There are many health and fitness blogs and sites out there, but I enjoy most the blog of a serious dabbler named Michael Allen Smith who blogs at Critical MAS.
MAS has years and years of exercise, health, food, and fitness posts, among other topics (though his beloved hot beverage requires its own site). It was from MAS that I learned about the Potato Hack. His Best-Of page curates those years of posts into a more digestible format.
His post on his personal "fat loss cheatsheet" is a great example of what he does best: condense his self-experimentations and learnings into a highly readable format.
MAS makes the point on his blog -- often -- that he is not prescribing or recommending anything. He is only describing what practices work or don't work for him. It's up to the reader to find their own recipe for success.
Still, it can be fun to measure myself against someone else's yardstick. So, let's run down his list and see how I measure up. The strategies are from most important to least important.
- Defining the WHY. I have not done that. The main reasons have been health (reduce hypertension) and ego. Those reasons may be enough to get me started, but may not be enough to keep me going through that long middle period.
- Create a story. What story, supported by my WHY, will keep me from breaking down in front of the snack machine at 4pm? By not having that story, I risk relapsing and gaining the weight back. What will I do the day after I hit my target weight?
- Get good sleep. I have lousy sleep habits. I could cite many reasons but they are excuses. One time I did a current reality tree exercise on the various difficulties I thought I was facing in my life; the root cause of all of them was not going to bed early enough for a good night's sleep.
- Stop snacking. This is true for me also and is the heart of the No S Diet, which is one of my mainstay methods. Once I start snacking, I do not stop.
- Remove trigger foods. We buy those only for special occasions; by and large, the house is pretty clean.
- Reduce daily eating window. I will sometimes skip breakfast and start eating at 1 or 2 pm, stopping before 8pm. But I've not kept the data to determine the optimal length of my own eating window.
- No liquid calories. I'm pretty good about this, though I do like a little sugar in my coffee. I will have cider or wine two or three evenings a week; Brad Pilon says the body will, overnight, burn through the alcohol first before burning the fat. One of Brad's sayings is that it's not weight loss that's a problem as much as weight gain.
- Eat higher volume food that is lower in calories. This is a big idea I've gotten from MAS, though I've not adopted his Peasant Diet.
- Increase protein. Another idea I've adopted; I now keep hard-boiled eggs and nonfat Greek yogurt in the fridge at work for appetite suppression. If I snack, I snack on protein.
- Cook more at home. We do that, thanks to Liz's wizardry.
- Baseline exercise. I do kettlebell routines 2-3 times a week (probably not for long enough), with some walking (not enough), some yoga and stretching (not enough).
- Intermittent fasting. Skipping the morning or evening meal is usually good enough for me; fasting for 22-24 hours once a week is doable, though Pilon recommends two 24-hour fasting periods in a week if you're interested in fat loss.
Update: MAS added a new #4 to his list, an obvious one in retrospect: Measure your weight. He uses a tape measure, I use scales.
