I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve lost some weight. A lot of weight, actually. A cool 22-pounds in the past six months. How did I do it, you ask? Three things: tempeh, Fox 4 and racquetball.
Let me explain.
Back in high school I weighed 180-pounds. No matter what I ate, no matter how much I tried to gain weight, I couldn’t. And I wanted to gain weight. I played football, and the more you weighed, the harder you could hit. I went to college and still struggled to gain weight. But then I took creatine (a legal supplement), and my weight went from 180 to 205. And there it stayed. For 20 years.
Okay, so it’s fluctuated from 205 to 215 depending on whether my wife was pregnant or not. You know, the sympathy weight. And I was happy with my weight. I thought I looked okay. But during Christmas, my mother issued a challenge to me and my siblings. Who could lose the most weight by July? She offered a little cash reward to create an incentive and I jumped in feet first. I am ultra competitive, so I was determined to lose weight. But how? I’d never really dieted before, so I turned to my wife for help.
My wife is a dietitian, and she does not like fad diets. They don’t work long term. To truly lose weight, you need to make lifestyle changes. So we changed the way we ate. She introduced more vegetarian meals to our diet. She served dishes like tempeh stir fry (tempeh is a soy-based product), black bean soup and chickpea burritos. With the right flavoring, it tasted great and filled me up. She also stopped buying red meat. Instead of spaghetti with ground beef, we used ground turkey. Instead of steak, we ate chicken. I also started controlling my portion sizes. I didn’t go for seconds. We didn’t buy or make as many sweets as we usually did. I would eat one cookie instead of three. I practiced better self-control. I started losing weight right away. By March, I was down from 211 to 205. Great! So how do I lose more?
Around this time, my schedule at work changed. Instead of coming in at 4am, I had to come in at 3am. While I’m sleepier, the upside is I get off work at 11:30 and can eat lunch with my family. I’m happier. Add to the fact I enjoy my co-workers and the stories I report on, my professional life is pretty good right now. When life is stressful and I’m feeling down, I eat to feel better. I don’t do that anymore since the change in my work schedule reduced the stress in my life.
Then I started playing racquetball. Let me preface this by saying, I’m not that good. I struggle to create shots and when I play against really good racquetball players, I will get skunked 15-0. Maybe 15-2 if I get in a few lucky shots. But my buddy Steve is also not that great, so we started playing together once a week. For an hour. All that running around, back and forth, sprinting from side to side, burned a TON of calories. My weight started to plummet. I went down to 199. Woo hoo! Then I hit 193! Are you kidding me? And then, on the last day of the challenge, I played racquetball for one and a half hours. Final weight?
189.
Yes! I started at 211 and ended at 189. A total of 22 pounds lost. Gone. Hopefully forever.
So now the challenge is staying there. Can I? With tempeh, Fox 4 and racquetball all still in my life, I’m optimistic I’ll be at this weight for many years to come.
You can reach Matt Stewart at matt.stewart@wdaftv4.com.
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