truffle - October 5th, 2003

The Truffle Diet

I've been on a diet for about two months. In that time I've lost about ten pounds. I've decided to make a brief journal post about my diet, in case it may be useful to other people.

First let me say that I'm not suggesting this is a magical diet, it has worked for me so far. I also know that many people are able to lose that amount of weight very quickly using certian wacky diets, so losing 10 pounds in two months is not that big a deal. I also know that losing weight is not necessarily a good metric for evaluating whether you've undergone a healthy body change. I believe that in the past couple months I've had a healthy improvement to my body because of this diet, and I also believe that this weight loss is going to be fairly long term, and not regained quickly and by accident. I can't prove any of this however.

I'm well aware there are other cool diets like the atkins diet, I'm just trying to present the one diet I'm currently trying, so I won't talk about alternative diet theory.

By the way, the motivation for my diet was pretty simple, I have put on a few pounds in the past few years, and I would like to lose them. I'd also like to get in better shape. I thus chose a goal for my diet based on achieving the same weight I had a few years ago. I feel pretty comfortable that that was a healthy weight for me, and it's thus a reasonable goal.

Here is the diet in a brief summary:

• Calculate your basal metabolic rate
• Eat about that amount of food (calories) every day
• Exercise

Calculating Your Basal Metabolic Rate

Your BMR is basicly the amount of calories you burn every die by existing. It takes calories to keep you alive. My BMR is 1568. This means that if I eat 1568 calories a day, and do my regular no-exercise routine, my weight will stay the same. I used this calculator to calculate my basal metabolic rate. This is obviously an estimate, a guideline, it's not totally accurate but that's fine.

Eat about that amount of food a day

Calorie reduce diets are boring and seldom work. Well diets in general seldom work. I decided to use this non-fad system because it's relatively simple. There is an amazing calorie database I use, that has the calories for almost everything I eat. When I eat something that isn't in this database, I use google to find a good estimate. In general I find after I look a food up once or twice, I generally know how many calories it is, so I don't look things up often.

But eating low calorie is hard! In this case I'm not actually eating that low calorie, I'm eating enough to maintain my present weight. It seems to work pretty well, I don't feel like I'm starving myself. I also generally don't worry about small calorie variations, I'm not looking to be obsessive about how I eat, I'm looking to target in general eating a certain amount.

Some tips I use for keeping within my daily calorie limit:

• 400 calories seems to be a nice magic number for a non-huge meal. 400 calories is a 6 inch subway sub, a bowl of cereal and a small glass of juice, a tonne of sushi. Sometimes I eat more than 400 calories, but most of my meals are 400 calories. I generally get my other calories from lattes and snacks.
• No french fries. I got this one from my ex boyfriend. It's sad, but it was one thing I just had to give up. Same goes for potato chips. I still eat potato chips rarely in small quantities. Baked tortilla chips with salsa and low fat sour cream are a nice alternative.
• When I order dishes with rice (I eat a lot of asian food) or large orders of noodles, I just don't finish all the rice. It's just there to fill you up anyway. I generally eat about half of it.
• Smaller portions are good. North american portions are way larger than portions in Europe. Once you get used to smaller portions, you realize that while it's certainly pleasurable to eat the extra food in larger portions, you can do without. I'd prefer to eat more smaller portions of different kinds of food, than eat a few large portions.
• Raw fruits and vegetables (no dressing) are 0 calories. Well not really, but basicly they are very healthy, and really low in calories. It's hard to get fat eating apples and salad. Just eat as much raw fruits and vegetables as you want and don't worry about it.

I don't want to suggest that limiting what you eat to a specific calorie range is trivial. It can be hard. Being in certain situations may encourage you to go outside of the calorie limit. I try to just be moderate in all things, so if I go over one day I don't worry about it.

Exercise

If you're eating enough food to maintain your current weight, you won't lose weight, unless you burn additional calories through exercise. Yes, this diet requires you actually do some exercise pretty much every day. I work out 3-6 times a week. The specific form of exercise I do is DDR, which is nice because it's very convenient, it's fast, and it's fun. I think other good forms would be treadmill, biking, stairmaster, etc.

The goal in my working out is to burn a specific target number of calories each day, in my case 400. In general as calorie theory goes, you need to burn 3500 calories to lose a pound. So this rate will cause you to lose a pound about every 9 days. Dieting theory I've read suggests losing a pound every 1-2 weeks is a healthy rate of weight loss. I picked 400 calories because I can burn that in about 40 minutes playing DDR, which tires me out pretty good.

I can validate the calorie theory somewhat, losing 10 pounds in about 60 days implies 583 calories a day burned off if I'm eating at my BMR. Maybe I've eaten a little less, or maybe I'm already burnign some extra calories, whatever, my actual results are close to my expected ones.

Finding time to exercise is hard, this is why DDR has been so good for me. I know many people can't find time to go to the gym, certainly not 6 times a week. What you might try is setting your calorie target 100 calories lower, and working out less times a week, like say 3 times a week. That would put a slightly slower weight loss rate, but I think what's important with a diet is trying to set reasonable goals that are trackable over a long term.

One nice think about a diet with exercise is I feel some confidence that I'm not losing weight due to muscle atrophy. If you starve yourself and don't exercise, you will definitely lose muscle. Eating a high protein diet, and doing some exercise, will help ensure you keep or increase muscle mass. Muscle is good, it burns calories all day just by being on your body. It helps make you look healthy and fit.

A few last words

Before you go on a diet you should probably know what your BMI is. The BMI is a simple way to check whether you are in a healthy weight range for your height. If you're trying to diet to a target weight that would put your BMI in the unhealthy weight range, you should probably talk with your doctor before attempting a diet to get there. He or she can probably help you determine whether or not your target weight is actually a healthy weight for your body type.