Dan Nied's Fortress of Weight Loss: Day 133

So I'm working on my washboard abs. Ok, that's not true. At least not yet.

It's not time to work on my abs right now.

But it is time to get under 260. That's the plan this week. Saturday morning, I weighed in at a slight 261, then took the day off. I am thinking that 259 is a pretty achievable goal this week, and certainly it is time for another milestone.

What's amazing to me is the fact that the two weeks off didn't really hurt much at all. Granted, over those 14 days I took no more than five days off, but you would think that would be good for at least seven or eight pounds gained, right?

Wrong.

Here is something I've learned over the last two years: Isolated screw ups won't really hurt the cause that much. And, I am sure, in some twisted way they might actually help you (though I can't really explain how).

Every time I have gone through rough patches in either the 100 Days or the Fortress, I have seen minimal damage done to my weight. I'm not really talking about one or two days of eating poorly, I am talking a week or two of bad decisions that just don't have the body-crippling effect you think they would.

With all we hear about obesity and the national movement towards losing weight and healthy living, we are all scared to death to fall off the wagon. But no one ever breaks that fear down for us. How many of us thought that slipping up on a diet meant you would do irreparable physical harm to your weight loss? I know I did, but maybe I am just dumb.

The real danger of falling off the wagon, though, is the potential mental failure. Certainly one drink will not actually kill an alcoholic. But it might make him want to start drinking regularly again. So maybe it's all about being able to control the urges. Maybe I am lucky that I am so far into this that I don't have to worry about never recovering from a day off.

I am, however, very familiar with the mental danger. I've had plenty of diets derail after a slip up three days in. And it wasn't until my mind was fully focused on the task of losing weight that I was able to overcome that danger. That's also why I didn't begin The Fortress until 16 months after I abandoned the 100 Days. In those months, my mind wandered away from being healthy. A diet wouldn't have been really possible then.

But I remember a day a few months before the 100 Days blog began. I was living in Colorado, pretty damn close to 370 if not already there. One of the basketball coaches at the junior college tried to motivate me to lose weight. So he took me up into the gym that was built into their arena and showed me how to use the elliptical machine. Actually, that was the first time I had ever used an elliptical machine. He made me stay on it for 10 minutes, and I was not happy about that. (Ahh, memories. If I remember correctly, after about three minutes I was gasping for air and felt my throat closing up. I was in pretty bad shape back then. Little did I know that, only a few months later, that machine was going to be the key piece of equipment in helping me become unfat.)

Anyway, as we were ellipticising, he offered up some weight loss pointers (by the way, he was very thin and very in shape).

Only one sticks out today:

"If you have one bad day, that wipes out a week of good days," he said.

Now, 109 pounds later, I am here to tell you that that statement is total bullshit. But you see, I didn't know that at the time. And that statement scared the hell out of me. That statement was probably the main reason, outside of my own unwillingness, that his efforts to help me didn't work. Here was a guy telling me that I had to give up every fatty food I ever loved in order to lose weight.

It just seemed too hard.

But, as I established earlier, that statement was total bullshit. And while I am not saying you can eat like shit every three days and still lose weight, I am saying that if you know yourself well enough, and you understand that you are strong enough to do so, it's really not the end of the world to order up a pizza on a Sunday afternoon. And you know what? It's also not the end of the world to make a burger run the following Monday night. But you have to understand what you have lost -- two days worth of weight loss -- and you have to be willing to embrace the following days as opportunities to advance your goal.

One bad day does not wipe out one good week. In two bad (for me) weeks, I gained two pounds. In one good week, I lost four. Even if you take every single variable into account, those numbers speak for themselves.If the same effort is given to both sides, losing weight might just be easier than gaining weight.

Let's use my numbers to demonstrate that point: I am a 28-year-old male who is 6-foot-3 and weights 261 pounds. My activity level is somewhere between moderately active and very active (hey, exercising five days a week is pretty damn active in my book). According to the calorie per day calculator, which you can find here, I burn 4,171 calories per day without exercising.

It takes 3,500 unburned calories to gain a pound, and 3,500 burned calories to lose a pound. Now, if I take in an average of 1,350 calories per day (which is about right for my plan right now), I will lose .806 pounds per day without exercising. Over a solid six days of eating well, I lose 3.2 pounds.

Now, to gain .806 pounds in a day, I would have to eat just about 7,000 calories.
Here are several ways I could do that at McDonalds:

16 Double Cheeseburgers (440 calories each)

14 Quarter Pounders with Cheese (510)

14 McRibs (500)

13 Big Macs (540)

12 large orders of Fries. (570)

11 Premium Crispy Chicken Clubs (660)

9 Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese (740)

If I have one of each of those items, that turns out to be 3,960 calories (and an unsightly 218 grams of fat).

Now, I should note that I probably jacked that math up beyond belief, and those numbers don't really make a lick of sense. Also, I should say that there are a TON of things I don't know about the human body and weight gain. Nor am I advocating ordering one of all of those from McDonalds and eating it all in one sitting (but I bet I could do it), or ordering 16 double cheeseburgers and eating thrm in one sitting (I know I can't do that).

But my point is that it takes a long time to really gain meaningful weight, just as it takes a long time to lose meaningful weight.

By the way, by my numbers, which we already know are probably wrong, if you are a 40-year-old, 5-foot-7 inch, 250 pound lightly active woman, you burn 2,402 calories per day. If you are on a 1,350 calorie per day diet, you will lose .3 pounds per day, and 1.8 per six days. In order to gain .3 pounds in a day, you have to eat 3,454 calories, or nearly 8 double cheeseburgers.

So my point today is that fucking up isn't the end of the world.

I know, I said that earlier, sorry I wasted your time with all this math.