one on the salt canister. Don't think meat has an ingredient list? Maybe, maybe not. Trust no one, trust nothing. They don't care about you. They care about your money.
20 carbs a day? 20 gram days were a failure to me. 10 was a good day, less was even better. Meat and eggs, cheese in moderation, and a small green salad with dinner every day. After a rampage through the supermarket, I figured out real quick that if I was going to be serious ANY premade foods were pretty much out. Bacon? Oho, that's got sugar and/or dextrose and a few other things that I was trying to avoid. (look up the term "excitotoxin" on google) Sausage? Wait, there's no way something that's supposedly made from meat has that many carbs. Filler? What exactly *is* filler, anyway? And there's the sugar again and that was in the sausages that didn't actually have high fructose corn syrup, plus other things I'd rather avoid. By this time I was maintaining a steady stream of obscenities and speculative researches into the genealogy of the people responsible for this under my breath, Yosemite Sam style. By the time I got through the salad dressing it was no longer mumbled and it was in several languages.
By the time I left the store I had a shopping cart full of meat, eggs, meat, cheese, meat, salad dressing ingredients, meat, and two small bags of precut salad, enough for seven days and a nicely accurate electronic kitchen scale.
I spent most of Saturday night figuring out how to make decent Italian and Bleu Cheese salad dressings. I spent hours going back and forth between the USDA nutrient database and a spreadsheet, figuring out EXACTLY what those dressing were going to cost me in terms of carbs. No carb went unscrutinized. If I was going to be consuming something that even vaguely looked like it might have carbs in it, I wanted to know exactly what it was and what it was going to do for me. If I was going to eat something that might have a carb in it, it was going to be worth it.
4) Hydrate. No, I mean it. Right now. Go. NOW! Get some water. I'll wait.
I spent the rest of the weekend cooking and figuring out how to cook all over again. I was (and am) an excellent cook, but I was not used to dealing with the low carb thing so there was a bit of learning there. (Side note: I have no sympathy for anyone, male, female or indeterminate who cannot cook. It's not that hard if you stop and think a little bit and learn to read a cookbook.) The grill was glowing like the surface of the sun and a steady stream of meat was transformed into goodies for the frigde. One of the many things that I took to heart from DANDR was in the survey you take after the two week induction. One of the questions is "Were you hungry" and the answer (and I paraphrase) "Moron! If you're hungry, EAT SOMETHING!!"
5) Take the supplements religiously. Do not skimp and do not skip. You're cutting a lot of nutrients out of your diet when you go into deep carb reduction so you'd better be making them up somewhere. I did the full kit, Accel, Dieters Advantage, Basic 3 and Essential Oils exactly as the directions said. Take it an hour before eating? I'd be eating between 55 and 65 minutes later.
Remember, I was shaving every last trace of carb that I could find. By this time I was four days in, over the induction flu, and had so much energy I glowed in the dark. I felt absolutely fantastic, plus the mental high of watching the scale change almost as I watched it was unreal. I hadn't felt this positive about myself in a long time. Hungry? Not an issue at all. If I felt even the slightest hunger pang I was off to the fridge for something meat. I kept a platter of grilled chicken breast strips just for Scoobie Snax. I kept burger patties in the front of the freezer. Between a frozen patty and a gas grill, you can have a lovely hot snack in ten minutes flat.
The cheeses were reserved for breakfast, the salad for dinner. I weighed EVERYHING except the meat and eggs. I weighed the salad, I weighed the homemade Italian dressing, I weighed the bleu cheese crumbles that went into my omelet. If I was planning on having bleu cheese dressing that night, I'd go light on the cheese for breakfast.
All the while, it seemed like every time I stepped on the scale I weighed less.
6) Exercise. I never bothered with a formal workout regimen. I live in the country. I don't have time. Need some aerobics? Grab the brush hook and head for a fence row. Need some weight work? Don't use the tractor to move those logs. Do whatever works for you, but get the blood moving and the respiration up.
At the end of the first week I had lost 25 pounds. My pants which previously were uncomfortably tight and did not need a belt were so loose they had to be belted. I felt great. I had so much energy I couldn't sit still.
Ok, there was a week gone, time for a bit of inventory. Weight? Excellent. Blood pressure? Hmm, can't quite tell but it seems to be just a little bit lower. A few other annoying problems? Either gone or greatly reduced. Ok, the "other annoying problems" were the four o'clock crash (just like in the book) and the world class flatulence. Before I started the diet, I had so much gas the DoE was registering me as an emergency fuel source. Sometime around day 6 that pretty much just stopped, all by itself. Plus I can call a 16 oz steak diet food!! What more can you ask?
7) Hydration ain't just something you do in the house. Take it with you, and not some cute little pint bottle. I still do not go out the door to do anything around here without at least two quarts of ice water in a cooler.
So on into the second week, more of the same. All the protein and fat I wanted, squeezing every last little fragment of carb just as hard as I could, abundant hydration, exercise (which was easier and easier with the extra energy), and the four Atkins supplements exactly as the good doctor ordered. I know the Accel is described as something to take if you need it, but I was not about to mess with that sort of success. At the end of the second week I had lost an additional 10 pounds. I was expecting a slow down so that was fine with me.
Now, here's one place where I deviated a bit from exactly what the good doctor said. He suggests going into OWL and experimenting with your carb levels until you find that balance point (sorry, don't remember the acronym) after induction. Weight was pouring off me like water over Niagara. Why on earth would I want to tamper with that? Remember, I started at 350 so 35 pounds later I was just really really overweight instead of really really extremely overweight.
I stayed hard on the induction phase, keeping the carbs as low as I possibly could, taking all the supplements. I continued to lose almost a pound a day until I hit the plateau described in another post.
I did have one worrisome incident after about the eighth week on the diet. I could not stand up without getting dizzy, really nasty nauseatingly dizzy so I headed straight for the doctor. She poked and prodded and drew blood and did all those other cool and groovy things that doctors do and announced that she knew what was wrong.
I was taking too much blood pressure medication. In eight weeks, I had changed my health enough that she had to cut my blood pressure meds IN HALF. The blood work showed that my LDL had lost forty points or so IIRC, my HDL had raised 5 points.
She was ecstatic and so was I. I looked SO much better than I used to, I felt amazing, joint problems started to eliminate themselves (hauling a sixth of a ton around is hard on the knees).
I never really got off the inducion phase of the diet. It was a diet that I enjoyed plus all the health benefits. Meat, cheese, eggs, and a tiny bit of veg. Perfect. As grandpa said, "Feed the vegetables to the cow. I'll eat the cow." I had to make periodic adjustments to how much I would eat, and the weight loss slowed down quite a bit after the plateau but it never stopped shrinking again while I was on the diet.
In about 14 months, I lost 130 pounds. I had to buy new clothes. I stayed with quarterly visits to my doctor and the blood work and blood pressure continued to improve. I was down to about 20 pounds from goal (200 at that point) and I let my guard down for ONE LOUSY MEAL. That was all it took to trigger the carb cravings, the rationization, the excuses, the laziness, the selfishness. The diet did not fail me. I failed the diet.
Meh, maybe doing induction to the extreme that I did was a bit excessive and maybe staying on induction for 14 months was a bit excessive, but the results were so good.
So there it is in a very large nutshell. Hope this does someone some good, either in the diet itself or in helping some one stay away from cheating. 130 pounds of weight loss and I threw most of it way for essentially nothing.
QSECOFR
327/315/199, five days in. 37.66% body fat according to MyBodyComp.com
)
~ 
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