A year ago today, I began following a nutrition and workout program with the goal in mind of losing weight. The very initial plan was to just follow Bill Phillip's 90 days Body for Life challenge, but I also had a more long term goal of dropping about 70 lbs although I didn't quite know how long that would take. It turns out I've lost 60 lbs so far. Not nearly as impressive as some others, but still a decent amount.

What I'm going to offer here are tips and advice that I've drawn from my experience. I don't pretend to have all of the answers but I can promise an honest, open account of my experience. First though, the before-after shots:

Nutrition

Sunday-Friday, I eat six meals a day, relatively evenly spaced throughout the day:

• Meal one: omelette made with 1 egg beater serving and 1 real egg, fat-free yougurt
• Meal two: protein shake/bar (I use regular Myoplex and Cliff Bars)
• Meal three: turkey-cheese sandwhich, raw carrots
• Meal four: protein shake/bar
• Meal five: this is the meal I eat when I get back from work, it varies every day but is always chicken, lean meat or fish, a serving of carbs (potato or whole weat pasta / rice) and a serving of veggies
• Meal six: It varies somewhat but usually either chicken and rice soup or a burrito with 1 full egg and 2 egg whites with a slice of cheese.

This adds up to just over 2,000 calories a day. If I get hungry throughout the day, I eat almonds or a slice of turkey. On Saturdays I eat whatever I want. No restriction whatsoever. I typically don't feel that good on Sunday mornings...

Exercise

I exercise in the mornings Sunday-Friday (Saturdays are off). I do the cardio on an empty stomach and don't eat for an hour after I'm done (this allows the body to keep burning fat even after you're done). For lifting, though, I do eat beforehand to have more strength and push harder.

• Sun-Tue-Thu: 20 min of stationary bike at variable intensity.
• Fridays: 45 min of Biceps & Back
• Mondays: 45 min of Chest & Triceps
• Wednesdays: 45 min Quads, Hamstrings, Calves, Abs and Shoulders

Although you can lose weight with just cardio or even just by changing your nutrition alone, you'd be missing out on a huge aid. Lifting doesn't just develop your muscles: it raises your whole metabolism, training your body to burn more calories, not just when you're lifting but all the time.

Results

I started at 289 pounds. I'm now at 229. That's 60 pounds even. I've kept a pretty good record of my progress, which can be found on this chart. Here is the small version of it:

The spikes in the line are almost always caused by my day off. Since I can eat whatever I want on that day I'll sometimes gain 4 or 5 pounds from that day alone. Of course most of that is just water retention, and I lose it all and then some during the week.

Obviously, this is getting harder as time goes on. I lost 21 pounds in the first quarter, 20 in the second, 11 in the third and 8 in the fourth. I seem to be approaching some sort of natural weight plateau, barely losing a quarter pound a week. Some of this may be due to the fact that my muscles have been developing quite a bit in the last couple of months and there is no doubt that it's adding weight to the equation.

Although I had initially fantasized about losing 100 pounds (it was easy to get carried away when I was losing 2 pounds a week...), I think that even losing the last 10 pounds is going to be difficult so at this point my goal is to reach 220 and stay there relatively stable for a while.

Tip #1: Plan, plan, plan

I cannot stress enough how true the old adage is: if you are failing to plan you are planning to fail. This is especially true if you're going to go on the 6 meals a day plan, because on most days you'll be away from home for more than 3-4 hours at a time which means that you need to bring a meal with you. If you don't bring a meal with you and go hungry, you'll be in a real danger zone to go binge somewhere. It can be as simple as grabbing a protein bar on your way out, but you have to get into the habbit to always know exactly when and what your next meal will be. This is also true if you only have 3 meals a day: it's still important for you to know when those meals will be, and what you will eat at least half a day in advance. I've definitely observed a rule in my own behavior that the hungrier I am, the more likely I am to eat crap. If I am hungry and haven't planned what to eat, healthy food just doesn't seem as appealing to me.

This isn't always as easy as it sounds. This plan was definitely easier to follow when I was working on my startup full time from home. There I had control over everything. Now that I work at PBS, it's not as easy. There have been several get togethers every week of my employment so far where there are cup cakes, chips, ice cream, hot dogs, burgers & pizzas everywhere. They like to go out to lunch and grab beers after work. They bake sutff.

This is where another kind of planning can be useful. You can plan out in your mind how the event will go, say something like this to yourself: "I'm going to go to this get together, I won't eat any chips or any cake, if someone offers me something I'll smile and decline, then I'll go home and I'll feel great about myself for having said no." What this does is give your mind a clear map of how you're going to get through that situation with a positive outcome and will be able to fight against the urge to eat. Visualize the way you'll decline the food too. Imagine yourself saying 'no thanks' and passing the bowl of chips to the guy on your left. It really does help...

The silver lining here is that when you're faced with a dangerous situation and come out on top, you are re-wiring your brain, teaching it that you have control and that the stimulus of food doesn't necessarily need to generate the response of eating. In the long run, this is the real goal and can only be accomplished by planning how you're going to do it.

Tip #2: Get a very basic understanding of nutrition & learn to read labels:

You don't need a degree in nutrition, but a few simple rules of thumb go a long way:

• Protein = good
• Carbs = good in moderation, but:
  • The more dietary fiber the better
  • Sugar is not great, it will be converted into fat later, so try to keep that low
  • Whole wheat really is better. I use 7-grain bread. Stay away from processed carbs, they soak in fat like a sponge
• Sodium = the lower the better, but for some people (like me), salty tastes better so don't use too much but don't cut every pleasure out of your life either: you can use a little salt.
• Fat = usually bad, but:
  • Saturated fat is the enemy. Any serving with more than 3g should raise your eyebrows.
  • Unsaturated fat is ok, in moderation. For example almonds are fine to eat because their fat is mostly unsaturated.

Tip #3: learn to cook basic stuff

I recently read the end of overeating: taking control of the insatiable american appetite by David Kessler, a former FDA commissioner, after I heard him on Bill Maher.  If I came away with one thing, it's that restaurants really are the devil when it comes to dieting. Even when you order a seemingly healthy meal it's often loaded with hidden fat, sugar and salt to make your brain chemically crave more (caesar salads are a notorious example). The best way to not be tricked is to learn to cook food: instead of going to a restaurant for lunch, bring a sandwich with healthy ingredients that you made in the morning, and instead of ordering dinner, cook a decent meal. It doesn't have to be time consuming, and it will also have the side bonus of saving you money.

Tip #4: Work out in the mornings

A bit afer I graduated from college I'd work out three times a week after work, and even though that worked well enough I've done it in the mornings for the last year and I like it a lot better, and here's why:

• You burn extra calories throughout the day if you worked out in the morning
• The gyms are far less crowded
• You'll skip less because you won't have to go work out feeling shitty from working all day
• It helps you focus throughout the day

The #1 downside is that it makes you wake up earlier, which makes you go to bed earlier, and that to me is a real sacrifice to make because I'm naturally quite the night owl.

Tip #5: Don't skip the day off

Like I said above, I sometimes gain 3, 4 or even 5 pounds on saturdays when I can eat whatever I want. You may be tempted to think that if you just didn't take that Saturday off you'd lose more weight more quickly. You'd be right of course, but taking the day off is important. The trick of dieting is to find a way to do it that is sustainable for the rest of your life. Otherwise you're just doing a temporary dip and you'll always regain the weight, like I have once.

The weekly day off lets you tell yourself when you see food that looks really good "I'll have that Saturday" as opposed to saying "I'll never be able to have that." For me, that's been a huge difference. It keeps me sane.

What's difficult

There are, unfortunately, a few challenges to doing this kind of diet. The biggest problem, I'd say, is that social events become problematic: many of them involve either eating restaurant food or drinking, neither of which are great. On the one hand, it sucks seeing a week's worth of work foiled because you had a plate of cheese nachos after downing shots and beers late night at a bar... on the other, you gotta keep seeing your friends. So it's a careful balance of willpower and compromise, but it can definitley be challenging.

Sometimes, you're hungry. I wish I could say that it never happen, but it does. Drinking water, light soda or coffee with skim milk helps, and if that's not enough I snack on almonds or on a slice or two of turkey.

Temptation is everywhere. It is to the food industry's best interest that you eat fattening food. They've gotten very good at marketing, food manipulation and altering the very chemical circuitry in your brain to make you crave more fattening food. This is where planning helps, for example so that you make sure you don't go hungry at times where you might be tempted were you on an empty stomach.

Do this sooner rather than later (I've done this before)

So this is actually the second (and hopefully last) time I do this kind of weight drop. Five years ago, I lost over 40 pounds over about 9 months but I then took a consulting gig and stopped working out completely because I was traveling every week... and regained it all over about 3 years, with an extra layer as a free bonus.

Why is this relevant? because it was much easier five years ago. I only worked out 3 times a week, I didn't diet nearly as strictly as I do now and I was drinking much more... and I lost at a comparable rate. So if you want to lose weight, don't wait, because it only gets harder.

Thankfully, this time around I have a really solid understanding of nutrition that has opened my eyes to a lot of things, and in a lot of ways I don't think I'd be able to go back now. My views on food have fundamentally changed, and hopefully will keep on changing for the better as I keep working on this.

Thank yous

Just wanted to give a shout out to a few people...

• My fiancee Galen, not only for supporting my nazi meal schedule and working out with me in the mornings but for telling me I was at the perfect weight when I was almost 300 pounds.
• My brother Tristan who gave me many great tips and who ultimately showed me just how insignificant my workout routine was when he started training for triathlons.
• Scott Monsefan, who introduced me a lot of the fundamental principles of nutrition and working out. This basic understanding of nutrition went a long way when I'd try to cook healthy but tasty meals.
• Bill Philips, since after all he did come up with the basic rules of the diet I followed. Props to him for designing a system that you can keep up in the long run. To me that's the biggest win in his program.
• Anyone else who's ever encouraged me