“Ah shit, here we go again!”
– Carl “CJ” Johnson, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Here We Go Again…
So it’s been a couple of years, and once again, I gained back all the weight I lost and then some, this time reaching an all-time high of 270 lbs… Enough was enough, so on August 1, I set my calorie tracker to a net loss of 2lbs/week, and have averaged about 2.5 lbs a week (15lbs so far!). No surprise, I’ve done this at least half a dozen times… counting calories and staying under your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR, i.e., the calories you naturally burn just by being alive) to maintain a deficit is effective!
The rule of thumb is ~3,500 calories = 1 lbs of fat loss, so a deficit of 500 calories a day gets you roughly 1 lbs of fat loss per week. Some of this might come from exercise, but most (probably 80% or more) comes from what you cram in your pie hole… But raw calories aren’t everything!
Calories In, Calories Out (CICO)
It’s entirely possible to subsist on nothing but pizza and Diet Coke. Hell, John Carmack did while developing such beloved titles as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. If the legends are true, he ate one medium-sized Domino’s pepperoni pizza daily and drank eight or nine Diet Cokes.
Baffled by how this could be, I looked up the nutrition information for said diet, and by my reckoning, that’s about 1,680 calories a day. As far as I can tell, John Carmack weighed something approximating 155-160 lbs. in his early 20s, was about 5’10”, and used to wrestle and weightlift. Given all of that, I would say he was staying around (if not under) his BMR and could do this (at least for a while) without becoming a fat fuck…
Even so, while you will most certainly lose weight while maintaining a caloric deficit, some of that weight will be muscle if you’re not getting enough protein and incorporating resistance training, but more on that later…
Why You Have to Cook for Yourself
If you want to be less of a Porker, you need to learn how to cook. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but it does have to be edible. Jack LaLanne is sometimes quoted (by scooby1961) as having said, “If it tastes good, spit it out!”
I’m sure there’s a cheap, “That’s not what he said!” joke in there somewhere, but we’ll leave that out… we’re classy here!
What he meant was that you shouldn’t eat calorie-dense, heavily processed food, devoid of nutrition, and chock-full of preservatives, artificial colors and flavors, sugar, salt, and fat. Lay’s Potato Chips’ old slogan was, “I bet you can’t eat just one.”
And they’re fucking counting on it! They want you [over]eating and going back for more! That’s the point: to get you to stuff your fat fuck face with delicious, carcinogenic cardboard food, then go back for seconds! So if you want to stop being a fat fuck, you need to stop eating food specially designed by food scientists to make you a fat fuck.
On the other hand, I can’t advocate (for myself) a monastic diet where food is viewed only as fuel and what someone ought to eat is min/maxed for macros, or worse yet, a monostrophic diet (e.g., eating only potatoes, plain, boiled or baked, for every meal, every day). While I’ve gotten short-term results eating this way, they were…
- Miserable,
- Detrimental (I always gained back whatever I lost, and then some), and above all,
- Unsustainable.
Learning to cook for myself is the only way to ensure that what I eat is nutritious and tastes like something I’d want to consume. Even then, it can be tempting to slather your food in off-the-shelf condiments and sauces, but you shouldn’t! Because chances are, it’s probably full of empty calories from added sugar and oil…
…and [Added] Sugar is in EVERYTHING!
If you bought it in a grocery store and it…
- Came in a box, bag, or jar and/or
- Has more than one ingredient and/or
- A TV commercial…
It probably has added sugar, although it may not be called that. That’s not to say sugar (or anything, really) is inherently good or bad, but those empty calories mean you can’t eat as much as you’d like and still maintain a caloric deficit.
Okay… So What Do I Do? I Compromised…
“You want compromise, how’s this? Twenty years in the can I wanted manicott’, but I compromised. I ate grilled cheese off the radiator instead. I wanted to fuck a woman, but I compromised. I jacked off into a tissue. Now go home and get your fucking shinebox.”
– Billy Batts Vincent
I like to eat. I can try to fight it, be miserable, and give up. Or, I can be smarter and make better choices. What follows is a bit of a rant, detailing unhealthy shit I used to eat, and what I’ve done to raise the bar on things I enjoy eating, significantly lowering the calorie count, in 20 minutes or less.
Tacos
Back in the day, we’d get one of those Old El Paso soft taco kits… You know, the ones that come with a little shitty package of tortillas, “sauce”, and seasoning. You throw the seasoning in with some ground beef, add some shredded cheese, lettuce, and tomato if you’re feeling fancy…
Remember what I said about these fuckers adding sugar to everything?
There’s motherfucken sugar in the goddamn seasoning (maltodextrin) and cock sucken sugar in the goddamn sauce! Why the fuck do we need sugar in the seasoning and sauce!?
So instead of flour tortillas (usually 90-100 calories each), I opt for yellow corn tortillas. They’re only 40 calories each, and you get more of them (usually stacks of 30). Wrap 4 in a damp paper towel, then pop them in the microwave on High for 1 minute. This makes them nice and pliable.
Instead of ground beef, I prefer to spend $1 more per lb and opt for beef stew meat. I season it with smoked paprika, cumin, salt, pepper, garlic paste, chili lime, and NO GODDAMN SUGAR! Cubed chicken thigh also works great, and you can either add chopped white onion on top or cook red onion in with the meat.
For the sauce, Herdez or La Costeña brand Salsa Verde is easy to find, tastes good, and has only 5 calories per tablespoon (and NO SUGAR!). My wife likes cheese on hers, which you could do, but I prefer a sprinkle of queso fresco. The leftovers are great for breakfast tacos (half meat, half scrambled eggs)! Delicious!
That’s only about 120-130ish calories per taco, and I can eat about 4 of them and feel satisfied (480-520 calories total). Each El Paso Dinner Kit “taco” (without the ground beef) is 90 calories, with nothing fucken on it! They’re about the same size and mass as the corn tortillas, but TWICE THE FUCKEN CALORIES! FUCK!
YouTube food snobs will insist you make your own tortillas and salsa, braise your meat for hours in fresh chili sauce, and while all of that sounds amazing, I don’t have that kinda time… My way takes all of 10-15 minutes to prepare… Sear the beef to medium rare, season it with the spices above, heat up your corn tortillas, then plate and eat them. Some Abuelita out there is rolling in her grave, and Jim is rolling his eyes, but he was living the good life in Mexico, surrounded by homemade food, and I’m in Anytown, USA, and fucken busy. These aren’t the best tacos you can eat, but they’re about 100x better than fucken cardboard Old El Paso bullshit.
Spaghetti
Growing up, spaghetti sauce had many names… Ragu and Prego, and later, as my tastes refined, we started buying Classico… You dump it into a pan of ground beef, cook up some spaghetti pasta, and maybe buy frozen garlic bread to go with it… But what they all had in common was the fucken ADDED SUGAR! Every…goddamn…one!
Then I found Rao’s, which costs three times as much as any of the other brands, and while it doesn’t have added sugar, it has more than double the calories (110 for Rao’s versus 50 for Classico) per 1/2 cup!
So I stopped buying the jarred stuff and just made my own, and it works out to about 35 calories per 1/2 cup of sauce… I start by frying up the ground beef (usually about 2 lbs), then seasoning it with salt, pepper, chili flakes, and Italian seasoning. Then I add about a tablespoon of tomato paste and a tablespoon of minced garlic, and mix it all up. I add about 4 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, a 28oz can of crushed San Marzano tomatoes, and a 15 oz can of tomato sauce. That’s it! The wife doesn’t like mushrooms or spicy food, so if I want those, I add them to mine separately…
It doesn’t take any longer to prepare – maybe 20 minutes, maybe less if you multitask (e.g., start the pasta water boiling at the same time as your beef if browning)…
Most pasta is about 200 calories for 2oz of dried pasta (~4.75 oz cooked), which is enough for one good-sized bowl, once you add around 8 oz of sauce, for a grand total of ~450 calories per serving. Sub out the garlic bread for a 2oz hunk of sourdough (~140 calories), and you’re still under 600 calories for dinner.
You can cook the spaghetti sauce longer and deepen the flavor, or make your own baguette, but again, that’s up to you and how much time you wanna spend on it…
Thrown Together Meals
Because I didn’t know how to cook, my wife would buy bullshit in three general varieties:
- Cardboard (read: Hamburger Helper)
- Jarred Bullshit (Butter Chicken Cooking Sauce, Teriyaki)
- Frozen Bullshit (various bags of shit you put in a baking pan)
All of these were laden with sugar (are you seeing the pattern yet?) and preservatives, and required about the same level of effort as a proper meal.
I eat a bit simpler these days. Beef or chicken stew with potatoes, carrots, and onions, sometimes cabbage, flavored with smoked paprika, salt, pepper, and a little soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, or balsamic vinegar.
Sometimes steak and potatoes, steak and eggs, or beef bacon strips and eggs. You can’t go wrong with these ingredients, and it’s hard to screw them up. Just make it a point not to overcook the meat or the eggs, which you can avoid with practice. When I wake up, I take a package of meat out of the freezer and start thawing it on the counter, and by dinner time, it’s ready to cook.
That Old, Familiar Road…
I’ve done this weight-loss thing enough times to know how it ends. I’m currently back down to 250 (roughly where I started 2.5 years ago), and I’ve been steadily losing 2-3 lbs a week, which is how it always begins. My calorie counter says I should hit my goal of 180 lbs by June 2027 at this rate, but we both know that my body will eventually rebel, and when it does, my weight loss will slow as my body adapts and grinds to a halt, usually 30-40 lbs in.
Like it or not, I’ll have to start incorporating physical activity to preserve muscle and keep my metabolism from tanking. Also, I need to take especially good care of myself… injury and sickness always seem to derail my progress, so if/when that happens, I can’t relent. I need to push through that shit no matter what!
Ah shit, here we go again! Wish me luck, Jim!