perfidy

I have achieved a milestone in personal fitness.  I now weigh less than 1/8 ton.  I have not seen the sunny side of 250 since somewhere in 2002, about which time I was settling into the sedentary lifestyle of the knowledge worker and eating at the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet across the street from my office nearly every day for lunch.

Since I started my diet on July 5th, with the encouragement and assistance of the Monkeybrains google group founded by Aretae, I have lost 18 pounds, net.  That's an average of three pounds a week over six weeks.  But the average is lying to you, as it often does.  I went to Ohio for two and a half weeks and over that time progressively fell off the diet, and ended up nearly ten pounds heavier when I returned than when I left.  So the total weight loss is closer to 26 lbs, over a period of four weeks.

How did I achieve this?  I've mentioned the Paleo diet here before, and that is it.  The best summary I've seen of the methodology of paleo dieting is right here, and here's the twelve commandments:

1. Eliminate sugar (including fruit juices and sports drinks) and all foods that contain flour.
2. Start eating proper fats - Use healthy animal fats or coconut fat to substitute fat calories for carbohydrate calories that formerly came from sugar and flour. Drink whole cream or coconut milk.
3. Eliminate gluten grains. Limit grains like corn and rice, which are nutritionally poor.
4. Eliminate grain and seed derived oils (cooking oils) Cook with Ghee, butter, animal fats, or coconut oil.
5. Favor ruminants like beef, lamb and bison for your meat. Eat eggs and some fish.
6. Make sure you are Vitamin D replete. Get daily midday sun or consider supplementation.
7. 2 meals a day is best. Don't graze like a herbivore.
8. Adjust your 6s and 3s. Pastured (grass fed) dairy and grass fed beef or bison has a more optimal 6:3 ratio, more vitamins and CLA. A teaspoon or two of Carlson's fish oil (1-2 g DHA/EPA) daily is good compensatory supplementation if you eat grain-fed beef or no fish.
9. Proper exercise - emphasizing resistance and interval training over long aerobic sessions.
10. Most modern fruit is just a candy bar from a tree. Go easy on bags of sugar like apples. Stick with berries and avoid watermelon which is pure fructose. Eat in moderation.
11. Eliminate legumes
12. Eliminate all remaining dairy including cheese- (now you are "Orthodox paleolithic")

The good doctor also points out:

If you can do step 1, that is about 50% of the benefit and alone a huge improvement on the standard american diet (SAD) By about step 6 you are at about 75% , by step 9 about 80% and at 10 you are at 99% for most people. These are just estimates, of course.

So right now, I'm obeying the first ten of the twelve commandments and thus am 99 44/100 pure paleo.  I don't think I'll ever cut the beans and cheese completely - they round out the meat and vegetables.  And by obeying those commandments, I'm losing a pound a day eating as much as I want.  Sunday, I was particularly hungry, I had 4 eggs and 4 slices of bacon for lunch, two glasses of whole milk, most of a bag of beef jerky, a handful of peanuts, a single strawberry, and a two large helpings of a tasty Indian lamb dish my wife made.  That had to be a few thousand calories.  But next morning, another pound and a half gone.

My goal is to lose another 20 pounds in each of the next two months.  That will put me at about 210 - a weight I haven't seen since my mid twenties.

Looking back at the last six weeks, I find that I'm really rather surprised at how easy it has been.  Aside from the trip, where I was at times not really free to pick the food that I wanted, and some alcohol consumption along with it; I've been able to keep to the diet remarkably well.  Being able to consume mass quantities is a huge help - every caloric restriction diet I went on in the past drove me nuts, and led to binge eating.

If you want to lose weight, I recommend this diet unreservedly - and read Good Calories, Bad Calories to understand why it works.