How I Dropped 50 lbs of Ugly Fat Without Cutting Off My Head

You know what the worst vice in the world is?
AD-vice.
So I’m not giving you any.
I’m just going to tell you a story.

Prologue: Once upon a time I trained with a woman named Mary, who had been a successful athlete in both gymnastics and track. She was widely known to the denizens of the Third Street Gym as “Crazy Mary.” Mary trained so hard it made other ladies faint, strong men weep, and undertakers rub their palms in glee.
She was obviously and seriously nuts.
So naturally, we became pals.
One day, taking a break between brutal compound descending sets for legs, with forced reps to failure (don’t worry if you don’t understand what that means), we hit the water cooler for a quick sip.
“I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news,” Mary said, with her customary film noir deadpan.
“Lay it on me,” I said. “What’s the good news?”
“The good news is: there’s a fast, easy way to get into kick-ass shape.”
“Great,” I said. “What’s the bad news?”
“The bad news is: THIS IS the fast, easy way to get into kick-ass shape.”
And with that we went back to work.

I recently had a bad tangle with a textbook psychopath who made Rhoda Penmark look like Shirley Temple. Until you’ve taken a turn around the dance floor with a psychopath, you have no idea how malicious, mendacious, and manipulative a human being can be. Or how dangerous.

At the same time, I had blown the whistle on corruption by the local board of fire commissioners, who, along with some officers of the fire company, had engaged in conduct that was unsafe, unethical or flat-out illegal. I filed a formal complaint. I went public. For me, it was a moral imperative. I couldn’t live with myself if I’d let it slide and someone got hurt or worse.
You do know what happens to whistle-blowers, right?

I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow.
Suffice it to say, I was experiencing a substantial amount of emotional stress.
To make it worse, the coping strategy that had allowed me to survive my uglysome childhood was that when somebody or something hurts you, do something that hurts MORE. It will put the original pain in some perspective and give you an illusion of control, see?
When in pain, I’d beat the heavy bag until my knuckles were bloody (“hand wrap? What’s a “hand wrap?”). I’d sprint hills until my lungs were burned to a crisp and my heat pounded like Gene Krupa doing “Sing, Sing, Sing.” I’d run until I was shuffling along on lead weights.
Upon reflection this may not be the world’s best coping strategy.

To deal with the emotional pain I was feeling now, I went to my old tried-and-true. I doubled down on my workouts. I scored personal bests in the deadlift and the squat. My 30-second hill sprint distance became a 24-second distance. To get leaner, if not meaner, I started a “ketogenic” style diet.
Why not? Hell, I’m SUPERMAN, Daddy-o.

Well, Superman, meet Kryptonite.
I started to gain weight — and not muscle-weight, either.
No matter how strictly I ate or how hard and consistently I trained, bad pounds continued to boogie on up. I ballooned from a 34” waist to a 44” waist in less than two years, and try as I might, I could not reverse the process.
Something was wrong.
It didn’t make sense.
On paper, with my low calorie intake, and my high calorie output, I should have been leaner than a back-street stiletto. Instead, I could have stunt-doubled for the Pillsbury Doughboy. This weight gain remained intransigent for six years. I grew increasingly frustrated, depressed, baffled, bothered and bewildered.

Here’s what I finally figured out, with the help of different “-path,” of the naturo kind.
The combination of intense physical stress chronic emotional stress added up to more total stress than my system could recover from. My cortisol was in orbit; my testosterone was deeper in the cellar than the Chicago Cubs. Or, as my natural doc put it so succinctly, “Your adrenal glands are fucked.”

I took a whole year off training, during which time event was a slow 15-minute walk. More like a stroll. Or an amble. And only a few times per week.
I swallowed a host of nutritional supplements, secret herbs, and spices to revive my adrenal glands, so punched-out that they couldn’t even produce cortisol anymore. I recovered at a glacial pace, but I recovered.

However, even a progressive return to what I considered more “normal” (for me) activity did not result in dropping the weight I needed to drop.
At my most dismal point, I weighed in at 248 pounds.
It was intolerable.
I had to do something.
I burned the midnight oil, googled the hell out of it, desperately poured over textbooks, scoured the latest studies for a clue. In the course of that frenzy, quite by accident, I stumbled upon “The Half-Day Diet,” by some guy I’d never heard of, Nate Miyaki. As I read it, I recalled an old school physical culturist telling me, in the waybackwhen, “You can’t out-train a lousy diet.”
Yeah. Preach it, Brother.
Credit where credit is due, I have to say, it was Nate Miyaki’s little book that finally bumped me in the right direction.

To start with, I had been using the wrong fuel for the activity I was doing. My high-intensity work needed carbs and I wasn’t eating any, or at least not enough. I’d have to change that.
I also discovered the stupidity of eating 3-squares a day — a practice that kept poking my pancreas with a stick causing them to produce too much insulin which resulted in storing body fat. I’d have to change that, too.

Okay.
Here’s how I went about it.
First I decided out what my “ideal” weight was: 175 lbs. (Actually, I’d be fine anywhere between 175 and 185, but I intentionally set my sights high.)
Then I ate for that weight.
That is, I matched my caloric intake to the weight I wanted to be, not the weight I was. I estimated that I would need 10 calories per pound to maintain that weight if I were sedentary. So 1750 calories per day.

But I wasn’t sedentary.
My typical training plan went like this:
1) Weight training. 3–4days per week, using a basic formula of 3 sets to failure, alternating between 5–6 rep maximums and 8–12 rep maximums. I used a variety of “splits” working each major muscle group twice per week.

2) Hill Sprints — once a week. 30-second all-out sprint. Repeated 4–8 times with a 2:30–3:00 recovery interval in between. I counted sprint day as a “leg” workout, so I only did one “leg day” with weights.

3) Walking. 1–2 walks per day 30–45 minutes each. The main purpose of these low-intensity walks was to help me recover from my high-intensity training.

I added additional calories for every high-intensity workout per week. One such workout meant 11 calories per pound (1925 cals per day); two workouts, 12 calories per pound (2100); 3 workouts, 13 calories s per pound (2275 cals per day).

After calculating my caloric requirements, I figured out my macro-nutrients. I went with .7 gram of protein pound of bodyweight (at 175 that would be122 grams of protein). Next, I calculated my need for essential fats. After that, the rest was carbohydrates.

Now that I knew what I was going to eat, and how much, I turned my attention to WHEN I was going to eat, and I’m convinced that this was the real key. I instituted a daily 16 hour fast. I finished dinner at 8PM, and didn’t eat until Noon the next day.

I found that I preferred having a very light meal of just a couple hundred calories to break my fast, and eat most of my calories at dinner. Often, because I wasn’t hungry at noon, I’d let the fasting period stretch to 18 hours.

My break-fast was most often coffee with 1 TBS of coconut oil, and a scoop of protein powder, sexed up with some cinnamon and ginger.
Dinner looked like this: 7–10 cups of fresh raw veggies dressed with my DIY concoction of olive oil, apple cider vinegar, and spices; three servings of protein (a serving is 3 eggs or four ounces of meat), and 3 servings of carbs (a serving is 1 cup of potatoes, sweet potatoes or rice).

I designated Saturday as “Feast Day.” Normal breakfast, but no rules, no restrictions for dinner. If I wanted pizza or ice cream, or etc., it was going to be on Saturday night.

Using this approach, I never felt hungry, and I never felt “deprived,” and I dropped from 248 to 215 over the course of a year. That figure is a little deceptive. I probably lost MORE than 33 pounds of fat. At the same time, I added some muscle, and muscle is more dense than fat, and that isn’t reflected on the scale, which only measures your total bodyweight, and not body composition. Wrong tool for that. Like the guy who took a ruler to bed with him so he could measure how long he slept.

I hit a plateau at 215 pounds.

I knew my training and nutrition were solid, so I decided to tweak my fasting. I took another look at the 5:2 Diet, which included two days per week of extremely low calories, but that one didn’t grab me because I figured if I’m going to fast, I’m going to fast, not fuck around. I took a look at the Eat-Stop-Eat approach with included a 24-hour fast once or twice per week. I also read a bunch of stuff by Dr, Jason Fung, and that gave me a couple of ideas.
I decided to try two non-consecutive days of fasting, starting from the end of dinner, at 8PM, through the ENTIRE next day, and eating again at noon of the following day. That’s a 40-hour fast, twice a week, with one of those longer fasts coming right after Feast Day.

It took about seven months on this plan to whittle my weight down to where it is now, 197 pounds, with a 36" waist. My training has been more or less a constant. I still have a few pounds to go, and I may try a few more experimental tweaks, but I’m going to stick with this as my basic plan as long as I keep making progress on it.

This is not an “overnight miracle”, a no-effort trick or hack, not a just-take-this-magic pill, or eat-all-the-crap-you-want-and-still-lose-weight approach.
But I dig it.
It’s the real deal, Daddy-o.
It takes some time, but you could say this IS the fast way to lose weight.

So that’s my tale of whoa.
Will MY approach work for YOU?
How the hell would I know?
I don’t give advice.
I’m just sayin.’

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