“What happened to just … living a normal life?”
“I think in our attempt to lead a ‘normal’ life, we may have over-steered.”
Nate and Elena in “Uncharted 4”
A while ago I did do a posting about my attempts to more-or-less creatively hacking diets. Now, after a hundred days, it’s time to draw a short balance.
What worked well
- I did lower my weight. From around 82 kg to more or less something between 70 and 72 kg.
- I did gain a new appreciation for food (and drinks). Being highly selective about what I eat did make me appreciate what I eat even more.
- I did not have the feeling that I am hurting myself, at least not until I reached the 70 kg barrier (see below). I did eat the stuff I like, and found stuff I did not know I liked (like baking bread).
- Mudder’s Milk turned out to be a great drink, esp. with some vitamins (and caffeine). Again, not healthy, but a nice way to get kcal in an easy to consume way.
- I feel much, much better now. I notice the 10 kg less. Esp. when moving around.
What did not work well
- I did hit a first barrier at around 75 kg, which I did overcome, and a second one at 70 kg. The first one was probably psychological (oh, I so wished I could have done it double blind, but I knew I was going close to 75 kg and 70 kg). The second one was more physical, I guess. It did start to hurt me and I did feel dizzy at times. Consequently, did change my goal from reaching 65 kg to keeping close to 70 kg. I did settle on the area between 70 and 72 kg. It’s incredible how wide the weight can vary in a single day. I used mean values of my morning and night-time weights.
- The whole reason I started was that my trousers were getting tight (and the fabric contains stretch material). Never mind the weight/bulge — I hate buying new clothes. I just hate it with the disgust of a thousand slugs. Now the trousers are too wide:
This isn’t fishing for compliments, this is just fucking annoying. Even worse, I don’t want to gain weight again to reach a fits-well-weight. I feel great now, I don’t want to lose it. But yeah, that was a brilliant fuck-up. It seems I have to buy new trousers anyway. - One could expect losing weight (fat) where the most weight (fat) is concentrated. Mostly at the stomach. But weight loss was … not that logical. Sure, I did lose a lot of fat near the stomach, but also at the legs, and perhaps most annoyingly, at the fingers. My rings sit loosely now.
Overall assessment
So, overall, it worked more-or-less okay. Will be very interesting to see whether I can hold the weight or whether it rebounds. It’s only been a month or so keeping the weight.
Still, it was fun so far (mostly), and the kcal constrains did motivate some creative cooking and recipe-book-making 🙂
