I’m an average frame 54yo male. 7 years ago I was in pretty good shape, weighing somewhere in the 170s. Sometime during 2012 my diet started to go south. I would eat healthy most of the week but I’d drink way too much wine every day and weekends were especially bad with all day long “cheat days” on Saturdays and snacking continuing into Sundays. Then there was traveling for work and eating out too often.
Despite exercising 30 minutes 5 days a week, my weight climbed slowly over the years. Finally, this past summer I hit a peak of over 207. Fortunately, on July 9 I decided to go on Mercola.com for some reason and it’s there that I read an article about intermittent fasting, which lead me to another article about keto. I thought why not, so I jumped fully into both the next day with a goal weight of 175 (32lb reduction).
As I’m sure many here have experienced, the first 20lbs went off pretty fast…I hit that in late August. The next 12 seemed to go much more slowly, but I finally hit my goal weight of 175 on Sept 29. The last few weeks have been much more up and down for me but I set a new goal weight of 170 and I’m currently at 172. I’m actually at a point where my wife is worried that if I keep dropping below 170 I’ll look too skinny. I told her I’d up my carbs and protein a little to try to stay around that weight while I work on adding some muscle.
Here’s my program:
Summary: Intermittent fasting (17/7), 2 meals a day (limiting snacking in-between), 1400-1700 calories a day (yeah, I count them), and below 18g of carbs. My ratios are usually something like 65% fat, 28% protein, and 7% carbs. I cut out all the crap/processed/fake food and try to eat as close to nature as possible. I stop eating when I’m full and I don’t force myself to eat to get to a certain ratio or number of calories.
Each day I eat my first meal around noon to 1pm, some days later depending on how hungry I am. Usually around noon I’m not really all that hungry. I only have coffee (no limit) or tea or water in the mornings. (5 days a week I still do 30 min of weights or cardio in the mornings plus walking the dogs 2 miles, but I find that working out doesn’t seem to impact my weight loss very much). I usually have 500 calories and around 2g carbs at lunch, something like 2 eggs scrambled plus cheese plus a quarter avocado plus something else like 4 slices of bacon or 1oz manchego cheese or some days sardines in olive oil. I usually have a diet soda at lunch…I know they’re horrible for you but I get so tired of water/tea/coffee that it gives me a mental boost and doesn’t impact my weight loss. (Some day when I really don’t need to lose any more weight I’ll substitute something like kombucha in its place).
For the 2nd meal I usually target around 1000 calories and 14g carbs. I’m still able to have dry white wine many days…so it’s not uncommon to get 300 calories and 8g carbs from the wine, but I always try to stay under 1600 calories and 18g carbs total for the day. For me that’s not hard because I’ll usually have around 6oz of some kind of non-lean meat, then a salad with olive oil and/or broccoli, asparagus, or cauliflower with butter or cheese and I’m never left feeling hungry.
I know this doesn’t work for everybody and it seems like it’s harder for the ladies…
My wife started a few weeks after me after she saw how much success I was having. After a month of trying my plan she gave up and tried a modified form of it where she had more carbs but still stayed below 40g and limited calories to 1000-1200/day. Like me she rarely feels hungry and like me she stops eating when she’s full. She has lost close to 20lbs so far and is close to her target weight as well.
Sorry to ramble on with this long post…just wanted to say thank you to this community for the advice and support and share what has worked for me in case it helps somebody else.