Low-carbing it

Last fall I was able to get my weight down to around 180, a figure I haven't seen in over 20 years. But the weight didn't stay off long — after Rocket City Marathon in December I took a vacation and didn't run for 10 days, gaining about 10 pounds. Since January 1 I've been trying to lose that weight back, but it's been very tough. My wife Greta also gained a little weight on our vacation so we decided we'd try a different approach and see if we could lose weight together.

Greta is a psychologist, so she knows that most diet plans are overhyped and under-perform, but one thing is clear: Almost anything that changes your eating routine can help you lose weight. You could try a diet banning all foods starting with letters in the first half of the alphabet, and if you stuck to it, you'd probably lose weight. Just the fact that you have to find a substitute for all those apples and bananas you've been eating will probably lead to weight loss.

That said, some recent diets have shown enough success to suggest that they really may work. The one that looked to us like it would eliminate some of our problem foods while still allowing us to eat some tasty foods was a low-carb diet.

So, starting yesterday, I've changed my eating routine to eliminate as many high-carb foods as possible. Here's what I ate in a typical day previously:

High-carb diet

Breakfast
Bowl of cereal / milk
V8

Morning snacks
Yogurt with fruit on bottom
Granola bar

Lunch
Taco Salad

Afternoon snacks
Apple
Banana
Toast w/peanut butter and jelly

Dinner
Some kind of meat, vegetable, and carb -- maybe steak, salad, and bread; or chicken, couscous, and asparagus; or fish, broccoli, and rice; or roast beef sandwiches with green beans. You get the idea.
A couple glasses of wine

It's actually not a super-high carb diet, but the carbs add up, especially those snacks! A typical day would involve 300 grams of carbs, including over 150 from snacks alone. Now compare that to what I had yesterday:


Low-carb diet

Breakfast
Bowl of low-carb cereal (Bear Naked high protein granola)
Light Soy Milk
V8

Morning snacks
Handful of mixed nuts
Celery sticks with peanut butter

Lunch
Taco Salad

Afternoon snacks
Carrot sticks with hummus
Handful of mixed nuts
Vanilla tea soy latte

Dinner
Roast pork tenderloin with olive tapenade
Roast asparagus with olive oil, salt, and pepper
A couple glasses of wine

Once again, this is not an extreme low-carb diet. A true Atkins Diet fanatic would scoff at this meal plan. But it involves considerably less carbs than what I had been eating before: about 130, with just 67 coming from snacks. The "low-carb" cereal I had for breakfast actually has more carbs than you're supposed to have in an entire day on the Atkins plan. But given that I'm also running 40-70 miles a week, I think it's still likely that I'll lose weight on this plan. That's the hope anyways. I'll keep you updated.

One other note: I do plan on consuming carbs in the form of GU for my longer training runs. This is just to (partially) replenish fuel burnt over the course of the run, and I don't think it will affect my weight-loss plans adversely.