Today I weighed under 200 pounds for the first time in 7 years, which means I've lost over 30 pounds in three months. I'm pretty happy about it and thought I would write a little post to share how I did it. Back in May I decided I wanted to lose weight. I looked up how much I should weigh and doing the math realized I was about 70 pounds over weight. Before I explain how I lost weight without exercising and still drinking beer every night, let me give you an idea of what my eating and drinking habits were like. From the time I woke up in the morning until I went to bed, I had to have a drink, either Pepsi or Beer. So I was drinking probably about 6 cans of Pepsi a day and about 8 20oz Miller Lights at night. I knew I could never lose weight and continue this habit. I also do a lot of driving for work and for some reason when I was in the car I had to have snacks, also, while drinking beer I had to eat something between sips of beer. My snacks consisted of crap like Combos, Slim Jims, Doritos, Honey Roasted Cashews, and Funyuns. I was eating fast food at least 5 times a week and sometimes as often as 10 times.
I knew I obviously could not keep these habits up and expect to lose weight so the first week I cut everything out. No beer, no more snacks, and I limited myself to 1 Pepsi in the morning, water the rest of the day. That week I probably lost 15 pounds alone. I don't know for sure exactly how much, because I only started weighing myself towards the end of that week and I weighed 225. I know I was at least 230 at the beginning of the week but possibly 240.
I'd say I did pretty good the first week but I decided there was no way I was going to be able to keep up that routine. i just enjoy drinking beer too much and even more addicting to me is the Pepsi. I went back to drinking beer at night and Pepsi during the day but I knew this was going to slow my weight loss efforts down to a crawl if not halt them all together. I did put a limit on myself on how many I could drink though. I looked up how many calories I should be eating daily and learned it should be around 3,000 but if I wanted to lose weight without exercising, it would need to be closer to 2,000. I had to do a little math and try to figure out about how many calories I was consuming with my old habits. 6 cans of Pepsi @ 150 calories each was 900 calories alone! Wow! I knew I had to limit those. I'm still drinking about 3 cans a day which is 450 calories. I have tried multiple different alternative to Pepsi and so far found nothing that I enjoy. I even went as far as to make a carbonated Sweat Tea. lol Please though, if you have any suggestions leave them in the comments for me, I still want to cut back on Pepsi if I can. Ok so the beer was about 120 calories per can @ 8 per night, comes to 960 calories. I wanted to be realistic at first so I decided to limit myself to only 6 of these at 720 calories. So now I have 720 calories in beer and 450 calories in Pepsi alone, which is 1170 calories in just drinks every day. I had to limit myself to 1,000 calories or less in actual food. I still wanted to have a snack while driving in the car so I looked at the calorie count on some of the stuff I would normally get at the gas station. Pretty much everything I looked at had at least 300 calories per serving size and multiple serving sizes per bag. I finally looked at a bag of sunflower seeds and it was less than 200 calories for the whole bag. It takes me about a week to eat a whole bag of sunflower seeds so I figured this would be a good snack for the car and I've been eating them every day since then. I limit my meals down to 400 calories or less. I typically eat just meat now for lunch or dinner (sometimes I combine the two) a half pound of, chicken, pork, steak, or seafood. This is never more than 400 calories even if I use a little A-1, barbecue sauce, or honey. I also like to get a package of Broccoli and Cheese or Corn, I think they're made by Green Giant, they're no more than 140 calories for the whole box, but I figured I should probably eat some kind of vegetable. lol
I did that exact same diet for about 2 months and kind of plateaued on my weight for awhile so I decided I need to do more. I figured I couldn't possibly continue to lose weight drinking that much beer with all the calories and carbs in it so I looked into beers with the lowest calories and found Bud Select 55, with only 55 calories in a 12 oz can. I started to drink a couple of these between regular Miller Lights and it was working. I started to lose weight again. Right now I'm actually down to one regular beer per night and the rest is the Bud Select. I think I'm probably only drinking about 360 calories in beer per night, which is half of what I was when I first started. .
Well, that is where I am at today and I still want to lose another 30 pounds. Let me know if you're interested in hearing updates and I will post again sooner or later. Also I'm open to suggestions as well in the comments.