Maintaining weight by eating doughnuts

Long time no blog.

There is a reason for that, of course. After giving the food diary a rest, I wanted to really give the whole thing a rest to see how I got on without having the Saturday morning weigh-in sword of Damocles hanging over me.

Could I maintain my weight without keeping a diary of my calories and without getting on the scales every Saturday morning? As the graph shows, yes, I pretty much could.

Nine months into the diet

It's been about 9 months since I started this diet, and I'm about 10 pounds lighter than I was at the start, pretty much right on where I wanted to be. Yes, I've been a bit lighter than that, but I think I actually look better now.

For one thing, I've started exercising a bit more again, so my muscle mass has probably added a pound or two over where I could have been. And that's fine too. As I've said before, this isn't a competition to see how light I can get, it's about having a diet that works for me, allows me to enjoy a particular lifestyle, and means I look alright in the mirror.

Yes, More bicep and shoulder muscle would be nice, but the pectorals are mostly acceptable and I've maintained my six-pack for a few months on the trot, so I'm happy with that.

Losing weight through doughnuts

Generally, the easier things are, the more inclined we are to do them, and the more likely we are to keep doing them. So, for me, I wanted this diet to be as easy as possible.

I don't want to have to scan barcodes of foods into an app, don't really want to weigh everything out and spend every mealtime doing maths. I'd rather have that time to do something fun thank you very much.

Having spent a few months keeping the food diary at the beginning of the diet, I have a reasonable idea of how many calories are in most of the foods I eat regularly. And that's all I need to know.

If I go out for dinner, I don't worry about how many calories I'm eating (and drinking!), I just eat, drink, relax and enjoy.

And I think that makes me better company.

I can do that, because I know I don't eat like that every day, not even every week, and I know that this is a marathon and not a sprint.

That's why I don't like daily calorie targets: they put you under too much pressure. A weekly or even a monthly calorie target makes much more sense. They make sure you stay on track for losing weight, but they take the pressure off and give you the flexibility to enjoy a night out without worrying that you've ruined your diet.

For perhaps the last two months, my Monday to Friday diet has been mostly doughnut based. Five Sainsbury's jam doughnuts at about 11.30 am provide the bulk of my daily calories (ca. 1150). Adding in a couple of ham sandwiches, some cherry tomatoes or celery (and the ever-present multi-vitamin!) and perhaps a chicken breast or an omelette takes me to somewhere around 1800 - 1900 calories for the day.

Take off say 500 calories for my 10,000 steps, and that's a respectable net calorie intake for 5 days of the week, letting me go a little bit wild at the weekend and have a few bottles of wine and a cheesecake or two.

And to those of you who say (or have been told) that you can't lose weight eating five doughnuts a day, I assure you that you can.

The evidence is plotted above.

The food diary takes a holiday

If you take a look at the graph below, you'll see that a couple of Saturdays ago, day 103, I'd put some weight on. Not only that, I'd put weight on for two weeks on the trot. Not what I'd intended.

Yes, there had been some work dinners - as well as the usual weekend binges - but I wasn't happy with it. It was time for a bit of a change.

So, for the last two weeks, you'll notice there has been no food diary: I have stopped keeping one. I've done this for a few reasons, despite the fact that there is a lot of evidence to suggest that keeping a food diary is one of the easiest things to do to help you lose weight.

Why keep a food diary

Simply, just to keep an eye on how many calories you've swallowed each day. If you put in fewer than you use, you'll lose weight, so knowing how many you've put in is a key part of the weight-loss equation.

If you keep a food diary for a while, you do start to get a feel for how many calories are contained within certain foods - particularly if you keep eating the same things again and again as I do. I'm certainly a creature of habit.

Once you've got the caloric values of a core of ingredients stored in your head, it's relatively straightforward to cook yourself a quick meal, and know about how many calories are in there. It's even easier if you use the rounding up to the nearest fifty method.

A quick example:

Slice of buttered toast: 150 kcal
A large egg: 100 kcal
Two back bacon medallions: 100 kcal
Two slices of ham: 50 kcal
Large glass of wine: 250 kcal
Slice of black pudding/lorne sausage/fruit pudding/haggis: 200 kcal
Milk in 2 cups of tea: 50 kcal
1x Sainsbury's jam doughnut: 250 kcal
1x buttered Scottish morning roll: 150 kcal

With that simple list, you're empowered to create myriad combinations of breakfasts, brunches, snacks, lunches, light dinners, very heavy dinners, and more, quickly, easily and without having to worry about doing lots of sums each time.

It just makes things very easy and, by always having a running total of what you're eating, you know when you're getting close to your daily calorie limit and, if you go over it, by how much you need to adjust the number for tomorrow to keep the week on track.

So why am I not keeping a food diary?

Firstly, because I'm sure it makes a lot of this blog very boring. Let's be honest, you know what I eat by now - mostly doughnuts - and I think, well, I hope at least, that I've made the point that you can lose weight week on week by eating mostly doughnuts, even if you have a Big Mac or a can of Dr. Pepper.

Just keep the calorie total under what you burn.

Secondly, it's also very boring to write. I have to keep a note on my phone, then type it up each day, all while trying to get the children dressed, fed, cleaned, teeth brushed and cleaned again. Keeping this food diary - keeping it public at least - was just an annoying part of my morning routine.

The other reason - and perhaps the main reason - was that I think I just needed to shake things up a bit. I'd put on weight for a couple of weeks, yes there were reasons, but perhaps the food diary was giving me a false sense of security. The running total said I was under my limit, so I ate something else to take me up to my limit.

That strategy is fine, but it doesn't leave you with sufficient headroom when you do end up having a couple of work meals out in the same week.

So, for the last two weeks the food diary has gone. And I've lost weight for both of those weeks. I'm nearly back down to where I was before I went to France.

I'm still counting calories, but I'm just having a quick think about it in the morning, roughly planning the day and not thinking about it after that. For the majority of work days, the plan has been 1 bag of 5 doughnuts (1150 kcal) or cookies (1100 kcal) for late morning, then some ham sandwiches (150 kcal each) to take me up to around 2000 calories for the day. Perhaps 2250 if I'm going to be walking a lot.

Quick, easy and, so far it seems, effective.

Back to life, back to reality

If you look at the last few points on the graph, you'll see a story. This is the story of my work and social life.

As I have little in the way of social life, it's basically my work life, which over the past couple of weeks, has involved way above my average number of nights out during the working week.

If you've seen any representative weeks of my food diary, you'll perhaps know that I'm big on the weekend binging. My Saturday and Sunday food and drink binges are my release; a 500 calorie a day (or more) celebration of all that is tasty and indulgent, washed down with some of the (relatively cheap, but still good) finest New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs that Tesco can offer for under £6.50 a bottle. Generally Wairau Cove.

Although, that said, I've been enjoying Lidl's £5.49 Gavi recently...

So, with the weekend being based around enjoying the sweet rewards of as many calories as I can afford, the working week is where I do my dieting and lose my weight, ready to start the next weekend a pound or two lighter than the last one and do it all over again.

Of course, if you then end up eating and drinking out on those weekdays as well, it's game over.

All work and no play...

And so, I have to report - you can see it on the graph - two consecutive Saturdays of putting on weight. And a good few pounds at that.

The most recent Saturday wasn't helped by the fact that I had a gig with the band on the Friday night. I'd been pretty good with the diet on the Friday, and had enough calories left for four pints to come in under 2500.

In the end, I had five. And a kebab on the way back to the night bus.

Then a couple of glasses of wine and four slices of cheese on toast when I got home.

And a couple of Jaffa Cake bars.

It was perhaps not surprising that I was a bit heavier than I had been the previous Saturday. Of course, as I got home at about 1.30 am, a lot of that food was still inside me by the time I stepped on the scales, so the 11 stone 11 pounds figure was perhaps not representative.

After the usual weekend binge though, Monday's weigh in of 11 stone 12 pounds possible was.

I'm trying (when I remember) to record a mid-week weight these days as well; Tuesday or Wednesday. Today's figure: 11 stone 10 pounds. I will take that. There was a meeting after work yesterday, but I left before the pizza made it out of the box.

I feel this week needs to be a good week. It would be nice to weigh in on Saturday at 11 st 9 lbs or a bit lower. I was 11,10 this morning, so I'm on track, but I am out - for dinner - after work on Thursday, so focus needs to be maintained.

As long as I don't do anything stupid this week, I should be fine. I'm back on the bag of doughnuts or cookies for lunch, and everything seems to be working.

Bring on Saturday morning...

The honeymoon is over

I think I may have become complacent.

Following this diet, I have lost nearly a stone. Then I enjoyed what some French restaurants and a Premier Inn buffet breakfast had to offer and put lots of that back on again. Then I lost most of that. Now I've put a bit more on.

Being realistic, my weight is always going to fluctuate. Eating (and drinking) is my coping mechanism. It is my indulgence. It is my release. The idea of my weight (or anyone's really) getting to one particular value and remaining there indefinitely - ruler flat - is unlikely.

In Updike's fantastic book Roger's Version, Roger's wife Esther has a weight maintenance strategy: she weighs herself each morning and if she's over 100 pounds, "she eats nothing but celery and carrots until she's back to exactly one oh oh".

That is not me.

Part of me would like to say - in my defence - that there have been diet blog experimental factors at play over the last couple of weeks (which have proven both fruitful and interesting, stay tuned for a future post), but, really, I'm just making excuses.

The truth is, over the last couple of weeks, I've not really been on it.

With this incredibly simple diet, losing weight has been so thoroughly easy. I've not really had to change what I eat; I've not had to join anything; I've not had to sign up to anything; I've not replaced what I eat with expensive pre-packaged 'nutritionally-balanced, macro-synergised' meals. I've just used my brain, added things up, and lost the pounds.

If you saw my post about my pedometer, you might have seen that I suggested some pros and some potential cons about counting your steps when trying to lose weight. It would appear I have fallen foul to some of those cons Again, useful experimental data (stay tuned yet again...), but, the fact of the matter is - for the first time since I wasn't on a pre-determined 'diet holiday', I weighed more this Saturday morning than I did last Saturday morning.

Yes, I still weigh a good few pounds less than when I started, but that wasn't in the grand plan. Today was supposed to herald the dawn of a new era - or at least a week in which I lose weight - but I've blown that as well.

The issue is really a matter of there only being 7 days in a week. As I've grown accustomed to my weekend blowout, I have a weekend blowout. The problem last week - and it's a problem again this week - is that I then have more than one weekday with major nights out, with dinners and the concomitant several beers.

In previous weeks, I've had the two day weekend blowout, but that's more than compensated for my the next five good diet days. Last week and this week, there's been a weekend blowout, plus two additional weekday blowouts. This leaves me with a week comprised of four blowout days, with only three diet days left to not just make up for those, but to then do the job of the week-on-week weight loss.

With the best will in the world, that's not really likely to happen.

So, to the future. Let's just see how it goes. These two weeks are not representative of my lifestyle. If I accept that I'll put weight on, I can do that with the knowledge that, when my normal schedule comes back around, I'll lose it again.

And - and I know I've said this before, often - that's what the diet is for. It's not a competition to try and lose weight and never put any on again ever. My diet lets me put weight on, and to be sufficiently ahead of the curve that I can put on a couple of pounds one week, look in the mirror, and still see a set of abdominal muscles. That's what it's for.

Counting steps for weight loss

A few weeks ago, my wife got me a pedometer. A little Jawbone Up Move.

It's a pretty simple little thing, though I'm sure it can do more than I use it for, but it's raison d'etre is counting steps, so that's how I use it.

The thing is though, does that actually help with my diet?

Does counting steps help you lose weight?

That one is difficult to answer. I certainly think it has helped me, but it may not help you. It also has the potential to be a dangerously sharp double-edged sword...

Let's start by revisiting the thermodynamic diet fundamentals: the change in your weight is driven by the utilisable energy that you take in (I say utilisable as if you consumed 1 gallon of petrol, you wouldn't really get the use of those  31,500 calories, you'd probably just die), the energy you use to do work, and the energy that ends up as heat.

It follows, then, that the more work you do, the more energy gets used to do that (and more going as heat) and the more weight you'll lose (assuming you don't compensate by increasing what you eat).

So how does the pedometer fit in? Well, a quick search of the literature shows a good few studies that show that pedometer use can help with weight loss. Of course, a pedometer is just a tool, so it can't help you lose weight any more than a trowel or a treadmill; the important thing is how you use it...

How can a pedometer help you lose weight?

For me, it's mostly because I'm quite competitive with myself. I don't like failing at things. Even if those things are as completely arbitrary as walking 10,000 steps a day, if I have a way of tracking how many I've done, I'll want to do it.

And then do more.

A couple of weeks ago, it got to nearly bedtime and I was still comfortably shy of the 10,000. So I ran on the spot until I got there. It took about 15m, and I could feel the heart rate rising. All of that exercise - limited though it was - was something I wouldn't have done if I didn't have a pedometer.

The other benefit is that it provides a more tangible way of compensating for the occasional indulgence. Each step is supposed to use up about 0.05 calories. That makes 10,000 steps 500 calories, and 2000 calories is about 100 calories.

So, if you're usually going for 10,000 calories a day and you fancy a Cadbury's Crunchie, turn that 10,000 into 14,000 and you've paid for it.

Why a pedometer might not help you lose weight

Well, let's come back to that whole 10,000 steps being about 500 calories thing again. On the surface, that's all good, but how you account for it in your daily calorie target. Let's say you're an average man with a daily target of 2500 calories. You get a pedometer and walk 10,000 steps and think "great, that's 500 calories, I can have an extra 2 pints of bitter".

Well, you probably can't, as that 2500 calorie figure probably includes a good few thousand steps as part of your average daily activity already. If you then claim more calories for those 10,000 steps, you might be claiming them twice.

For me though, the biggest problem is all the extra steps above the 10,000. I'm finding that I'm now considering those as extra calories I can eat.

Before I had the pedometer, I considered my calorie allowance to perhaps be a bit higher, but I wouldn't even consider any exercise as allowing me to eat more. If I did more exercise, that was just a bonus that led to even more weight loss. Now though, I'm finding myself saying "well, I can have that pudding and I'll just walk an extra x steps"; some of which I may well have walked anyway.

It's a bit of a balancing act, but some of the data is interesting - more on that in a week or two - and it's quite nice to know that, in the 6 weeks or so I've had it, I've walked over half a million steps.

Quite a humbling figure...

Day 90 - 5250 calories

Breakfast
Milk (50)
Shortbread (650)
Almond croissant (350)

Lunch
Hake with vegetables (500)
Cheeseboard (1000)
Wine (450)
Afternoon tea cakes (500)

Dinner
Beer (300)
Wine (300)
Chicken and vegetable stir fry (300)
2x slices toast (200)
2x slices toast and jam (400)
Jaffa cake bar (100)
Glass of port (150)

Exercise
45m walking

Day 91 - 2800 calories

Breakfast
Leftover Weetabix (50)
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)

Lunch
Chicken curry (300)

Dinner
Venison burger and garlic mushrooms (250)
Beer (200)
Toast (100)
4x slices bread and jam (800)

Exercise
2x 1.5m planks
80m walking

Day 92 - 1950 calories

Breakfast
Ham (100)
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)

Lunch
Chicken curry (500)

Dinner
Bacon sandwich (250)

Exercise
2x 1.5m plank
2x 30 press ups
90m walking

Day 93 - 2600 calories

Breakfast
Ham sandwich (200)

Lunch
5x jam doughnuts (1150)

Dinner
Chicken curry (500)
3x pints beer (750)

Exercise
75m walking

Day 94 - 3450 calories

Breakfast and lunch
5x ham sandwich (600)

Dinner
3x pints beer (750)
Wine (400)
Steak and chips (1000)
Brownie (700)

Exercise
75m walking

Day 95 - 3100 calories

Breakfast
Cake (300)
Milk (100)

Lunch
Burger, bun, bacon, mushrooms and salad (700)

Dinner
Tuna and veggies (400)
Wine (800)
Cake (300)
Shreddies (500)

Exercise
60m walking

Daily weight variation on the diet - part II

I've been trying to weigh myself first thing on a Saturday morning. As soon as I get up and have my first pee of the day, it's time to get on the scales. That's the routine, and I keep that consistent from week to week.

I always weigh myself first thing on a Saturday and that is the gold standard weight.

If you look at the graph though, you may notice a few more points on there recently. Well, those were just motivational; something to help me stay focussed and get back on track after the various dieting holiday binges.

However, the fact remains, it's Saturday first thing that counts.

Okay, so, you get the picture, the Saturday first thing weight is the one I care about, but why? Simply because I need to have a fixed point of reference that tells me how much weight I've lost in a week. This diet is all about the long-term, but without short-term goals and progress updates, how will I know how I'm doing? There needs to be some short-term monitoring to make the long-term bit happen.

A week seemed like a good compromise. It's a long enough period of time to have a binge eating/drinking day (or two), but leave sufficient days to make up for that, but not so long that things can really get away from me and leave me with little chance of recovery (diet holidays excluded of course!).

Daily, or even every couple of days seemed just too frequent for me, the weight could end up just popping up after a binge, then down, and I'd end up obsessing over the little details.

So, that covers the whole weekly thing, but why is the time of day so important?

How much does your weight change during the day?

Yours? I don't know, but I can find out how much my weight changes during the day. And I did. Every day for seven days, I weighed myself four times a day: waking, just before leaving for work, when I got home from work, and just before bed. On Saturday and Sunday, the just before leaving for work and getting home from work times were substituted for after breakfast and after dinner.

I recorded the results, and plotted this graph:

Wow, looks like there's quite a lot of variation there, doesn't it? On Saturday, certainly, that's a rise of a good few pounds. No doubt the result of drinking many, many cups of coffee, possibly after being dehydrated following wine the night before?

A good diet day on Friday though, if somewhat unsatisfying.

With the exception of those two days, while there are some changes let's put them in perspective. For starters, look at the y axis. It doesn't start at 0. Whenever you see a graph, always check the axes first, having a y axis that doesn't start at 0 is one of the easiest ways to mislead your audience and make changes look more striking than they may actually be.

Let's look again after starting that axis at 0:

Not quite as striking now, is it? That Saturday was a 3900 calorie day, so you might expect my weight to increase throughout the day. Thursday was a 4050 calorie day, so that covers that big rise.

The Friday was a 300 calorie day: 50 calories of milk with my morning coffee, and 250 calories of wine in the evening, so you'd expect my weight to come down during the day.

Generally, then, if I eat a 'normal' amount, I weigh one or two pounds more at the end of the day than I do when I first get up. When you consider the amount of food and liquid that goes into me over the course of a day, that's not really much of a change in percentage terms. However, when you're talking about trying to lose a pound or two a week, that variation becomes a significant source of noise.

Hence the common point of reference: the Saturday morning weigh-in.

Day 84 - 750 calories

Breakfast
Cereal bar (150)

Lunch
Chorizo slices (250)

Dinner
Ham sandwich (150)
Beer (200)

Exercise
90m walking
2x 2.25m planks

Day 85 - 4950 calories

Breakfast
3x ham sandwich (400)

Lunch
Mixed grill (1400)
3 pints beer (750)
Brownie and ice cream (1000)
Almond croissant (350)

Dinner
Chicken and bacon pasta (350)
Sticky toffee pudding and cream (700)

Exercise
90m walking
2.25m plank

Day 86 - 2300 calories

Breakfast
Leftover toast (100)

Lunch
Triple chicken sandwich (650)

Dinner
Wine (850)
Venison burger (150)
Mushrooms (50)
Pasta (500)

Exercise
2x 2.25m planks
90m walking

Day 87 - 3000 calories

Breakfast
Toast (200)
Leftover Weetabix (50)

Lunch
Curry (1250)
3x pints beer (750)

Dinner
Toast (100)
Leftover pizza (100)
Ice cream (250)
Beer (300)

Exercise
2.25m plank
60m walking

Day 88 - 2650 calories

Breakfast
Leftover toast and Weetabix (100)
Ham sandwich (150)
Slice of Rocky Road (500)

Lunch
Venison burger and mushrooms (200)
Cheese sandwich (150)
2x Jaffa Cake bars (200)

Dinner
Beer (300)
Venison burger and mushrooms (200) 
2x Jaffa Cake bars (200)
Wine (650)

Exercise
60m walking

Day 89 - 3900 calories

Breakfast
3x slices toast (300)
Milk (50)
2x slices toast and jam (400)
2x hot cross buns (500)

Lunch
Chicken and vegetable stir fry (250)
Slice of cake (200)
9x Jaffa Cake bars (900)

Dinner
2x beers (600)
Chicken curry, rice and naan (500)
Toast and jam (200)

Exercise
2x 2.25m plank
45m walking

The recovery continues, but how...?

This week has been a bit of a mixed bag so far. I was really pleased with Saturday. Getting through a Saturday on under 3000 calories was massive for me. Saturdays are usually my highest calorie day thanks to huge amounts of snacking and lots of wine and beer, so I should have been set up well for the week.

The curse of the macaroon

 

Sunday, well, it really wouldn't have been that bad; but then came mum's baking.

We went 'round to say hello and have a quick afternoon tea, and she'd been baking. In particular, she'd been baking her amazingly fantastic macaroons, spectacularly light and tasty; half-dipped in chocolate. Superb.

Now, my brother was there and, currently dieting himself, had been through the ingredients and worked out that there were only about 90 calories in each one. Amazing. Unfortunately, if you eat more than a dozen, all those 90s add up. Throw in a few wee bite-size muffins, and you're up to a real number.

Other than that, the rest of the day was okay and, even including the baking binge, the weekend's total left the daily budget for the rest of the week looking quite achievable to hit a daily average of 2300 calories.

All to play for.

Where has the weight gone?

 

A good question.

If you look at the graph, you can see that I've lost about the same amount of weight in a week and a bit or so, as I did in the first two months of the diet. How can that have happened?

Well, the first thing is that the night before that fateful 'weigh-in of huge weight-gain', I had three very large bottles of Corona, so I was probably very nicely hydrated for the next morning, so that first weight was perhaps not a fair representation of what I actually weighed.

Add to that the fact that I was probably more stuffed with glycogen than I had been for a while and you might get another pound or two. Hell, maybe even three if you're feeling generous. Still, I wouldn't have expected to lose that much weight.

Homeostasis and marginal gains

 

The body is pretty good and maintaining equilibrium; certainly, it has processes that work hard to try to maintain equilibrium. This is a fairly large topic by itself, and one that will get its own post at some point, but let's just say "adaptive thermogenesis". Basically, the body tries to regulate its energy reserves by altering that whole ATP Synthase efficiency thing and changing the amount of heat you produce.

In an overly-simplified nutshell, if you eat lots and lots and lots, your body becomes less efficient and you burn more calories as heat, if you eat less and less and your fat stores get depleted, you get more efficient and fewer of those protons are wasted spinning those enzymes without making ATP and you don't generate as much heat, saving those calories you ate for chemical energy.

Could my binging have increased my levels of uncoupling proteins and made me highly inefficient, making it easier to get through those calories when I went back to restricting them again?

Without having done any gene or protein expression analysis, I don't know. What I do know, is that I ate lots of calories and I put on weight, I ate fewer calories - fewer than I should have used in the day - and I started to lose it again.

And that's good enough for me.

There have been a couple of other little changes as well. For one, I stopped having milk in my morning coffees. Switching to Nescafe Azera, which is quite a tasty brew for an instant coffee, has meant I can have my morning instant black. Not something I've been able to do with instant coffees before.

Yes, I should just get the cafetiere out, but I just can't be bothered on a school day. Sure, that saves maybe 100-150 calories a day, but scale that up to ten days, that's getting up for 1500 calories saved - not far off half a pound's worth.

I've also been counting my steps recently - another post in itself to follow later. Now, I'm not expecting this to make a huge difference to things, but - combined with my self-competitive nature, it will have made some.

Yesterday, I found myself running on the spot while I made my breakfast, just to get the steps up. I did it properly as well, I could feel the heart rate go up. When I got to the bus stop, I looked at the next bus due display and saw I had five minutes before my bus was due. Rather than stand there I walked on to the next stop. Then past it and on to the next again one.

By the time I sat down on the bus to go to work, I was already at 4000 steps. Not too bad. I did the same in the evening as well.

Hopefully over the course of the scale of weeks, all these little details will start to make a difference. The issue with this week is that, as it is going so well, there's always that temptation to say you've achieved what you wanted to for the week and write off a couple of days.

Let's try not to to that this time, I'll just enjoy myself properly on Saturday.

Day 80 - 2600 calories

Breakfast
Toast (100)
Bacon sandwich (300)
Mr Kipling Almond Slices (900)

Lunch
3x ham sandwich (400)
Chorizo (250)

Dinner
Salmon (450)
Wine (200)

Exercise
50m walking

Day 81 - 5150 calories

You know what I said above about achieving a goal so writing days off? Well, just yeah...

Breakfast
Toast (100)
5x cookies (1100)

Lunch
3x ham sandwiches (400)
Little cupcake (200)

Dinner
Toast (300)
Bottle of wine (700)
Bacon sandwich (250)
2x Bounty sandwiches (750)
4x cereal bars (600)
3 portions of Weetabix with milk and raisins (750)

Exercise
75m walking

Day 82 - 7200 calories
(It's okay, this is part of an experiment for a future post...)

Breakfast
Diluted fruit juice (50)
Almond croissant (350)
2x Jaffa cake bar (200)

Lunch
Scrambled eggs on toast (300)
Black pudding and lorne sausage (800)
2x Almond croissant (700)

Dinner
4x fruit scone (1100)
Turkey tacos (800)
Ice cream (400)
Cheesecake (400)
Toblerone triangle (100)
Wine (200)
Peanuts (300)
5x 710ml bottles Corona (1500)

Exercise
60m walking

Day 83 - 2900 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Toblerone Alp (100)

Lunch
Ham sandwich (150)
Peanuts (800)
Toast (250)
Cheese (50)
Cake (300)

Dinner
Chicken pie (550)
Wine (300)
Jaffa cake bar (300)

Exercise
45m walking

Back to auld claes and cold porritch

If you were to look at the graph, you might think that my diet has gone completely to hell for the last couple of weeks. You couldn't be more wring, it's done exactly what is was supposed to. I have been able to indulge - fairly significantly - and enjoy myself for a good couple of weeks, and end up weighing less than when I started this whole thing off.

In another few weeks, I'll have lost another few pounds and will be able to indulge all over again.

I'm not trying to win any prizes for losing the most weight in the shortest period of time, nor do I want to see just how light I can be. I just want to be in a position where I can drink wine and eat huge portions of curry and cakes when I want to and not have to worry about it.

Okay, I'll admit, after a good couple of days in the middle of the week, closing it out on back to back >3000 calorie days wasn't in my original script. Thursday got away from me with an event that we put on at work - with beer and pizza - and Friday I was just in that sort of mood. Still, it's the start of a new dieting week and I intend to make it a good one!

Truth be told, it probably looks quite good that the weight went up at yesterday's weigh in. My whole point about this diet is that if you take in more energy than you use, you'll put weight on. What with a couple of mid-week weigh-ins this week, if you'd seen I'd had consecutive 3000 calorie days and not put weight on, you'd probably think this whole thing was a sham.

Well, there you go. If I eat too much and don't exercise it off, I put on weight.

So where do we go from here? Down in weight hopefully. I've made it through the first challenge - Saturday (day 75 below) -  under 3000 calories. It's been a while since I've done that. If I can have a sub 2500 calorie Sunday, then I should hopefully be set up nicely for the working week, which is always a bit easier to manage in terms of snacking.

The aim is to get to the end of the week average 2200 calories a day. If I Sunday is a 2500 calorie day, that gives me a Monday to Friday energy budget of 2010 calories, which shouldn't be too challenging, particularly if I can start with a strong Monday.

One thing's for sure though, with 2000 calories a day allowed, there will be plenty of space for cookies and doughnuts. Good stuff.

Day 75 - 2850 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Poached eggs and ham on toast (350)
Toast (150)

Lunch
Venison grillsteak and carrots (300)
2x Jaffa cake bar (200)

Dinner
Beef stew (500)
Wine (350)
Beer (200)
Sticky toffee pudding (400)
Cream (300)

Exercise
60m walking

Day 76 - 4000 calories (so much for the 2500 calorie day...)

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Hot cross bun (400)

Lunch
Stew (400)
Ham sandwich (250)
Bread (100)

Afternoon tea
Mum's home baking - Damn you!!! - (1700)

Dinner
Wine (350)
Stew (400)
Toast (300)

Exercise
75m walking

Day 77 - 1900 calories

Breakfast
Weetabix (250)

Lunch
5x ham sandwiches (900)

Dinner
Venison grillsteak and carrots (250)
Doughnut balls (300)
Wine (200)

Exercise
(40m walking)

Day 78 - 1500 calories

Breakfast
Toast (100)
Jaffa cake bar (100)

Lunch
5x ham sandwiches (650)

Dinner
Stew (400)
Beer (250)

Exercise
75m walking

Day 79 - 2200 calories

Breakfast
Poached egg on toast (200)
Jaffa cake bar (100)

Lunch
5x jam doughnuts (1150)
2x ham sandwiches (300)
  
Dinner
Yum yum (350)
Sausages (100)

Exercise
45m walking
1x 2m plank
1x 2.25m plank

The wake up call and keeping the weight off

If you read my previous post - in which I went to France and ate and drank a lot - you will know that the diet took a bit of a holiday. I may then have said that I would have a great week and get back to below where I was at the previous weigh-in.

That was a foolish thing to say. I thought I'd get on the scales yesterday: I have put on pretty much 10 pounds in 10 days.

How do I feel about this? Well, not great at first, until I thought about it for a little while and a few things dawned on me.

The first is that I haven't really put on 10 pounds. For one, the difference in my weights from the last Saturday weigh-in to yesterday was actually only 9.75 pounds. Also, as I'd stepped onto the scales only a few hours after finishing binge eating, I still had a good amount of food in me, and I was likely also quite hydrated from the 3 giant-sized Coronas I'd had the previous night.

The flip side of the thermodynamic diet

Maybe things weren't all that bad. Of course, I had put on weight, and a good few pounds at that but, in some ways, it's reassuring. It's good to be brought down to Earth occasionally of course, but it also adds additional evidence to the central hypothesis of this diet - what causes your weight to change is a difference between the amount of calories you eat, and the ones you get rid of through work and heat.

Since the 3rd of January, the difference has been in favour of losing weight, with my net intake of energy being less than my output of energy net, leading to the consumption of my body's internal stores of energy and a concomitant loss of weight.

In the last 10 days, I have eaten significantly more - and have drunk even more significantly more - and spent the majority of my time parked on my arse in meetings, at airports or on buses, trains and planes.

There was no way the net energy output would be greater than the net energy input over this period. So, extra calories stored internally and weight goes up. As the current graph shows all too clearly:

And the laws of the thermodynamic diet are conserved!

The big realisation though, is that it doesn't really matter. I'd had a couple of weeks where two times of indulgence had run together: the work trip to France followed by a weekend away at a music festival and a day off where the holiday spirit had continued and I got a bit carried away - not great when you started the day with a ridiculous hotel buffet breakfast.

It's the mini Danish pastries that get me every time. I imagine that's what crack must be like.

Keeping the weight off

How often is this juxtaposition of circumstances likely to arise? Not very. And, as I've said before, the whole point of this diet is to put me in a position where I can have indulgent binges and not really worry about it. If I put on weight, as I've done here, then I have the tools and the confidence to know I can lose it again.

The reason for being on this diet is not about seeing how much weight I can lose just for the sake of it. I love eating and drinking. They are a big psychological release for me. A big wine and steamed pudding binge can be just what my mind and body needs some times and I have no intention of sacrificing that; it's too important.

This diet isn't about getting myself to a point where I'm lighter than I've been since I was a child. I'd look terrible for a start. Yes, I like having a defined set of abdominal muscles and being relatively toned, but I don't want to turn into a wee thin shadow of a person who would be unstable in a stiff breeze. That's just not my scene.

I think my initial down-heartedness about the weight gain was more about this blog. I wanted to show how losing weight could be easy. How you didn't have to follow any fad diet, or spend money on esoteric foods or weight-loss consultants. You just needed to be able to count and apply a bit of common sense.

I thought that having a data-point on the graph that was higher than the previous one would make people think that the diet didn't work and that there was no merit in this simple scheme. However, I think, what I've actually done, is actually confirm that it does work.

Hopefully you'll see that when the graph heads down again, which, as of this morning, it's already starting to do...

For now though, it's possibly time to close out the month of March without any additional binge days, get the graph heading down again, and be ready for the next round of Sauvignon blanc and sticky toffee puddings!

Day 72 - 1800 calories

Breakfast
2x scrambled eggs (200)

Lunch
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)

Dinner
2x Weetabix with milk (250)
Wine (250)

Exercise
2m plank
75m walking

Day 73 - 3000 calories
Okay, not in the plan, but it's been a long day: up at 0530, home from work at 2245.

Breakfast
Sausages (200)
Protein bar (200)

Snack
Jaffa Cakes (600)

Lunch
Chicken curry with rice (500)

Snack
Chicken curry with rice (500)

Dinner
Beer (200)
Pizza (800)

Exercise
80m walking

Day 74 - 3050 calories

Breakfast
5x chocolate cookies (1100)

Lunch
Chicken breast (400)

Dinner
Beer (300)
Egg on toast (300)
Yum yum (500)
Weetabix (300
2x biscuits (150)

The work trip diet holiday

I did start the week with the best of intentions. Well, obviously that's not quite true given the amount I ate on Saturday and Sunday, but I had planned for last week to be a diet week. However, that turned out not to be the case. Much as when I was sitting in Bella Italia with my family a couple of weeks ago, I realised that I could make the most of this one and not worry about the weight - I was away in France for work for a few days.

To go to France - where I haven't been in over ten years - and not maximise the food and wine opportunities would have been a waste. Time for another diet holiday.

The trip started quite respectably, a couple of protein bars on the train down to Stevenage, and I'd made it to Luton airport (I refuse to call it London Luton, it's just not. It's Luton) on 600 or so calories by 2.30 pm. And then the inevitable: the (most recent) French air traffic control strike meant a delay of nearly two hours.

What do you do in an airport for a couple of hours when you meet a few new people who are heading out on the same trip as you? You have a few beers.

In some ways, that made things easier, when that happened I realised that there was really no point in trying to hit a target that week, and eating out always makes it a bit harder to try and keep track of what the calorie numbers are anyway, so the decision was swiftly made to take another break.

After the weigh-in success of the previous Saturday and the taking stock of where I was after being on this diet for two months, I didn't really mind. Again, the whole point of the diet is to give me a sensible baseline weight so that I can go wild and eat and drink myself silly every so often.

And if you're going to do it, doing it in France is a pretty good place for it.

As of Friday (ish), I was back to counting the calories again, and as far as Saturday's go, yesterday wasn't great, but with some effort it's all to play for this week, let's see if we can be a pound or two down on the last weigh-in, not just back to where I was after a few days' indulgence.

As for today, it's probably back to Bella Italia again as I'll be away in Glasgow enjoying Jennifer Nettles and Brad Paisley at the C2C festival!

Day 67 (Friday 10th March) - 2300 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
2x Protein Bar (500)

Lunch
Triple chicken sandwich (650)
Snickers (250)

Dinner
Pasta, chorizo and peppers (350)
Shortbread (450)

Exercise
35m walking

Day 68 - 5450 calories

Breakfast
Milk (200)
Leftover toast (50)

Lunch
Beef olives (400)
Egg on toast (300)
Ham sandwich (200)
Shortbread (450)

Dinner
Curry and rice (500)
3x naan bread (1350)
2x beers (600)
Wine (1000)
Chocolate (400)

Exercise
100 press ups
30m walking
2 1/4m plank

Day 69 - 2500 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Beef olives (400)

Lunch
Garlic bread (600)
Pizza (600)
Wine (200)

Dinner
Leftover pizza (600)

Exercise
45m walking
2m plank

Day 70 - 7000 calories

Breakfast
Ridiculous hotel buffet breakfast - I forget the details but the fry up portion included 3x black pudding, fried egg, 3x bacon, 1x hash brown, tomato and mushrooms. On top of that there were Danish pastries and a croissant with jam. There may have been more... (3500)

Dinner
Chicken tacos (800)
3x large Coronas (900)
Bottle of wine (700)
2x Tesco bread and butter puddings (800)
Single cream (300)

Exercise
45m walking
2m plank

Day 71 - 1250 calories

Lunch
5x chocolate cookies (1100)

Dinner
1x Weetabix with milk (150)

Exercise
80m walking

The thermodynamic diet - two month progress report

Let's just start with a quick weight loss progress report: this thermodynamic dieting really seems to be working. That's me now about two months into this diet and I'm 12 1/4 pounds lighter than when I started. Here's the graph as of this morning, Saturday 4th March:

Yes, the internet is full of lots of things saying that the laws of thermodynamics have nothing to do with dieting and a calorie isn't just a calorie, but it's all a matter of interpretation: don't forget about that second law and remember that your body doesn't do things with anything close to 100% efficiency and all is good.

The food diary of my diet

My food diary for the last couple of months certainly doesn't look like the food diary of a dieter. It's full of beer, pizza, doughnuts, cookies, wine, chocolate, and the occasional can of Dr. Pepper or glass of fruit juice just to prove a point.

It really doesn't matter what you eat: just don't eat more than you burn.

Again, that efficiency thing comes back into play. If you eat 2000 calories of simple carbohydrate and burn 2500 calories that day, you'll have a 500 calorie deficit on paper, the same as if you ate 2000 calories of protein.

However, the protein may take a bit more energy to process, so the actual calorie deficit from the high protein diet may end up being more than the carbohydrate deficit.

What I'm going to say though, is "who cares"? Do you really need to micromanage things like that? Do those extra few calories really matter enough to make you change how you eat?

Keeping things easy

For me, and I'm sure for a lot of people, the easier something is, the more likely you are to do it. I'm writing this at 6.30 am on a Saturday morning. It's cold and raining outside and really doesn't sound very appealing at all.

If I were a member of a gym, I don't think I could summon the effort to go to the gym on a morning like this (even if I were a member). However, if I had a rowing machine in the house, I'd probably get half an hour in before breakfast. I've got my dumbbells here, so I'll try and get some weights in: maybe a set each time I go upstairs. It's easy.

And I like easy.

The last thing I would want to do when wanting to lose  weight is have an overly prescriptive eating plan that breaks down what I need to eat into various components and forces me to come up with a daily diet plan that needs its macronutrients assembling like a game of Tetris. I don't have time for that.

I'm also limited in what I can eat during the day. I don't really have access to a kitchen at work, there's a kettle and a microwave, so I can reheat my leftover curry in a Tupperware, but not much more than that.

I also don't particularly want to spend any more time than I currently do preparing food. Don't get me wring, I really enjoy cooking, I find it a very nice way to spend a Saturday evening: glass of wine in hand - Keith Floyd style - deftly plopping a poached egg on top of a nice piece of smoked haddock; but I don't want to have to spend precious time each evening or morning preparing a scientifically-constructed meal plan.

And I don't want to spend any more on food.

I like the food I eat: it's tasty and it makes me feel happy. While I don't get my 5-a-day (although I never have, it's not simply a diet thing), I think I actually eat nutritionally better than a lot of people and, while I've stopped adding it to the daily food diary, I'm taking my multivitamin every day as well.

Summing up the first 2 months of the diet

I was about to say I just don't get why so many people try to make losing weight so complicated, but then I remembered they need to make it complicated so that you need to buy their book or sign up to their program.

Lots of people want to lose weight, and lots of them are prepared to pay for it. It's big business. I'll admit, that for a lot of people, cost is associated with value: if you pay for something, you value it more. Taking that into the diet world, if you pay for the plan, maybe you're more likely to stick to it, maybe you'll make more of an effort.

For the diet plans where you go and do your weekly weigh-in in public, I can see how paying for that can make a lot of motivational sense for a lot of people; I suppose it comes back to the public shame thing I mentioned before.

Maybe I wouldn't have lost over 12 pounds if I'd not been writing this and making my progress public. I feel I've made a public commitment to lose weight and, quite frankly, I probably would be a bit ashamed if I didn't. Perhaps not ashamed, that might be on over-reaction, but I'd certainly be disappointed with myself and perhaps a bit embarrassed.

From inductive reasoning, I knew that this diet would work. Since they were developed, no event has been shown to violate the laws of thermodynamics and my body is no different.

Sure, if I keep this up and get slimmer and slimmer and continue to drop my body fat percentage, my body might start to panic a bit. My metabolism will change, the levels of those mitochondrial uncoupling proteins may change, my proton leak may drop and I will lose less energy as heat. My leptin levels might fall and my ghrelin levels might rise making me much more hungry.

In short, if I keep going, it's going to get harder and harder to lose weight. But I have no intention of going that far. I don't want to be a rake. My BMI is currently 22.4. I have no intention of it falling below 21.5, and even that's probably too low.

In short, for two months in, I'm really happy with how things are going. I look a lot better in the mirror, and I can continue to have a 5-pack of doughnuts at work with my morning coffee, a bottle of wine on a Friday night, and enjoy pizza and ice-cream with the family.

Last week, my daily calorie intake average was 2514. I round up, so if we consider that that's a 5% overestimate (probably quite conservative), that falls to 2388 - quite a drop. Then consider the extra walking and the fact that I probably spend a lot more time awake than most people, and you can see how I lost nearly two pounds last week.

Away for three days for work next week though -eating out will likely be involved, so we'll see how we do next Saturday!

Day 60 - 2950 calories

Breakfast
Milk (200)
Protein bar (200)

Lunch
5x jam doughnuts (1150)

Dinner
Pint of beer (250)
Steak, chili and pepper stir fry with rocket salad (300)
Bottle of wine (700)
Chocolate crepe (150)

Exercise
60 sit ups
100 press ups
6x sets dips
30m walking

Day 61 - 3200 calories

Breakfast
Milk (200)
Bit of cookie (100)
Fried egg roll (350)

Lunch
Steak stir fry on rocket salad (300)
Small croissant (250)
2x slices toast and butter (300)

Dinner
Beer (200)
Bread and butter (500)
Plaice with leek and broccoli (300)
Crepe (150)
Burger (250)
Wine (300)

Exercise
30 sit ups
6x sets bicep curls
45m walking

Day 62 -3700 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
2x poached eggs on toast (300)

Lunch
Fry up (2x black pudding, 2x Lorne sausage, 4x link sausage, 2x scrambled eggs (1000)

Snack
Creme egg (200)
Beer (200)
Mini eggs (250)

Dinner
Wine (400)
Chicken and veg stir fry with wild rice (400)
4x chocolate crepes (500)
Snickers (250)
Whisky (100)

Exercise
30x sit ups
6x sets dips
2m plank
60m in pool with kids (can't really call it swimming)
30m walking

Day 63 - 1850 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Scrambled egg on toast (350)
Protein bar (250)

Lunch
Ham sandwich (200)
Chicken sandwich (350)

Dinner
Bacon sandwich (300)
Weetabix, raisins and milk (300)

Exercise
60m walking
2 1/4m plank

Getting the diet back on track after the holiday

The other weekend, I gave the diet a break for a few days. I was on holiday, and I didn't want to have to worry about counting calories, and also ruining everyone else's time while I sat there drinking water and not having dessert.

For that reason, there are no food diary entries for that whole long weekend, and I didn't bother checking my weight so there's a bit of a gap in the graph.

Although I was taking a diet holiday, I still had a bit of a target: by the time of the next weigh-in, I wanted to be pretty much back at the weight I was at the previous weigh-in, two weeks' earlier. I managed to make that happen, with a couple of ounces in hand, and my handy weekly-daily-calorie budget spreadsheet was quite useful in making that happen.

Losing the holiday weight with a Google sheet

I had written off four days - Thursday to Sunday - for the diet break. During those four days, much pizza, lasagne, Thai takeaway, ice-cream sundaes and associated other tasty things were consumed and very much enjoyed. All of which washed down with a fairly reasonable amount of beer and wine.

As I wasn't counting any calories, I really didn't know how much over my budget I'd been, which obviously makes calculating what your new budget needs to be to balance that out pretty tricky. Realising that, I just decided to apply a bit of common sense for Monday to Friday, picking a respectable number of 2200 calories a day.

I reasoned that by the time I'd rounded up the calories on each item, and walked a bit, that 2200 a day would get me there or thereabouts by the time Saturday morning came around. Having indulged for four days, Monday came in at a nice round 1000 calories: I had plenty of energy stores ripe for the picking, so I just wasn't that hungry. Easy.

Not only was that a good start to the week, when I plugged that into the spreadsheet, coming through Monday 1200 calories under budget meant I had those 1200 to add to the following days' allowance. Seeing the daily allowance cell change to an even richer green was a nice psychological boost actually: it just made me feel like things were going to be easy.

The rest of the week was fairly uneventful. I didn't feel the need to have any particularly super-low calorie days, I just ate a sensible amount and ended up keeping the daily calorie intake under that 2200 each day, with the exception of Friday, where I pushed the envelope to 2300 calories by drinking a bottle of wine.

By the time I went to bed on Friday, my average daily calorie intake for the working week was 1860, comfortably under the initial 2200 target I'd set. When I got on the scales on Saturday, I was 160 lbs and 2 oz, 2 oz. down on 2 weeks' earlier.

Holiday weight lost.

And that was it. No silly fad things, no having to spend all evening in the gym every day, no 'expert' plan to follow, just picking a number that felt about right, and eating a number of calories each day that was smaller than that.

Day 55 - 2850 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
2x slices toast (300)
Weetabix (150)
Mini hot cross bun (150)

Lunch
Bread (200)
Lentil Soup (300)
Protein bar (200)

Dinner
Chicken, rice and vegetables (400)
Beer (200)
Cheese and pickle sandwich (250)
Chocolate (600)

Exercise
60 press ups
25 crunches
30m walking

Day 56 - 1750 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Toast (100)

Lunch
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)
Ham sandwich (250)

Dinner
Venison burger (200)

Exercise
2x 25 crunches
3x sets dips
100 press ups
45m walking

Day 57 - 1600 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Muffin (300)
Toast and scrambled egg leftovers (150)

Lunch
Chicken breast with tomatoes, peppers, chilis and rice (450)

Snack
2x Ham sandwich (300)

Dinner
Venison burger with vegetables (300)

Exercise
70m walking

Day 58 - 2350 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Muffin (300)
Ham sandwich (150)

Lunch
Chicken breast with tomatoes, peppers, chilis and rice (450)

Dinner
Chorizo slices (250)
Ham sandwich (150)
A few beers (950)

Exercise
100 press ups
5x sets dips
30 crunches
80m walking

Day 59 - 2050 calories

Breakfast
Milk (200)
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)

Lunch
Chicken breast with tomatoes, peppers, chilis and rice (450)

Dinner
2x scrambled eggs on toast (300)

Exercise
85 sit ups
3x sets bicep curls
45m walking

Daily weight variation on the diet - part I

The diet weigh-in

While I'm mostly judging the success of this diet by what I look like in the mirror, checking my weight is obviously an important key performance indicator. Particularly at this early stage in the diet.

While I would like to add a bit of muscle mass in the future - likely meaning I'll put some weight on - the first stage was always going to be about shedding the ballast, and that meant making sure the reading on the scales came down.

As I wanted a bit of a confidence boost at the beginning, I made the first weigh-in day a Saturday, knowing that I did, let's say, enjoy my food and drink over the weekend, so I wanted a nice Saturday morning number prior to eating enough calories to last 3 1/2 days in 2.

Dieting away the glycogen

With that precedent established, Saturday became the regular, weekly, weigh-in day. What that has meant though, is that, with a calorie target established for the next week, I'd burned through plenty of those before even making it to Monday. By the time I got to Thursday and Friday, things were often getting a little desperate in terms of how many calories I had left.

All of this led to Friday becoming something of a super-low calorie day. Certainly a lot, lot fewer than I was burning. Where did a lot of the energy I needed come from? Probably those glycogen stores, that were full to bursting from a week of eating doughnuts and cookies.

Let's say that there's perhaps about a pound of glycogen in there, with a concomitant water weight; let's call it three pounds. So, let's say I start the day with all of that in there, and use it all up at the end of the day, that could be as much as 4 pounds gone purely from using up those glycogen stores - which doesn't actually take a whole lot of doing if you're up and about all day.

Add that to the glass or two of wine I have on a Friday night to dehydrate a bit more, and the difference in my weight from a Friday morning to a Saturday morning could be really quite significant.

Losing weight while putting it on

Of course, with that precedent established, if I was actually careful with my calorie budget over the course of the week, I might not have to starve myself on Friday and I might wake up on Saturday with some glycogen and some water left. If I get on the scales, my weight could have gone up since the previous week.

For some folks who've worked hard to stick to their plan, that could be quite demoralising.

Let's look at my situation. I could have weighed in last Saturday - glycogen depleted - and been 162 pounds. The next week - a better planned week - I could have had lots of calories to play with on Friday, gone out for dinner, had a few pints and stopped for a hospitality-sized bar of chocolate on the way home.

I might have finished the week under target - let's call it 3500 calories under what I burned that week. I get on the scales the next morning, and I'm 165 pounds.

Aaagh! I've put 3 pounds on! How's that happened?! Well, I'm just not comparing like with like. When you think about it though, you might well have lost a pound of fat, it's just you've put 4 pounds on in glycogen and water weight. Burn through that glycogen and you could be 161 pounds tomorrow morning.

It's nothing to worry about, you're doing well, it's just a bit of variation.

Long term vs. short term

For me, the long term goal is losing the fat. It's worked out so far that, as every Friday has mostly been the same, I've been comparing like with like. However, over time that's not really what I'd like to be doing.

For the first few weeks, it's been great to see the points on the graph fall every week. It's given me empirical confidence that my diet plan works and that many of the top search engine-ranked 'experts' are talking complete guff and I wouldn't send them with a short list to do my shopping.

Now though, I don't think there's any harm in letting that number pop up from the previous week occasionally. Who cares? As long as the trend is heading in the right direction, that's okay. As I mentioned in the holiday post, I want to be able to go out and have fun without a diet cramping my style. As Friday night is a good night for that, always having to fast because that's the day before the weigh in is not what I want to have to do.

So, from now on, it's all about that trend so, if you see a point on the graph that looks a bit out of place, you'll know why...

Day 52 - 2050 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Protein bar (200)
Ham sandwich (150)
Shortbread (100)

Lunch
Chicken, bacon and cheese sandwich with chips (900)

Dinner
Lentil soup (300)
Weetabix and milk (150)
Wine (150)

Exercise
100 press ups
4x sets dips
30m walking

Day 53 - 2300 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Protein bar (200)

Lunch
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)

Dinner
Ham (200)
Wine (700)

Exercise
Walking (60m)

Day 54 - 4100 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Toast (150)
Weetabix (150)
Shortbread (150)

Lunch
Lentil soup (300)
Bread 250

Dinner
Poached egg on toast (200)
Shortbread (150)
2x flapjack bar (250)
A good evening of beers (1500)

Dinner II
Cheese on toast (450)
Weetabix (200)
Toast with chocolate spread (250) 

Exercise
40m walking

The holiday diet

You want my secret to enjoying your holiday when you’re on a diet? Take a break from the diet.

You may have noticed that there was no weigh-in this Saturday. No update to the graph, not even any food diary updates. There’s a reason for that: I was on holiday. I did not want to be ‘that guy’, sitting having dinner with my family, always going for the lowest calories thing on the menu, and making everyone miserable as I agonise over dessert.

So the diet took a holiday and, really, that’s what it’s for.

Diet takes a holiday

What’s actually the point of losing weight? I’ve got myself to a healthy BMI, my waist/height ratio is even better - my waist measurement is significantly less than half my height - and, on Thursday morning at least, I had a fairly presentable set of abdominal muscles.

Now, if you saw my post about my target, all was looking good for going swimming, but as it turned out, we ended up going on Saturday rather than Thursday, but I was still presentable.

Yes, I would still like to lose another three or four pounds, but I’m actually looking okay. I like to think of a lot of the point of this diet is to give me the freedom to be able to eat and drink as much as I want on holiday or on a night out, and not have to worry about it; to have enough diet behind me to be able to put on a pound or three and still be in a window of target weight, then I can just lose it again.

The children’s leftovers

I’d actually had quite a good calories day on the Thursday. Admittedly, I’d been sat in a car for four hours, but things were going well. Then it was time for dinner. I ended up going for the under 600 calorie pizza and salad option. I wasn’t particularly aiming to stick to any sort of target for the day, but it actually sounded pretty good, and I thought, well, if I can have a good day, I might as well.

Then the children didn’t finish theirs.

A moment of “oh, should I, shall I be good?” struck me, and I told it to sod off. I was on holiday, the food was good, and I don’t like to see waste. I even had a pudding.

The next day was the same story. I had made peace with the diet holiday concept by this point, so the buffet breakfast was put to good use, followed by another pizza (and large ice cream sundae for pudding) at lunch, with a couple of beers before dinner, a large lasagne, and, having felt that the previous night’s sundae was a bit on the small side, I paid the extra £1 and upgraded my dessert option to the ‘sharing’ size.

Saturday started well, but became something of a binge-fest (I shan’t go into details, I’ll just say that multiple steamed puddings and a doner kebab were involved), and Sunday involved a takeaway and a bottle of wine.

It’s now Monday morning and, looking in the mirror, I don’t look too bad. I don’t look as good as I did on Thursday morning, but I’m pretty confident I will do by the weekend again.

And that’s what it’s about. I have lost enough weight to get into a position where I don’t have to worry about enjoying myself every so often, and that’s where I want to be. I’ll be back to the counting and rounding up today, and I’ll weigh-in again this weekend. If I’m back to where I was last weekend, hell, even a pound up on it, I’m happy with that.

I know it will be gone again by the next week.

Day 49 - 1000 calories

Breakfast
Milk (200)

Lunch
Protein bar (200)

Dinner
Protein bar (200)
Glass of wine (200)

Snack
Weetabix, raisins and milk (200)

Exercise
100 press ups
70m walking

Day 50 - 1750 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Protein bar (200)

Lunch
5x Double chocolate cookies (1100)

Snack
Ham sandwich (200)

Dinner
Weetabix and milk (150)

Exercise
100 press ups
6x sets dips
60m walking

Day 51 - 2200 calories

Breakfast
Milk (150)
Protein bar (200)

Lunch
5x jam doughnuts (1150)
Ham sandwich (250)

Dinner
Lentil soup (300)
Weetabix and milk (150)

Exercise
70m walking

On hunger

The thing about food and drink - beer & pizza and wine & cake in particular - is that it's great.

It tastes great, for some of us it's psychologically and emotionally great, and it does that fantastic job of making us not feel hungry. And feeling hungry isn't great.

And therein lies a problem of trying to lose weight. If you have neither the time, nor the resources, to exercise all of those calories away - and if you work and have a family, you probably don't - you're going to have to eat less.

And that's just not fun.

And even if you can exercise all the calories away, all that exercise may well just end up making you feel more hungry anyway.

Being hungry

Unless you are particularly lucky, have worked out a great system, or are losing weight slowly enough that it isn't making a huge reduction to your daily calorie total and it doesn't hurt too much, you may just have to find a way of dealing with hunger occasionally, sometimes, or regularly.

And, you know what, that's nothing to be ashamed of.

It seems that there are plenty diets that shout about never feeling hungry. Well, possibly there are, but I really have neither the time nor the money to deal with them. I can't afford to have multiple smoothies delivered to me every day. I don't have the time to prepare multiple small meals for throughout the day, nor do I have the opportunity to eat them.

I'm sure the wonder that is the internet is full of sites telling me how I can lose weight by eating as much of what I want and never feeling hungry - no doubt by 'never eating the five things that KILL WEIGHT LOSS' or similar, but I'll take them with a pinch of salt.

And, if you think about it logically, if all of those diets worked as easily as they said, we'd all know about, everyone would be doing them and we'd all be the weight we wanted to be.

Much like the many emails that populate my spam folder offering an easy way to increase the size of my body - well, one part of it anyway - if it worked, we'd all be doing it.

And trousers would need a fundamental redesign.

Sometimes you're going to feel hungry, and getting through it actually isn't as hard as you might think.

Managing your hunger while eating less

I remember watching an episode of Horizon, I think it was the one that brought the 5:2 diet to the world's attention, in which Dr. Michael Mosley did a three day fast. He described hunger as coming in waves, but that they pass; and I've found that to be true.

Hunger doesn't gradually appear and continually build and build, the feeling of hunger appears, then it passes. Much like the waves Dr. Mosley describes, you can let them wash over you.

Now, obviously, this takes willpower. Not as much as you might think, but willpower nonetheless.

I came across an article on an online 'nutrition' site that said something along the lines of 'asking someone to lose weight through willpower is like asking a child not to get any taller through willpower.

I have one word -actually, I have a few - to describe what I think about that, but - as I don't know you well - I shan't use them for fear they might cause offence. I'll just say that these two situations aren't really comparable, but I think we all know that.

I'll come back to willpower, it's enough of a subject to warrant its own post.

Making it work for you

I'm not going to try and say I have all, or even any of the answers. We're all different, and we'll all deal with things in different ways.

If feeling hungry is a problem, then experiment with different ways to manage it. When I've been trying to lose weight previously, I'd tried a little an often strategy, that didn't work, I just felt hungry all the time. I found I felt much less hungry if I went as far into the day as I could, then ate the majority of my calories in one go.

I've tried high protein diets, that just doesn't satisfy the hunger. For me, high fat seems to work a lot better, keeping the hunger away for longer.

I've tried drinking water when I'm hungry, works Sort of. What absolutely doesn't work for me is chewing gum. All that seemingly does well for me is stimulate my appetite.

It's your body, you know it best. By all means, try the suggestions that you find, but if they don't work, don't worry about it, and try something else.

Right, having blown my calories at the front end of the week, I'm off to have one more cup of coffee for breakfast and fast until tomorrow morning...

Day 44 -2200 calories

Breakfast
Milk 100
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)

Lunch
Turkey club sandwich (550)

Dinner
Weetabix, milk and raisins (250)
Bread, butter and jam (200)

Exercise
Walking 70m

Calculating the daily calorie target

This was actually relatively straightforward, so shouldn't really take long. However, as usual, there are a few variables you might want to consider if you want to make it work for you...

The calorie target - inductive or empirical?

If you believe me - in that the way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you eat (forgetting about those efficiency overheads of course!) - then you really need to think about 2 things: how many calories you need to eat each day to stay the same weight, and how fast you want to lose weight.

Let's look at the first part of that: how many calories a day do you need to stay the same weight? Well, that's going to be different for each of us. And that's where two difference research philosophies come in: induction reasoning  and empiricism.

What we can strip these two philosophies down to is this: do you come up with that daily calorie number using information, equations and assumptions that are already known, or do you work it out for yourself.

Calculating your daily calorie needs inductively

The inductive approach is easy. You can start with the very ballpark guidelines of 2500 calories a day for a man and 2000 for a woman. It's a great starting point, but chances are those numbers aren't quite right for everyone. I've not performed a study myself, but I wager the numbers are going to be different if you're desk-bound, 5' 4" and 130 lbs, than if you are 6' 2", 240 lbs and work on a construction site carrying bricks around all day.

Just a hunch.

That said, if you would say you were 'about average' in terms of build and lifestyle, you get make a start based on those numbers, but if you think you're not, or you want to be a bit more 'accurate', then it's time to hit the online calculators.

If you query your search engine of choice for 'TDEE calculator', you'll probably get a few results. Some of them may use a different formula, and some of them may produce a result that's a better fit for you. I would recommend trying a few and taking an average. When I tried it, I received a range of values from around 2200 to 2500 calories a day.

And there's your starting point.

Calculating your calories to make Karl Popper proud

Of course, as a follower of empirical science, I'm much more of a fan of knowledge coming through experience and being based on deductive reasoning, so how do we do that? Simple, we do an experiment. We'll strip the design of this back a bit though, we're not going to be submitting it to a journal for peer review...

Choose your reference weigh-in time for a once a week update and pick a number of calories, possibly based around what your eating each day as it is and times it by seven to work out your weekly calorie budget.

Eat that number of calories in the next week and weigh yourself; if you weight went up, reduce it for next week, if it went down, but you were hungry all the time, you could maybe increase it. Work out your budget for the next week and repeat.

And repeat, and repeat, and repeat. If you then plot a graph of your weekly calories against your weekly weight change, you'll be able to see (approximately) the number of calories that should give you a weight change of zero. I've thrown together a quick example of how it might look with a quick plot of some made-up numbers in Excel.

Other spreadsheets are available.

Of course, you may have noticed the obvious downside of this: time. To get a good few data points you're looking at a good few weeks. Possibly not the greatest.

Combining induction and deduction

So what to do? Well, just adopt the best of both worlds. Use the inductive method to get your rough starting point, weigh in, then start recording the weekly calories and adjust as required. Easy.

Now to the next part, working out what the daily target number should be to lose weight, and that just comes down to balancing how quickly you want to lose weight, with how hungry you can cope with being.

As a rule of thumb - and there are a few average and assumptions that go into this, but it does the job for our purposes - a pound of fat is about 3500 calories. If you search for that, you'll no doubt come across lots of things saying that it isn't and that reducing your calories by 500 a day to lose a pound a week is a myth. Ignore them. For our purposes that works fine.

Yes, longer term there are more things we might need to think about - the main one being that as we lose weight, there's less of us to maintain, so our daily energy requirement goes down, but you're going to be following how much you eat and how much weight you lose, so you'll always be on top of that.

So, starting out, if you want to lose a pound a week, you need to reduce the number you've come up with by 500 calories. There are two ways to do this: eat less, and/or exercise more to the equivalent. Again, there are lots of exercise calorie calculators out there, so take a look at a few and find out what you need to do.

The ones I've looked at I've always thought were a bit generous, so I usually take an average of a few and round down and that seems to work for me. The graph is still heading in the right direction. For me at least - male, 5' 10", 161 pounds, I count brisk walking for an hour as 250 calories.

Coming up with my number

I started with the 2500 a day guideline number and just used that - given my averageness. Of course, I'm keeping notes of the calorie intake and monitoring my weight change, so I'm covered empirically as well and can adjust when things start to slow down.

By using that number, then rounding my calories up as I eat and not deducting the exercise as I go, I'm probably about 500 calories short of that (I reckon 250 calories a day in extra exercise and 250 in calorie over-estimation is close enough), and that seems to fit with my losses of a pound a week.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, you'll find lots of things on the internet that say the 3500 calories thing is nonsense, things about starvation mode, even some things that say exercise uses up so few calories it's not even worrying about, so why listen to me?

Put simply, because I have no vested interests, I'm not selling anything and, as far as I've found so far, I'm the only one saying what I eat and telling you week-by-week how much weight I'm losing.

And, if you want to, you can do the same.

Day 41 - 4900 calories

Breakfast
Milk (200)
Weetabix (150)

Lunch
2x sausage sandwich (700)

Snack
Chicken sandwich (300)

Dinner
Curry, rice and naan bread (1000)
4x beers (800)
Bread and butter puddings and cream (1000)

Snack
Bread, butter & jam (200)
4x cereal bars (550)

Exercise
30m walking

Day 42 - 1000 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)

Lunch
Ham sandwich (200)
Ham sandwich (150)

Dinner
Chicken sandwich (300)
Plum (50)
Beer (200)

Exercise
Walking 70m

Day 43 - 2400 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)

Snack
Water biscuits (200)
Cheese (100)

Lunch
Chicken & lentil curry with rice (400)

Dinner
Chicken & lentil curry with rice (400)

Snack
Chocolate cake (1000)
Beer (200)

Exercise
Walking 60m

Expanding on the thermodynamic diet

I fear I may have fallen into the same trap as many of those I don't respect: I have been glib. I have oversimplified things and that is patronising and unfair.

I apologise.

Let's expand on the last post and make things a bit more clear. A bit less glib.

Expanding on the thermodynamic diet

Right then, the key thing I've talked about in this 'thermodynamic diet' is the fact that if you consume fewer calories than you use, you'll lose weight. I absolutely stand by that and believe it to be 100% true. It's been the basis of my diet for a little over the last month, and I've lost 7 1/2 pounds.

With all this talk of efficiency and things in the last post though, we possibly need to revisit the word 'consume'...

A calorie is a calorie; there is no getting around that. It is the amount of energy required to heat 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. Whether it's a calorie of carbohydrate, or a calorie of protein, it's the amount of energy to do that.

However, that's all lab and textbook stuff, and we're not trying to heat water, we're trying to make ATP and, as we mentioned in the last post, that's not 100% efficient.

What we're really looking at then, is the net number of ATP molecules made from 1 calorie of carbohydrate may not be equal to the net number of ATP molecules we can make from 1 calorie of protein, 1 calorie of fat, 1 calorie of alcohol... Well, you get the idea.

A calorie is a calorie?

Yes. That doesn't change. The issue comes down to efficiency - for a given calorie, how much ATP can we generate and how much work are we able to do. 

Now, a lot of this is the driver behind many diets you might see out there; low carbohydrate, high protein diets for example. But I think the discussion of all of that sort of thing can wait until another day. It’s certainly enough of topic on its own.

That said though, I cam across one paper the other day that said, at least for a very specific set of circumstances, the conversion of protein into sugars carried an overhead of 33%. So, to process the energy in say 100 calories of protein required 33 calories, so you could infer that the net calorie gain from 100 calories protein was 67 calories.

Like I said though, that was under a very specific set of physiological conditions, and a set you may not enjoy getting to.

Does that mean a calories isn’t a calorie? Of course it doesn’t, it just reminds us that various processes in the body use energy, and that is something we might have to account for.

I am not even going to bother worrying about it.

I base my calorie figure on the number that is on the packet and do my rounding up. The numbers might be off by a few percent, the portion size might be off by a few percent, so I’ll round up, eat within my daily calorie goal, and, I expect, continue to lose weight.

Worrying about the little changes in efficiency of conversion just takes too much time. I see people who seem to spend far too long in front of their macronutrient calculator app, trying to make sure that they are getting the right amount of calories from their various macronutrients.

Life’s too short and time’s too precious!

If you struggle so much with perpetual hunger that you have to squeeze every last calorie you can out of your diet somehow, then maybe that’s what you just have to do, and good luck to you, but for the few percent difference it makes, I’d rather have that time back and go for a walk...

Day 37 - 2150 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Protein bar (200)

Lunch
Ham sandwich (200)
Chicken sandwich (300)

Snack
Chicken sandwich (300)

Dinner
Lentil soup (400)
Chicken sandwich (200)
Weetabix, milk and raisins (250)
Beer (200)

Exercise
70m walking

Day 38 - 4050 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Protein bar (100)
Plum (50)

Lunch
5x Double chocolate cookies (1100)
Ham sandwich (150)
Lentil soup (400)

Dinner
Smoked haddock, poached egg and spinach (250)
Bottle of wine (700)

Extended evening eating...
Cereal bar (200)
2x Protein bar (400)
4x Weetabix, milk and raisins (600)

Exercise
100 press ups
1x 2m plank
30m walking

Day 39 - 300 calories

Breakfast
Milk (50)

Dinner
Wine (250)

Exercise
80m walking

Day 40 - 4200 calories

Breakfast
Milk (300)
Croissant with 3 scrambled eggs (650)
Almond croissant (350)

Snack
Toast with butter and jam (200)

Lunch
2x slices fruit pudding, 2x slices black pudding, 2x slices lorne sausage (750)
Plum (50)

Snack
1x Weetabix, milk and raisins (200)
1/2 slice of toast and jam (100)
Chocolate coins (100)

Dinner
Fish and vegetables (150)
Wine (500)

Snack
Beer (200)
Bread, butter and jam (200)
3x cereal bars (450)

Exercise
Walking (20m)