The 40 year old Twinkie

Last year I experienced a confluence of events that would be an exaggeration to say  changed my life, so I’ll opt to say they modified my life, not the least of which was turning forty.  Turning forty itself wasn’t that significant, more of a relief once the threshold had passed. I guess I had been subconsciously aware of its looming arrival.  Nevertheless, it got me thinking about my age and my health.  Until my thirties I had always been extremely thin, but that lost decade had seen me fluctuate between 160 and 190 lbs.  Each time I’d get heavy, disgust myself and then attempt to loose some weight fast, using Atkins, South Beach and other nonsense.  They worked temporarily but weren’t sustainable lifestyles. 

About the time I turned forty last year, a few other things happened.  I had been diagnosed which some severe reflux and some other minor health concerns that required that I alter my diet.  I went to Disney with my family and found myself once again disgusted with my 180 lb. self in family photos from the trip.  And I came across the Twinkie diet by chance.  The Twinkie diet crystallized for me what I always believed but for whatever reason was reluctant to accept.  And I’m sure I can list a lot of familiar reasons.  Ultimately, its all about calories, period.  No perfect mixture of proteins and vegetables of a certain color, not eating a bigger breakfast, or eating numerous tiny meals throughout the day. 

Inspired by its simplicity, I picked that last weight that I thought of myself as thin, 150 lbs.  and targeted the number of daily calories required to get there.  I used sites  like Livestrong and LoseIt.   Livestrong has the more complete food catalog but LoseIt integrated with fitbit, which I also picked up. None of those are critical, but mildly interesting.  I’m not especially anal about analyzing and tracking. Fitbit isn’t particularly accurate but it is effortless.  Therefore, I picked a low calorie number, 1500, to make sure that since I was going to be ball parking a lot, even if I was substantially off I’d still end up pretty low. I even threw in some P90X and Insanity workouts, but I had a hard time finding the time for those with any regularity, but they contributed.  After about 5 months I hit my 150 lb. goal, mostly on the wings of caloric restriction.

Unfortunately, 150 lbs. didn’t quite turn out to be a thin as I had expected and the Thanksgiving to Christmas time frame saw me gain back about six pounds.  But using the same Twinkie principles I was able drop 10 pounds again from 156 to 146, which is about as light as I’ve been since I was 25.  The beauty is that I still eat junk food, and go off the wagon pretty frequently, but as long as I’m roughly accounting for the calories the weight loss seems pretty sustainable.

Now if I could only suck back down to my 112 lb. high school wrestling weight, now that would be something.