"I hit my weight goal, at last, yesterday! That was almost
exactly two years in the making, but that’s the healthy way to get there! I
know, of course, that I will always have to track intake to keep it there, but
for now, I’m through losing weight. (If 180 is too fat, tough luck! That was my
goal from the get-go."
By John Gouwens
This narrative was originally circulated campus‐wide at Culver around January 30, 2014, as an example to others. Now updated on November 17, 2014, I share it with you.
A “Growing” Problem
Those who have known me for awhile were probably aware that I’ve had an issue with increasing weight over many years. It started to get noticeably worse about 13 years ago in connection with a medication I still take which tends to have a side effect on metabolism, leading to weight gain. (I was not, however, ideal weight before that time.) In 2012, I ended up buying new clothes (new tuxedo for music performances, a very nice new suit, six new shirts with size 18 1/2 necks, several pairs of pants) because too much of what I had didn’t fit any more. I even had a couple of pairs of pants that split when still new. This, and being really winded going up stairs, was an increasingly grave concern. I was somewhat in denial about how fat I had gotten, and avoided looking at my body in the mirror, though occasional photos others took on Facebook were all too revealing. (See photo, taken at the carillon at Indiana University. I still can’t believe it when I look at this! That was from 2010. I got worse over the next two years!)
The annual wellness screenings (required of all who are in the insurance at Culver Academies) made me all too aware of what I was doing to my health, of course, and those included marginally high blood pressure and cholesterol in the “yellow” zone (slightly too high). I was horrified, frankly, when I weighed in at 247 by late summer. This simply had to change! Right away, I began eating desserts less often, and trying to be “smarter” in what I consumed. Just making a few adjustments helped some!
MyFitnessPal
I recognized I needed a more structured approach. Way back in 1988, I had successfully lost a considerable amount of weight; I had accomplished that by carefully measuring foods and tracking them against a brochure from the doctor’s office about how many ounces of each food group I could have per day. It worked, but it was certainly complicated, and nearly impossible to do when eating out. So, I made an appointment at our campus clinic (a free clinic for all employees and spouses – one of our recent initiatives) to see what resources are available now. Our Nurse Practitioner, Beth, told me about the website with a mobile phone application called MyFitnessPal.com. This offered a splendid solution, since I’m as addicted to my smart phone as anybody is. MyFitnessPal allows you to track far more than calories. If you’re trying to address carbohydrates, sugars, cholesterol, sodium, etc. it tracks all of that! In my case, I was interested mostly in the calories, but of course in the process, to make any progress at all, I was going to have to go for more foods that were relatively low in fat! MyFitnessPal also allows me to enter exercise, which is great, and it actually allows me to “buy back” some leeway for that day’s calories. It already has an impressive database of foods, particularly from chain restaurants. Many restaurants have website lists of the nutritional information for much if not all of their menus. There are also some third‐party sites that are helpful, such as one for fast foods that allows you, for instance, to assemble your choices for a subway sandwich, tallying up all the stats on each cheese, meat, sauce, etc.
Much of the database in MyFitnessPal is supplied by other users, and whenever I find something I like that isn’t in there, and that looks reasonable for my diet, I enter all the statistics and share most of it to the MyFitnessPal database. (If you see any entries for “Hacienda South Bend,” I put all those in!) It’s a big eye‐opener to see what the calorie content is of some foods! Did you know that a whole Bloomin’ Onion at Outback Steakhouse is 1,949 calories? (The sauce is another 220!) Fear not, Outback’s Filet with wild mushroom sauce is only 273 calories. A 14 oz. New York Strip is 764 calories – rather high! Victoria’s Filet is just 218. You thought that Chicken Cesar Salad was good diet food? Think again! 698 calories! To take another example, at Olive Garden, you can get a (quite tasty) Venetian Apricot Chicken at 420 calories, or Chicken Alfredo at 1,440 calories!! (The latter is much higher calorie than any of their desserts!) It’s about making informed choices. (At some of these places, such as Olive Garden, the servers will bring you the nutrition information paper if you request it.) So, when going out to eat, it’s a good idea to plan what you’re going to have before you get there, or at least to narrow it down to just a few choices. More on that shortly. You can also “friend” other people in MyFitnessPal, and get each other’s updates. I have advertised my progress on Facebook, and several of my friends (including some Culver alumni from many years ago) have joined, and enjoyed real success with it.
Strategy
I believe that to succeed at this, I had to allow myself one regular “vice.” I like a nice, strong beer late at night (a Belgian Dubbel, for instance), and I have one, pretty much every night. Yes, it’s 300 calories or more for 12 ounces, but I budget for it. If I skip the beer one day, I can maybe split a 600‐calorie dessert with my wife. (Olive Garden’s Black Tie Mousse Cake is 760 calories – so we split one sometimes.) At first, I was sticking with 2100 calories per day, but was making awfully slow progress. I lowered the goal to 2000 calories per day, and most days, I am close to 300 calories under that goal, actually. If I walk our dogs for 20 minutes, about 3 mph, that’s 95 calories I am burning, so I can work off some of that dessert. (Actually, since I’m walking two rowdy Siberian huskies at once, it’s probably worth more than that!) 20 minutes of “gardening, general” is 116 calories, depending on your weight. For me, though, I find the equivalence isn’t quite accurate. If I “earn” another 200 calories, and then consume 200 more than I should, I do start to gain again.
I get busy enough with the work I do that I really didn’t want to carve out time dedicated to exercise, aside from occasionally walking the dogs. People who overeat and then try to work it all off are fighting a losing, time‐consuming battle. So, this was all about regulating calorie consumption, while still enjoying tasty, flavorful foods.
I also held out a couple of landmark goals for myself. Several years ago, I bought a beautiful gold‐colored suit (an expensive one), which I Ioved! I happened to get it at a time I was just starting to put on weight significantly, so I was only able to wear it a couple of times. I had kept the suit, though I wasn’t sure I’d ever fit into it again. That became a milestone for me! Later, I had bought an elegant dark brown suit with a subtle plaid material, which I had last been able to wear in about 2010.
Part of this program has entailed doing more cooking at home. With MyFitnessPal, you can enter your recipe, figure out how many servings you will get from it, and it will calculate all the nutritional data. This week, we’re enjoying a Chicken Dijon Pot Pie that’s 723 calories a serving. If I don’t have anything else with it, that works well for supper. Other recipes are lower calorie, like a white chicken chili. 2 cups of that chili, with 4 Tablespoons of fat free sour cream, ¼ cup of shredded cheese, and 29 grams of oyster crackers is all of 683 calories. Both in 1988 and now, it has been critically important to have a good kitchen scale. I weigh the bread and the cheese I have at breakfast. Often I weigh the meat or other ingredients in recipes. We came up with a version of homemade taco salads (using flour tortillas baked in a shaped shell) that is a pretty generous amount of food at 573 calories. I often start the day with a home‐brewed cappuccino, so going to sugar‐free syrup and non‐fat milk dropped that from 250 calories to 30. The bottom line was, I could still eat a whole lot of things I really like and lose weight!
The program also lets me save “remembered meals.” I use this as a shortcut when I go to a restaurant I frequent. I frequently chaperone busloads of students to and from O’Hare Airport. When we get back late (often), we usually stop at a location where Taco Bell is among the choices. I saved four favorite combinations of “meals” that come out to reasonable calorie numbers. Then I saved one monstrous list of everything I thought I might really like – a list with about 8,200 calories, and I delete items until I have it narrowed down to 500‐700 calories. (Note: Grilled stuffed chicken burrito is 758 calories.) I did the same for Outback, Carrabba’s , and Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. You can save your own personal list of foods (not just recipes or meals) also. If you have, say, five combinations of things you like from Subway, there are online tools (Subway now has their own) which total up all the numbers as you design a sandwich, then you can type the results into “My Foods.” If you’re entering something that you get at a restaurant “as is,” you can add it to the database for others to use also.
I can still enjoy something sweet, now and then. If I have a fairly low‐calorie dinner at Carrabba’s or Olive Garden, I can afford a scoop of Ritter’s frozen custard for dessert. Believe it or not, many flavors of Ritter’s are listed in the database (and I added about ten more). A single (already sizable) scoop is anywhere from 230‐300 calories, and the waffle cone is another 100. It’s all in making choices to accommodate what I want to do. (Many Baskin‐Robbins flavors are in the database also, and I’ve added a small number there, also.)
Once in awhile, I allow myself to “cheat” a bit. As long as I don’t eat in ridiculous quantities, Thanksgiving is a day I exceed my goal, but I can afford a day like that maybe once every ten days or so. An extra beer or two on New Year’s Eve won’t undo everything if I behave the rest of the week.
Success Rate
I went onto MyFitnessPal in late December 2012, by then weighing 241; by early May I was at 216! By mid‐September, 2013, I was at 200 pounds, and I finally wore that gold suit, for the first time in years! (The dark brown suit fits me easily now.) Several other suits I couldn’t wear now fit again, as do the vests for several three‐piece suits. I save everything that isn’t horribly worn out, so I still have suits I bought in 1980. (No, I still can’t wear those, and don’t expect to!) I still had many shirts with 17 ½ necks and quite a few with size 17 necks. Though the size 17 necks are just on the borderline, I actually can fasten those collar buttons again. I had been up to size 42 waist size in pants (and those were the ones that had sometimes split open!), and am now handily down to size 36 with room to spare. In our summer staff polo shirts, I had to get extra larges. Now I’m comfortably back in larges.
Recently, I took in three very expensive 3‐piece suits that were about 3 years old, dating from my heaviest period. Fortunately, the clothing store’s tailor was able to alter them to something that still looked good, albeit not quite as precise a fit as they originally were. That was a relief! These were some really nice, three‐piece suits!! I’ve bought just a few new things since, but for the most part, am comfortably back in clothes I had around before. The final goal of 180 still lies ahead. I am at 187.8 at the moment, having reversed a 6‐pound gain in May. (At least I know how!!) That’s certainly a reminder that this is a long‐term commitment, not something where you “take care of the problem” and then go back to your old habits.
Here I am in the gold suit in September, 2013:
It actually fits quite a bit better now!
I’m guessing (not having kept careful records) that it’s been about 19 years since I weighed as little as I do now. I’m not done! I’ve at least gotten to where I can bear to look at myself in the mirror, and I see I’m not finished. I have now surpassed my original goal of 190. I’ve decided I should now go for 180, and that will probably be it. We’ll see! The occasional knee pain I used to have on stairways has pretty much disappeared now! Even if I stay where I am, I feel way better, have far more energy, get around so much more easily, and let me tell you, it’s definitely an ego trip to shed lots of weight! I waited until late October to go through the wellness screening. Here’s the difference I’ve made in one year, and the update at the second year:
I have to admit, I was disappointed that last stat wasn’t a whole lot better, but so many of the statistics have improved, and I certainly feel better! Over the past year (November 2013‐2014), I didn’t really change what I was doing particularly, but the weight loss has slowed to more of a holding pattern, but that didn’t really happen until I was at 192. By January 20 I finally broke the 190 barrier (at 189). The last time I was at 189 was back in 1991, so it was a step to get to that point! Once I got below 190, I had to buy some new pants, and I was able to get several suits dating from my worst period successfully altered. New suits used to have lots of fiddling to fit me right. Now, I perfectly fit a 44 Regular with no fussing at all, only a hemming. Obviously, I’ve hit a point where my proportions are better!
I had a few fluctuations over the past seven months, though mostly was within sight of my goal. It’s a good reminder, to keep the weight off, it’s a lifetime commitment, and as you get closer to your goal, it does get harder to hit it! (This is probably also that my metabolism has changed since I shed the worst of my weight.) Finally, I got there! 179.6 on November 17, 2014!
So, I’ve managed to eat in a way that I enjoy, still enjoy dessert and/or beer, and still keep calorie consumption low enough to lose lots of weight. I enthusiastically recommend MyFitnessPal! It’s well worth all the fiddling I had to do to get my favorite foods saved to it. I plan on tracking my eating this way permanently. Incidentally, since the Dining Hall has started posting nutrition information on its food, I’ve entered many of their items (especially the ones I’m likely to eat) into MyFitnessPal, so I can track those meals right along with everything else!
I will always have to keep tabs on how much I consume to keep this under control, even now that I’ve hit my goal. I have no intention of losing more. I do not want to have to scrap or replace my whole wardrobe! I’m too practical for that! With luck, or maybe by keeping up enough activity to burn off calories more consistently, I can allow my calorie consumption to go back up somewhat, now that I’m. If I had totally denied myself the foods I liked, I might have lost faster, but I wouldn’t be able to sustain it. This pattern of eating I can definitely maintain. For the many among you who need to shed weight, I warmly recommend MyFitnessPal, especially if you enjoy dealing with the technology. I really never thought I’d have this kind of success. As bad as I had gotten, I never thought I’d be asked to share my experiences as an example to others! I’m absolutely thrilled, but I’m also still working at it! Join me if you like!
John Gouwens
Fine Arts Department
