Minimize Me: 10 Diets to Lose 25 Lbs in 50 Days
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Authors: Andy Leeks
Tags: #Health; Fitness & Dieting, #Diets & Weight Loss, #Other Diets, #Humor & Entertainment, #Humor, #Diets
Minimize
Me
By Andy Leeks
10
diets to lose 25 pounds in 50 days
Copyright © 2014 Andy Leeks
All Rights
Reserved
Dedicated to
everyone who has ever struggled with their weight
Diet, n.
A special course of food to which a
person restricts themselves, either to lose weight or for medical reasons.
According to research, an
estimated 45 million Americans diet each year, spending a staggering $33
billion in the process. In the UK, more than one in four adults have either
recently tried to or are currently trying to lose weight. Worryingly, although
people are aware of the need to eat well for the sake of their health, most are
dieting with the ultimate aim of looking good. While I’m sure that’s a
disappointment to everyone in the medical profession, it kind of makes sense,
because if you are lucky enough to have lost some weight recently it’s entirely
possible that a friend may have told you that you "look great". They
might even have been brave enough to ask the big question itself – the elephant
in the room (if you'll pardon the pun) – "Have you lost some weight?"
It’s unlikely they said, "You look like your blood pressure has
lowered!" or, "Correct me if I’m wrong, but you look like your
cholesterol is returning to a healthy level."
Who can blame people for
dieting for the sake of vanity? We live in a world where appearance is
everything. To prove that point, I’m a man who is ‘follically challenged’ and
it’s as easy for me to get a hair transplant as it is to buy a hat. I've
actually ended up settling for neither, and over the years I’ve found myself
embracing my balding look by shaving off the very little hair that does grow.
When you think about it,
it can seem a strange thing to do. If you had a particularly barren year in
your vegetable garden, you wouldn't dig it up and destroy the few vegetables
you did manage to grow, would you? If you had a poor return on an investment,
you wouldn't withdraw whatever money you had made and burn it, would you? That
sounds like a fair argument, but in fact my choice is far better than the
alternative. ‘Follically challenged’ people essentially have two options – they
either fight it, or they accept it. For the vegetable-growers, fighting it
would mean spending money on richer soil, pesticides and netting; for the
investors, it would perhaps mean re-investing their money in higher-risk
markets; but with hair loss, fighting it often results in the biggest hair
tragedy possible – the comb-over!
There are so many
questions when it comes to the comb-over, (the first three being why, oh why,
oh why would you ever choose to have a comb-over?) While most of us are eagerly
checking the weather in case it rains, I imagine the comb-over brigade are
anxiously awaiting reports on the wind, keeping everything crossed for nothing
more than a gentle breeze. Come to think of it, how do comb-overs even come
into existence? They seem to just arrive; I’ve certainly never seen one in
transition. My guess is that either people have naturally long hair to begin
with, start losing the top bit and immediately comb over the sides, or they
start gradually losing the top bit and then go into hiding while growing out
the sides before re-appearing with the comb-over in full swing…
While I’ve not succumbed
to the comb-over, I have succumbed to the diet, and I’m what is considered a
‘yo-yo’ dieter – I’m forever losing weight by dieting and then subsequently
regaining it. As I see it, what happens is that the initial exuberance wears
off as weight loss begins to slow, enthusiasm tails off, frustration and
boredom kick in, and the only thing to help pick you up when you’re feeling low
is the very food you’ve been trying to avoid. It’s a vicious circle, and it’s
the bane of almost every dieter at one time or another.
My weight has fluctuated
wildly throughout my adult life. Once I had passed through the education system
I found myself free to make my own choices, without having to worry about
school-friends mocking me, or my P.E. teacher making me run an extra lap or two
of the school field. Suddenly I was earning my own wage, living at home and
paying very little rent. I had more disposable income then than I do now and,
like many teenagers, I spent it all on alcohol and takeaway food. McDonald’s
was my weakness back then. There was one within walking distance of my parents’
house, and over the course of the week I’d slowly work through their menu, eating
everything but the salad. To this day, I’ve never understood why McDonald’s
sell a range of salads. To me, that’s like a funeral director selling life
insurance or a dentist selling sweets. I’m sure the simple answer is that they
do it because they feel they ought to, and perhaps they’d get into trouble if
they didn’t – the same attitude I took to exam attendance right through school.
McDonald’s weren’t wholly
responsible for my obesity in my late teens and early twenties – alcohol
featured heavily too. There was a time when I regularly went out drinking six
nights a week. Most people’s weeks start on a Monday and end on a Sunday, but I
had a very different week. I had a drinking week. It would start on a Thursday
and end on a Tuesday, with Wednesday effectively being the drinker’s Sunday.
Every night had something to offer the young drinker, kicking off with Thursday
night in Kudos (the only nightclub in town at the time). Fridays, Saturdays and
Sundays were spent spilling out of one bar and into another, Monday was student
night at Chicago's and Tuesday was Karaoke night at the Hogwash. Wednesday
happened to be the over-25s night in Kudos, so naturally, we left the old-age
pensioners to it and caught up on some much needed rest. I wouldn’t like to
know exactly how much I spent on alcohol and junk food in those years, but I
know for certain that my very first credit card was used solely for that. With
the help of my two friends, Jim and Jack (Beam and Daniels that is), I somehow
managed to rack up a £2,500 bill.
What seemed like innocent
fun back then actually turned quite serious a few years later as I found myself
seriously obese, drowning in debt, and struggling with alcohol addiction. I’m
pleased to say that the debt has been cleared (for the most part anyway – there
always seems to be one card kicking about with a pesky balance on it) and I
haven’t touched an alcoholic drink for almost five years. I am, however, still
struggling with my weight, although I’m now only considered to be mildly obese,
rather than dangerously so. It doesn’t actually take as much as you might think
to be considered obese. Check it out for yourself – the NHS provide an online
tool where you can check your own BMI (body mass index). Anything over a point
score of 30 is considered obese, and it’s likely that you know people in that
category. To look at them, you might even think they were in the fit and
healthy range.
http://www.nhs.uk/Tools/Pages/Healthyweightcalculator.aspx
Losing weight isn’t
actually that difficult; it’s doing it healthily and then maintaining that
lower weight which is difficult. Boxers are a great example of how it shouldn’t
be done. In boxing they have weight categories, and in order to try to gain an
advantage, boxers try to stay as close to the upper weight limit as possible.
In fact, many boxers will purposely carry an extra seven pounds or so leading
up to a fight, before undergoing a gruelling 24 hours in which they will limit their
calories and water intake while exercising in sweat suits before the weigh-in.
They do this because such quick weight loss is essentially artificial and
certainly unsustainable. By the time the fight comes around the next day, they
will have added the weight back on, giving them an advantage.
I personally can’t imagine
that putting your body through those kinds of stresses before a fight is a good
way to prepare at all. If I were a boxer, I’d probably prefer to spend those
last 24 hours before a fight resting, or perhaps watching re-runs of my
opponent’s last few fights. Maybe that’s indicative of my lazy attitude, and
why I now find myself discussing obesity and diets! I must admit that I always
try to find the easy way out. At school, I never read any of the books that
were given to us for our English Literature course, always preferring to buy or
rent the film version. I even managed to pass my driving test the lazy way. I
never could be bothered to take lessons, so I simply got insured on my wife’s
car and adorned it with the necessary L plates. After a few years, and with our
first baby on the way, my wife pleaded with me to take a test, but rather than
booking the necessary lessons, I simply purchased a DVD titled something like
‘Driving Test Success’.
The thing is, I knew how
to drive; I just didn’t know how to drive the right way to pass a test. The DVD
I had purchased included two mock driving tests which had been filmed. One was
a fail and one was a pass. I watched both tests and I changed my driving
technique to match the one in the DVD. (The pass, not the fail.)
I used that DVD to do all
of my revision for the written exam too, and because I managed to book my test
via a previous cancellation I actually managed to pass my driving test within
seven days of buying that DVD, without having had a single driving lesson. I
certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone else doing what I did though. In fact, I’m
a little bit worried about putting it in print, in case the DVLA find out and
accuse me of cheating.
There’s always a way to
cheat – a shortcut which will save you most of the hassle. I remember back at
school there was a child who had to switch classes due to his behaviour, and
they hadn’t had a chance to update the register. As a responsible young boy, I
was given the task of checking to see if he was present at school that day.
(See – even the teachers were keen to use a shortcut or two.) After diligently
carrying out this task for two or three days, I decided to cut down my
sixty-second responsibility to around thirty, by simply checking if his coat
was on his peg. This worked absolutely perfectly, until the day when he wasn’t
in school and his coat had been left on the peg from the previous day. The
detention I got didn’t deter me, and even as recently as last week I found
myself ruining a risotto by pouring in the stock all in one go, rather than
patiently adding it a ladle at a time.
I would estimate that I
have been on twenty or so diets in the last fifteen years, each time losing at
least half a stone. Of those twenty diets, I would consider only one to have
been really successful. It is probably no coincidence that that particular diet
was the only one which was undertaken because of health concerns. I had been
gradually gaining weight leading up to and just after the birth of our first
child, and six weeks after she was born I developed a painful cyst on my groin.
I’d been with the same doctor for years, and after she prescribed the necessary
tablets and gave me the lecture about not drinking alcohol while taking them,
she asked me if I knew how much I weighed. I told her that I didn’t, and a few
seconds later I watched as the scales displayed 18 stone 7 lbs, or 259 lbs if
you’re American, or 118 kilos if you’re from anywhere else. While there were
three different ways to describe the measurement itself, there was only one
word which could accurately convey how I felt – miserable. My doctor was
amazing. She explained that this was a chance to do something about my weight
and that the cyst could have been my body’s way of crying out for help.
"Is a groin cyst the usual method of communication?" I enquired.
"A bad back would have done!"
I agreed to eat healthily
and exercise as best I could for a week and, to help spur me on, my doctor
asked me to make an appointment for the following week. A week later, my cyst
was completely gone and I had managed to lose 9 lbs in weight (just over 4
kilos). I continued to eat healthily and exercise for the next six months and I
lost just under six stone in total (84 lbs or 38 kilos). It was the first time
I had ever ‘dieted’ for health reasons, and the first time I hadn’t actually
followed any particular diet plan. I simply ate the right foods in the right
quantities at the right times. I found myself craving healthier foods. The fact
that I was doing it for health reasons and not for the sake of vanity is the
reason I think it was successful and perhaps the reason why I was able to keep
the weight off for as long as I did.
How long, I hear you ask.
Just over two years. For two years, and two years only, I was considered by the
NHS as being ‘Overweight’. That’s right, even though I had lost nearly six
stone, I was still considered to be overweight. So what went wrong? I got lazy.
I stopped thinking about the consequences of my choices and slowly but surely
got back into bad habits. My portion sizes started increasing, my food choices
got poorer and I started exercising less. It’s also entirely possible that the
family-size bag of Cadbury’s Buttons every evening also contributed to my
downfall. I didn’t put it all back on, but I imagine I’ve put on half of it. I
can’t tell you exactly what I weigh right now, because I haven’t dared to weigh
myself.
Although I’ve talked at
length about my most recent success when it comes to losing weight, the fact of
the matter remains that, like the England football team, I have only had one
success in twenty attempts. If I were a racehorse I would have been shot by
now. When I look back at all of those failed attempts, I can see that there’s
always been a common denominator.