Losing weight the Tokyo Cowboy way.

Last week I informed people I had gained a large amount of weight and had since lost an estimated five stone of it. A few people stopped and asked me about it over the weekend, so it is all blog-worthy material right? There is more to the way I did it than simply eat less – exercise more and hopefully it will encourage others to give it a shot too.

Exercise bores me. I don’t really like any sports at all and the prospect of going to a gym for anything other than standing outside with a bag of chips utterly galls me. Fair play to those that enjoy it, I wish I could too, I’m jealous. One problem I had when realising I needed to do something about it urgently was considering the prospect of having to cut out all of the things I liked, or to become obsessed with calorific content of the food I ate – that’s not living.

My friend, Dave (I have mentioned him before), persuaded me to give the 5:2 diet a try. He was also on it and had seen a fair amount of success too. After a month of arguing, I relented, if anything to curb his nagging (just a joke, I appreciated the badgering, I needed it at the time). For those unfamiliar, the 5:2 diet consists of two fasting days per week where you consume no more than 500 calories for women and 600 calories for men (that is a generalisation based on averages). It is a quarter of what you apparently need in the average day.

I did this for approximately three months. I found it relatively easy, since on my fasting days, I would sit and play video games until going to bed, thus distracting me from any hunger needs. I previously mentioned that I had no scales by which to measure my weight, but people started to remark on how much weight I appeared to be losing. I bought some scales in June and weighed myself for the first time since I was around 21. I was at 17 stone 9 pounds. I was disheartened at this as I had imagined it was at around fifteen stone. But it made me more determined. Based on the fact that I had been doing the diet for three months and people remarked on how much weight I lost, I estimated my starting weight to be around 18 and a half to 19 stone. That’s a lot of cake.

Now having scales to get a firm measure of progress, I changed up the way I did the diet. Originally, I was just doing the fasting days on random days of the week. Then I regimented it as it was far harder to stick to at the weekends due to social activities, meals out etc. I started to do my fasting days Mondays and Wednesdays, weighing myself Thursday mornings to log the loss. I shifted another stone over the next two months, often noting a loss of two pounds per week. All this with barely any effort seemed great. I was at 16 stone 9 when I left for Japan, where I was taking a two-week break from the diet.

After getting back, I was very happy that not only had I not gained weight, despite eating whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, I had lost an extra five pounds. There was a lot of walking involved and the humidity was high. I think more importantly, the quality of food I was eating played a major role too. This made me re-evaluate the way I ate on my non-fasting days. Prior to dieting, the vast majority of my meals were accompanied by chips (fries) and bread. With those being largely out of the equation in Japan, I saw the benefit to eliminating them further (but not completely).

Around this time, I had started a new job, one which was a couple of miles away, so I started to cycle to and from work every day. It isn’t a lot, but it was more exercise than I was used to and this was helping to make a difference. I began cycling everywhere, as part of my ways of combatting the depression was to make more of an effort to engage socially with more people, so I would visit other friends at night times as well. But then disaster. Three weeks in a row, no change. I began to panic, the dreaded plateau that I had heard so much about. Surely it couldn’t hit so early?

Well it hadn’t. But progress was naturally going to slow down anyway. The more weight I lost, the less my body needed to operate on a daily basis. I began to weigh myself daily to keep a track of what I was like on my off days. This made me eliminate pizza and red meat as an option on my off days. I allowed myself a takeaway every week, so this still left Indian food, Chinese food and chicken based kebabs. Without a weekly treat to look forward to, I don’t think I would have been able to stick to it. I had also become mildly obsessed with re-creating some of the awesome food I ate in Japan. I became quite adept at making katsu curries and ramen, which I am not too fond of myself, but everyone else I have cooked it for loved it. Eating these healthier than-they-used-to-be meals kick-started my loss again.

This became a regular pattern, the loss would slow down to almost nothing, although the belt notches would be getting tighter and tighter. I’d have a mini-meltdown and change something else. I started making Tuesdays a semi-fasting day, only having around 1000 calories on those days too. Weighing myself everyday made me far more careful at the weekends, psychologically I never wanted to damage my progress, so it removed the temptation to have a second takeaway per week (which previously I had succumbed to). I started adding ten-mile bike rides a couple of times per week, since my job sadly ended in April. With the weather being good around this time of year, it is viable, although I worry when it starts to get worse.

What I’m doing now is less 5:2 and more 3:2:2. I now do two fasting days (where I basically consume only soup) and two where I only have half the amount of calories I need. I’m far more active than I was, partially because the thought of doing something no longer terrifies me. A two-mile walk used to be something I had to psych myself up for, now I do it without thinking. I’m now at 13 stone 11 pounds. I plan on slowing it all down when I hit twelve and a half. I’m not vain and couldn’t give a shit about looking toned

.

Although I will wear power pants.

 

The reason the diet originally made more sense to me is that as you get older, your skin becomes less elastic. I could have dieted, hammered it in a gym then made myself miserable and lost weight far more rapidly. Then I would have been left with massive flaps of excess skin, something that I would be less happy with than being overweight. Any excuse not to wear Lycra I guess.

I’m hoping that some people can read this and it will alleviate their fears, the same ones I had and give something a go. It seems sanctimonious to say it, but it helps make you feel better and opens up a lot more doors than before. Plus, now those doors don’t need to be quite so wide. As ever, leave a comment if you want to ask any questions or share your own experiences with others reading. Everyone needs a Dave to berate them into starting…

Hated this picture for so long. Thankfully, it doesn’t accurately reflect me anymore.