The Right Way

The Right Way. As a kid I was told by my Mom, this is the right way to do this, make a bed, make a meatloaf, eat, think, live. She said she was doing it the right way and any other way was wrong. Maybe it's my natural rebellion that I took that as a challenge. I was challenging her way, the authority of the thing, the idea that there was just one way to do something with positive results. My rebellious attitude was the cause of most of my problems in life, or as I prefer to think of them, my lessons. I too wanted to do everything my way, and I did try to find the easiest, most efficient way to do things, usually doing them differently every time I did them.

I grew to hate, despise rules, and spent my life kicking against the pricks. I am the one who has never accepted the rule book. (I have yet to see this so-called rule book) Telling me that I could not do something was a dare to do it.

I never got into the groove of a 9–5 job, staying with one company for 40 years. I don’t do grooves. Maybe that was one reason I never stuck to a diet, never kept up an exercise regime, snacked constantly instead of eating in a normal way. I never learned what normal meant.

So here I am last July 16th looking at the scale that says 238. I have not exercised in a very long time. Not even walking. My muscles are atrophied, I am too fat to comfortably tie my shoes. My right hip is nearly locked up from the car accident when I was 22 years old.

I fell in the yard a few weeks ago. I was helping my son move a wire chicken coop and tripped over a board. I landed on my side and it took a minute to roll up onto my side, onto all fours. I didn’t have enough strength in my arms to push myself up, my hip won’t allow me to get my knee up. My legs are too weak to lift my legs up steps very well and useless trying to push off the ground with only one good leg. I was stuck. If my son had not been there I guess I would have had to crawl to the porch. He had to bring me the camp chair so I could use it to climb to my feet. Falling is a scary thing.

I don’t walk in the woods any longer. I have a walking stick which is a necessity to keep myself steady, to prevent me from tripping over grass and my own feet. I use a grocery buggy for a walker. Falling is one of the few things that scare me. Being in a position of helplessness to the point where someone else needs to help me, get up, get dressed, fed, washed, is my most disturbing nightmare. At 67 (the new middle age) I think about that a lot. So maybe falling in the yard was a small wake-up call. Scary situations are a great motivator.

I read about nutrition a lot. I study many things about how to get back to basics and utilize natural things. I like learning about herbs and the old ways. I like grinding my own whole wheat, dehydrating foods, raising farm animals, and learning about gardening without the use of pesticides. I don’t like refined foods. I don’t like going against nature (Just authorities). So I rean across some articles on fasting. I devoured them. Because I am that rebellious obnoxious know-it-all who learns something new and suddenly becomes an expert I wanted to know how fasting works. I decided that maybe fasting was something I could try. It didn’t require me to join some pay-as-you-go club to participate. Oh, there are tons and tons of plans offering to fix everything, do your thinking, for a small fee. Some low carb, fasting organizations will happily take your money so they can tell you what to eat, when to eat, how to eat, what exercises to do, what your calorie and carb count should be. But that means rules. I don’t do rules.

I don’t do diets, not since I gave up the yoyo effect of all the diets I did in my youth. I see ads that say ‘Diets don’t work, try this.’ or ‘Try that.’ No thanks. I already know diets do work, as long as you stay on them, which for the most part is impossible or at least improbable.

Fasting appealed to me because there didn’t seem to be any hard and fast rules. Perfect. I read how it was done and why and what the results might be. I deduced that even if I failed to do it perfectly I could still lose a little weight over a long period of time, it was flexible enough to allow me to eat anything I wanted within a limited time frame, a time frame of my own choosing.

Most of the time frames seemed to suggest 8 hours of eating and 16 hours of fasting. That isn't too restrictive. That just means skipping breakfast. Simple. I rarely eat breakfast anyway. The biggest change I saw coming was no snacking after the last meal of the day. That was major, as I probably was eating more after dinner than the average person eats for breakfast and all of junk.

I learned some time ago that when I go whole hog and try to do everything at once I fall, and I fail, I get overwhelmed, soon bored, burned out, disgusted, and move on to something else. So I decided, I could fast but I wasn't going to go extreme and fast for 16 to 20 hours every day at the same time. I began simply. I got up, had my coffee, when I got hungry I ate my normal 2 eggs, 3 strips of bacon breakfast. That normally took place between 10 am and noon. I didn’t snack between meals. At dinner, I had whatever I normally eat and then stopped eating around 8 pm. I did that a few days and then the next day I waited a little later to eat breakfast. In a few days, I was eating at noon and stopping at 8 pm on a regular. And not snacking at all.

Next, I reduced my calories. Now at 238, I know that I must have been eating in the neighborhood of 2380 calories a day to stay so damn fat. I have studied these things for years. I ain’t stupid. Just lazy. There is a formula that says, in effect that if you add a zero to your weight, it will tell you how many calories you are eating to maintain your weight. Of course, the formula is a more complicated than that but I am no math whiz so I keep it simple. You can find how many calories you need to cut to lose a set amount of pounds in a set amount of weeks, months, etc. I try to keep it simple for my simple mind. If my target weight were 200 I would need 2000 calories to reach that weight. No more, no less. If I were to burn off 400 extra calories a day doing exercise I could add 400 calories to that 2000. My ultimate target weight is 115. I am only 5 ft tall. I don't do any exercise. This is so simple even if I was stupid I couldn’t miss. I decided that a good target calorie count was 1200 calories per day. Only my issue with that is — it feels like a rule and though I am willing to keep track of calories, I balk at measuring food for very long. My failure in the past is the same as my failure at following recipes to a T. I don’t measure past the point of having a good guesstimate of an amount. So my target calorie count fluctuates between 900 and 1400 hundred. If I want fries and a burger, I’ll have it. I don’t care about the rules enough to be precise.

So I followed this plan for a month. Breakfast at 12 or 1 pm, stop eating at 8 pm. Aim for a thousand calories. Usually a hair more, sometimes less. An average of 1100 after the week was done and — I lost two pounds. I know that the first two to six pounds loss is usually water so I didn’t get excited but I did feel motivated to keep going. It was painless. I began to experience hunger, in that my stomach felt empty. But my appetite wasn’t screaming for a Little Debbie. Not that I didn’t ever eat desserts. I had a miniature ice cream cone for breakfast one day. I just counted it in my calories and moved on.

The second week I lost another two pounds. Success! I kept going. And I waited till 1 pm to eat breakfast after the second week. I kept losing about two pounds a week. Now I was a little excited. I kept up my motivation by reading everything I could get my hands on about fasting. I read a lot about carb counting too but I love carbs and I am not into depriving myself of them. I know me. If I give up carbs, I can probably do that for a few months but then I will stop and I’ll be right back where I started — and depressed to boot.

I ate whatever I wanted and when I am winning and losing weight I begin to want better fuel to put in my body. Just losing weight is a great motivator. I took more consideration eating a balanced diet. But the cool thing for me was that just fasting and not snacking is so easy that even without counting calories I don’t fear gaining the weight back. I might slow down my weight loss but I won't be left feeling like a failure, or like binging on a tub of Ben and Jerries.

I start on July 16th and today is September 29th. I have lost 13 pounds as of this morning. Now here’s the funny part. I am obsessed with the scales. I drink a couple of liters of water throughout the day. I pee all night. Yeah, it’s a real pain. But I weigh myself every morning before I do anything else and this morning it said 225. Now the thing is an hour after my coffee and a quart of water that scale is going to say 227. I know it. I won’t claim that 225 until it reads 225 at 3 in the afternoon for a couple of days.

I joined several groups on Facebook that are either Fasting or Carb counters or both. I find it is encouraging to brag about my wins. I also find it amusing that so many people are self-proclaimed experts and insist on quoting the rules of Fasting. Purists. I’m not a purist. So when I see some newbie asking if it is against the rules to add creamer to their coffee in the middle of their fast, I giggle at the responses of, ‘Oh you can’t do that or you are breaking your fast.’

Yeah, you are, technically. You aren’t doing a ‘clean’ fast. So the fuck what? I do creamer in my coffee at 9 am. I might have a second cup at 9 pm. Fuck your rules. I am still losing weight, which is my main objective.

The thing is you, as an individual have to do your own homework, you make your own rules, you know what you want the end result to be. If you are making progress just keep doing what you are doing. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. I wrote all that above just to say that last line. IF it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.