The Lose It! Experiment

I get questions about sports nutrition all the time.  In fact, nutrition is probably the single most common question topic we get around here.  So with that in mind, I figured it might be worth a post to talk about the fact that I put myself on a diet this week.

I sometimes wish I looked like
Jesse Spence.

I wrote a little on Monday about how I’d gained some weight during the recent crisis at work and about how it bothered me.  Why?  Well look, I know I’m not super-heavy or anything, but I’m definitely a little larger than your average triathlete, and all that extra weight sure as Hell isn’t making me any faster.  Plus, truth is, I’m not the world’s handsomest guy.  I mean, I know I’m not Quasimodo or anything, but I’m also not George Clooney or that guy who played Chase on the TV show House.  I’ve got a big nose, goofy ears, weak chin, balding head…  But the one thing I’ve always had in my favor is that I’ve got a good build—a slightly stouter version of your typical swimmer’s body.  But if that’s my one thing, well, I’ve got to do what I can to hang on to it, no?  Else all I’ll be left with is a bunch of generally unappealing facial features and body that would’ve made it work… if I hadn’t put on so much weight.

So anyway, bottom line, I want to lose some weight.  Last season I dieted pretty seriously and got down to 185 lbs.  This season I raced at a little more than 190 lbs, but I was inconsistent, and I can’t help thinking that if I’d been a little more focused—in all aspects, but especially in terms of my diet—it would’ve paid dividends in training and on race day.  And now, coming out of the crisis at work, I’m weighing in at almost 200 lbs.  Not only do I feel like crap when I work out, the weight gain is bad enough that you can see the extra pounds around my midsection.  I’d like to fix that.

Last season I tried a diet based on the Thrive plan.  Thrive is a vegan diet that was developed by a professional triathlete, and I liked quite a bit of it, but I never went all the way with it.  I cut out red meat, but I left chicken, fish, and diary in my diet, and quite honestly, I don’t think that the inclusion hurt me. 

I'm using an app from LoseIt.com

This year, I’m trying Lose It! which is a simple diet and exercise logging program that’s built around an iPhone app.  I discovered it via the Football Today podcast because the show’s producer, Jay Soderberg, has used it to lose something like forty pounds with it.  Well, that was enough for me.  I downloaded the app on Sunday night and started using it the next day.  Lose It! gave me a goal of consuming no more than 2,128 calories per day (plus exercise), and so far that hasn’t been too hard to manage.  That said, I don’t know how much thinner I’m getting here, but I suppose we’ll find out when I weigh myself this weekend.

If you’re wondering, my goal weight is 180 lbs, and I want to get there at a rate of one pound per week.  That’d put me at about what I weighed when I was 25, just before I went to Korea.  Whether using Lose It! and exercising per my normal schedule is enough to get me there is something of an open question in my mind, but it’d sure be nice if the program does happen to work as advertised.