Weight Loss Program for People On The Go

A lot of people have asked me to share my secrets to losing about 10% of my body weight in about 3.5 months. When you get to be in your mid-40's, it can creep up on you fast. 

If you're someone like me who is on the road a LOT, and spending the great majority of your day in meetings and appointments, the ability to eat good meals throughout the day is tortuous. But it doesn't have to be. 

Here is a collection of tips that I've gotten from friends, neighbors and relatives. This is meant to be EASY (I hate complicated things and can't possibly "manage" one more thing)

Meals:

I prepare a bunch of hard-boiled eggs and cook up a bunch of bacon and/or chicken on Sunday evenings.

Breakfast:

One hard-boiled egg, one piece of bacon, coffee, low cal/lite orange juice (ie Trop 50).

Lunch:

One hard-boiled egg, one piece of protein (chicken or bacon), vegetables and hummus, bbq sauce for the chicken is fine I have found. Skip fruit until you’ve gone down to your target weight, then add it back in. Buy a lot of Tupperware lunch containers.

No sandwiches, subs, fast food, period. Try to limit how many times you eat out for sit-down lunch or meet clients for lunch. Suggest coffee instead, or meet at your office. There’s really nothing decent on most lunch menus that is sub 500 calories. Salads are even horrible generally. A chicken breast and an egg are 300 calories. 1 tablespoon of bbq sauce is only 35 calories. That’s the perfect number of calories for a meal. Pre-peel the egg and you can eat it all on the go in your car with relatively no mess (less than Taco Bell anyway).

One Jimmy John’s sub has 1600 mg of sodium (!), and the bread equivalent of 3 BIG MACS. Don’t believe me? Cut your sub into 3 pieces and compare it to a Big Mac bun. Even an unwich has the sodium on the meat. Just skip it all. You’re being duped by their marketing teams.

Mid afternoon snack:

Mixed nuts or vegetables like sugar snap peas or cucumber slices. Even a small bag of chips is fine. One SMALL bag. Pickles and peppers are also good.

Dinner:

Meat/fish, potatoes and vegetables. No pasta! Tacos with ground turkey are good, use low carb shells. Say goodbye to pizza for at least three months. If the family wants pizza delivered, order the bbq wings for yourself. After 2 – 3 months of not having pizza, most pizza will gross you out anyway.

Fasting:

When you feel hungry during the day between meals, let it go. Drink a lot of water and in 10 – 15 minutes it will pass. If you don’t feed your body it will switch to burning all the fat that it has stored up. And believe me, we all have plenty. A growling stomach is not a signal that you are dying, it’s just your stomach acid kicking in because it’s expecting to be fed.

Those periods of fasting are actually good for your body. It makes your body stronger because it has to tap into reserve stored energy, i.e. fasting kicks your metabolism into high gear.

Drinking:

No happy hour meetings with clients or friends, especially over beers, at least for a couple of months. A 16oz pint of a 7% ABV craft beer (IPA) is 250 - 260 calories. 2 pints are 520 calories (obviously). Imperial Stouts are even higher at about 400 – 500 calories per pint. A 5 oz glass of wine is better at only 130 calories. Mixed drinks aren’t my cup of tea but I’ve read that Tequila is the best alternative.

Exercise:

Apparently 80% of losing weight is what you eat, and 20% is exercise. But you should schedule time to workout into your calendar. Find workouts you enjoy, they will be much more sustainable. A Y membership is less than $100 a month and they have showers. The downtown Y is especially cool.

I partake in the stair climber, upper body weight lifting (not bench pressing 150 lbs, just high repetition lower weights), yoga, planks, brisk walking, and a lot of road biking and mountain biking (stationary biking in bad weather).

I would try and schedule in at least 5 hours of exercise a week. Workout until you are soaking with sweat at least 5 days a week. If you’re not sweating profusely, you’re not working out hard enough and not getting your heart rate up enough. You can't "walk around the neighborhood" every evening and expect to lose weight. 

Water:

Keep a bottle of water on you all day. Keep refilling it. Keep drinking it.

The goal is not to “lose weight,” but to get your body back down to the weight it’s supposed to be before you started filling it with fake food. And the goal is to not feel that "jiggle" when you go over all those potholes in your daily travels. 

You will think that you won't be able to stand eating the same thing every day. But trust me, the feeling you will get by a) not stressing out about where you're going to fit lunch in,  and b) the feeling you will get when your clothes begin to fit again and you actually don't mind when people take pictures of you will far outweigh those perceptions of deprivation. And are you really depriving yourself? Hellz no. Your body is addicted to fake foods.

The first two meals of the day are FUEL to get through the day. Dinner is the reward (still limit the carbs). 

Good luck and keep me posted as to how you do over the first month of this "program." 

Jeff

* Tips for making the perfect hard-boiled egg: bring the water to a boil before putting the eggs in, 13 minutes at a low boil, remove from heat and drain off the boiling water (be careful), add cold tap water. Pour off the water again in 5 minutes and replace with cold water again.

** Tips for easy-to-make bacon: buy thick cut bacon that is stacked (because regular sliced bacon is a slimy joke), use a cookie sheet and cover with aluminum foil with no-stick spray, oven to 400 degrees, lay out as many slices of bacon as possible on the cookie sheet, 18 – 20 minutes depending on whether you like soft or crunchy bacon, lay on a paper towel after cooking, stick it in a freezer bag. No messy frying pan to clean up, just roll up the aluminum foil and into the trash!