Weight Up, Weight Down

I remember when I was younger, I could eat almost anything that didn’t run away fast enough. Especially in my late teenage years I often ate all kind of junk food and often in quite large amounts. At the same time I wasn’t a very active kid. That’s not to say I stayed home all day long. I was going out with friends, walked for several kilometers each day as this was my main mode of transportation, swam occasionally. But I didn’t play football as many of my friends did and wasn’t involved in any other sports. In spite of all this I was staying fairly lean and fit. In general I didn’t think about nutrition, calories, weight etc. Yeah, it’s different when you’re growing up…

I’m 185 cm tall and up to my twentieth year I’ve never weighed more than 86 kg. Then in the last six months of my compulsory military service, which were very boring, I started to gain weight. My unit was carrying out a sentry service and there weren’t much things to do except taking charge of the posts or resting. After my discharge from the army I went up by another 2-3 kg. That’s when I decided I should take countermeasures. I restricted my food intake and also bought myself a bicycle. I was thinking about using it for transportation for some time anyway. This turned out to be enough and I was again at 86 kg in just few months. I enjoyed my bike through the summer and part of the autumn but when the temperatures fell bellow zero grades centigrade I left it at home.

There’s little room for outdoor physical activity in the big city during the winter and there are a lot of holidays as well. Quite often the days from 24 Dec to 1 Jan are non-working and we just stay at home and eat these delicious dishes prepared around the Christmas and New Year celebrations. That’s how I woke up at 103 kg on the 1st of January 2003. It was time for more drastic measures.

At first I severely restricted my food intake. I didn’t change what I was eating at all – just the quantities. I replaced the big pizza with a small one, 3 slices of bread with 1 slice and so on. Strangely (at least it was strange for me back then) these measures almost didn’t help so I included some physical activities. Mostly cardio like jogging, biking and only occasional push-ups or pull-ups… With a lot of effort I managed to go down to about 91 kg but the mirror wasn’t happy. Having the knowledge I acquired since then I think that’s because I lost too much muscle mass together with the fat by not eating enough and doing mainly cardio exercises. And the worst thing – after the summer was gone and I lifted the food restriction and abandoned exercises I regained my weight up to 100 kg in just few months.

At the beginning of 2006 as I was at my 99 kg mark again I finally realized that I don’t really know what I’m doing. It was about time to sit and do some serious research about how does the human metabolism work. I had spent years studying computer systems and at the same time I knew very little about how does my body work. Okay, perhaps nobody knows exactly all the aspects of how does the human body work. It’s a stunningly complex system and there’s a lot of controversy about what’s good for your health and what’s not. But anyway I had to look at the available knowledge and try to take some educated decisions about what to do next.

After about a month of research I decided to stick with Low Carb, High Fat diet (LCHF) and Resistance Training. This turned out to be an excellent choice so far. Two years and a half have passed – I eat mostly LCHF, most of the time I don’t watch my calories, unfortunately I don’t exercise very regularly – and I weigh 87 kg and my body fat is about 15% on average. I got a cholesterol profile about a year ago and the results were excellent. So I highly recommend this way of eating and training to everyone.

In later posts I’ll get into more details, and show you what I did to lose weight and what were the exact results.