Today I weighed under 200 pounds for the first time in 7 years, which means I've lost over 30 pounds in three months. I'm pretty happy about it and thought I would write a little post to share how I did it. Back in May I decided I wanted to lose weight. I looked up how much I should weigh and doing the math realized I was about 70 pounds over weight. Before I explain how I lost weight without exercising and still drinking beer every night, let me give you an idea of what my eating and drinking habits were like. From the time I woke up in the morning until I went to bed, I had to have a drink, either Pepsi or Beer. So I was drinking probably about 6 cans of Pepsi a day and about 8 20oz Miller Lights at night. I knew I could never lose weight and continue this habit. I also do a lot of driving for work and for some reason when I was in the car I had to have snacks, also, while drinking beer I had to eat something between sips of beer. My snacks consisted of crap like Combos, Slim Jims, Doritos, Honey Roasted Cashews, and Funyuns. I was eating fast food at least 5 times a week and sometimes as often as 10 times.
I knew I obviously could not keep these habits up and expect to lose weight so the first week I cut everything out. No beer, no more snacks, and I limited myself to 1 Pepsi in the morning, water the rest of the day. That week I probably lost 15 pounds alone. I don't know for sure exactly how much, because I only started weighing myself towards the end of that week and I weighed 225. I know I was at least 230 at the beginning of the week but possibly 240.
I'd say I did pretty good the first week but I decided there was no way I was going to be able to keep up that routine. i just enjoy drinking beer too much and even more addicting to me is the Pepsi. I went back to drinking beer at night and Pepsi during the day but I knew this was going to slow my weight loss efforts down to a crawl if not halt them all together. I did put a limit on myself on how many I could drink though. I looked up how many calories I should be eating daily and learned it should be around 3,000 but if I wanted to lose weight without exercising, it would need to be closer to 2,000. I had to do a little math and try to figure out about how many calories I was consuming with my old habits. 6 cans of Pepsi @ 150 calories each was 900 calories alone! Wow! I knew I had to limit those. I'm still drinking about 3 cans a day which is 450 calories. I have tried multiple different alternative to Pepsi and so far found nothing that I enjoy. I even went as far as to make a carbonated Sweat Tea. lol Please though, if you have any suggestions leave them in the comments for me, I still want to cut back on Pepsi if I can. Ok so the beer was about 120 calories per can @ 8 per night, comes to 960 calories. I wanted to be realistic at first so I decided to limit myself to only 6 of these at 720 calories. So now I have 720 calories in beer and 450 calories in Pepsi alone, which is 1170 calories in just drinks every day. I had to limit myself to 1,000 calories or less in actual food. I still wanted to have a snack while driving in the car so I looked at the calorie count on some of the stuff I would normally get at the gas station. Pretty much everything I looked at had at least 300 calories per serving size and multiple serving sizes per bag. I finally looked at a bag of sunflower seeds and it was less than 200 calories for the whole bag. It takes me about a week to eat a whole bag of sunflower seeds so I figured this would be a good snack for the car and I've been eating them every day since then. I limit my meals down to 400 calories or less. I typically eat just meat now for lunch or dinner (sometimes I combine the two) a half pound of, chicken, pork, steak, or seafood. This is never more than 400 calories even if I use a little A-1, barbecue sauce, or honey. I also like to get a package of Broccoli and Cheese or Corn, I think they're made by Green Giant, they're no more than 140 calories for the whole box, but I figured I should probably eat some kind of vegetable. lol
I did that exact same diet for about 2 months and kind of plateaued on my weight for awhile so I decided I need to do more. I figured I couldn't possibly continue to lose weight drinking that much beer with all the calories and carbs in it so I looked into beers with the lowest calories and found Bud Select 55, with only 55 calories in a 12 oz can. I started to drink a couple of these between regular Miller Lights and it was working. I started to lose weight again. Right now I'm actually down to one regular beer per night and the rest is the Bud Select. I think I'm probably only drinking about 360 calories in beer per night, which is half of what I was when I first started. .
Well, that is where I am at today and I still want to lose another 30 pounds. Let me know if you're interested in hearing updates and I will post again sooner or later. Also I'm open to suggestions as well in the comments.
You are describing the power of seeing results. When you lose weight you get motivated to keep it going. Resist the urge to give up when you plateau. You are doing the right thing to find ways to change your diet to keep losing weight. And you've identified your weaknesses and are finding ways to manage them. That's great work! My only suggestion is to incorporate more fruits and vegetables into your diet - and add a bit of exercise to your routine. Keep us posted on your progress :)
LOL!