My problem was that I loved to consume all of the things that were not good for me: pop, caramel macchiatos, chocolate bars, fast food. I had a lot of stress at work and when I have high stress my eating habits take a dive. At a very bad point, I was buying a carmel macchiato and snack at my mid-morning break at work, buying lunch at the cafeteria which almost always included fries or chips and dessert, then had a bottle of pop and a snack like a candy bar or bag of chips in the afternoon.

I had an office job and sat most of the day at my computer or in meetings. I worked many hours and would be tired when I got home. I like watching television and movies and reading, so in the evenings I’d continue sitting.

Breaking these habits was very difficult. Over a long period of time I was able to get down to where I was hovering around 200 lbs. That took years.The event that became my motivator was that after my annual blood work, my cholesterol was (once again) high. My doctor said that I was going to have to go on a statin drug.

Now, I don’t often conform to conventional wisdom. One of those areas is conventional use of pharmaceuticals. I did some research about cholesterol and statin drugs. Statins aren’t the kind of drug that I was interested in. I put off my doctor and said that I wanted to my cholesterol with diet and exercise and not with pharmaceuticals.

I knew right away I would have to do and would give the biggest reward was to stop drinking sugar. As I said, I love pop and fancy fru-fru coffee drinks. It was hard. I had a change jobs and used that as a catalyst to break the habit of going to the coffee shop every day. Quitting my pop fix would be more difficult as pop purchases were not confined to a specific location like the coffee drinks. But I wanted the change. I needed to make drastic lifestyle changes or I would end up being on a lifetime drug.

I had given up pop before for short periods of time, usually Lent. Pop and I had to completely and permanently break up. When I stop drinking pop altogether, I’m okay. When I quit, I can’t have even a little taste. If I do I’m back to a bottle a day. So, it’s been about 2 years or so since I’ve had any pop.

Way back in the early 2000s I did the Atkins diet for awhile with some success. I liked the food that I could eat, and the science seemed sound to this non-scientist. I can’t think back to remember why, but I didn’t stick with it.

Within the last year, I heard about and started reading about the keto diet. From what I recalled it was very similar to the Atkins diet. I started doing that (again), greatly reducing my carb intake for a certain period at the beginning to shock my system. In some ways the heavy travel schedule with my current job was helpful. Because I eat at restaurants, the change in my eating habits didn’t have to impact how we bought groceries or how we prepared food for the family. I haven’t found a restaurant yet that would not substitute a second order of veggies for the starch.

So, to make it simple, I cut out all breads, rice and potatoes. I stayed away from breaded foods and sweet sauces. Candy and other forms of refined sugar were out too. I ate more proteins and veggies. Lots of veggies.

A third tactic was to stop eating breakfast. My wife had heard about and was practicing prolonging her evening fast by not eating breakfast. This seemed a heresy, as I was programmed all my life that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I never asked “important for who?”. Sometime in the summer of 2017 I tried it. I never imagined it would work because even when I ate breakfast every day I would be starving by 10 or 11am. How much worse would that be if I didn’t have anything to eat. Before you say “well it makes a difference what you eat for breakfast”, I know that my experience did not reflect much difference in foods. Regardless of whether I ate bacon and eggs (protein/fat), breakfast cereal (carb/simple sugar) or oatmeal (carb/complex sugar) sometime between 10 and 11 my stomach would start to growl and it would feel like I hadn’t eaten in days.

I’m willing to try just about anything, so I tried my wife’s idea. Again a heavy work travel schedule helped. To not eat breakfast meant that I could sleep in a little, and I just avoided going to the lobby. I was pretty amazed that I wasn’t famished in the morning. My mid-morning hunger pangs disappeared and I could make it to lunch without feeling hungry at all.

A nice side-effect of this was that since I didn’t feel extra hungry at lunch or any time later than I did before, I could effectively cut out those calories from my daily intake.

I didn’t get much exercise, I recognized that problem. I tried small things just to say I did something. For example, I would park far from my office so that I’d have to walk farther going to and from my car. Although I ate fast food too often, I would make sure to walk to the restaurant and maybe do an around the block circuit on my way back to the office. I had about 2 acres of grass to mow at home and purposely bought a heavy-duty walk behind mower so that I wasn’t sitting while mowing on Saturday as well.

For a long time I’ve taken the stairs instead of an escalator or elevator. I continued to do this at my hotels, always taking the stairs, even when checking in and out when I’d have my suitcase. I read on somebody’s blog that a “real man” only packs what bag he can carry and doesn’t roll his bag at the airport. I’ve tried to implement this by carrying my suitcase instead of wheeling it. I bought a backpack as my carry-on item and often walk when I’m in between flights.

For most of my life, when I would try to lose weight, I’d start some form of a cardio routine. I’d run or bike or use the elliptical machine. I never saw great results no matter how I pushed myself. Let me clarify. If I kept at it, and pushed myself, I would definitely see improvement in how long or far I could go. When I lived in Manitoba, I was able to run two half marathons in two weeks. But I still had a lot of fat, and that fat didn’t seem to be reduced by the amount of running or biking that I’d do.

A few years ago I started hearing that building muscle through strength training, is more effective at burning fat than cardio workouts. I’ve never been athletic or strong, but I thought that I’d give it a try. A colleague of mine at Coe had on her wall the 30 day push-up challenge. I didn’t have weights at home, but I could do push-ups. My 30-day challenge took me an extra 15 to 20 days as it took me extra time to get to the first day’s number of pushups. I think it was 25. I don’t know if I made it to all 30 days, but I kept at it for most of the month. I would break up the number into sets of 8-10 to get to the requisite number of push-ups for the day. It worked really well. It didn’t take much time each day and I felt like I could start seeing some definition after a week or so. What did me in was that when I was getting up to 60 or more push-ups per day, my wrists became very sore. Eventually I took a break and then stopped.

When I had to get serious about losing weight, I started with the push-ups again. I read that some high percentage of Americans cannot do 25 consecutive pushups. That was my goal. I would get to, and continue doing at least 25 pushups per day. It didn’t take a lot of time, but it was something. It was a small enough amount that I wouldn’t hurt my wrists.

Like before, I started seeing results pretty quickly. Obviously I didn’t turn into Arnold Schwatzenegger or anything like that, but I could see and feel that I was getting stronger. Soon I added a forearm plank for however long I could hold it.

Later, I read a different MMM article about working the legs. His point was that the muscles in the legs are the biggest muscles, so you get lots of fat burning bang for your buck by increasing your leg muscles. He’s all about the squats. Well, I still don’t have any weights to work with, but I can do squats with just my own body weight, so, that’s what I did. I added 25 reps of body squats to my daily repertoire. So now, just about every day, I do 25 push ups, a plank and 25 body squats.

That has helped me lose fat and build strength. A great combination.

My final tactic is to leave food on my plate. I’m sure most of us grew up hearing our parents admonish us to clean our plates. “Don’t you know there are starving kids in…” was the guilt trip refrain. That mantra was drilled deep into my psyche. Even when I was full, I would clean my plate or feel guilty.

I read (yet another) great Mister Money Mustache article about how ridiculous this philosophy is. He said that if you’re full, or even before you get “full”, stop eating. Just stop.

His rationale made great sense. By the time I read that article, I was rockin’ the weight loss, and was in the zone to keep it going. I don’t know what the magic words he used were, but I started doing it right away. I made it my mission to deliberately leave food on my plate (I have less control of portion size when I travel and eat at restaurants most of the time. At home, I take a deliberately small portion and don’t go for seconds). It was liberating!

So that’s how I did it. That’s how I went slowly from 225 in the early 2010s to 160 lbs now. My refined goal it to get to 155 by the end of this year. When I’ve been there for about a month or so, then I’m going to work harder at strength building. That will probably increase my weight again, but in a good way.

Change is hard at first, but if you’re disciplined enough to keep at it, then you will form a new habit and it will be just as natural as the old habit had been. It helps to have a good motivator mine was that I didn’t want to go on a permanent cholesterol drug. Working slowly helped too. I knew that it had taken me years to put on all that weight. I had tried many quick fixes in the past, but they only lasted in the short term. My new strategy was to change my behaviors and slowly (1-2 lbs per week) reduce the weight. That system has worked very well for me.