Just as you’ve imagined yourself at your ideal weight, you know in your mind’s eye what the Statue of Liberty looks like, but it’s unlikely that you could draw it from scratch, much less build it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to get you to draw or build the Statue of Liberty, although, if you’ve the time, energy, and money, by all means, build it. If it’s good, Disney or Six Flags, once out of bankruptcy, will buy it for a pretty penny.

Time to Re-Assemble Yourself

You’re going to imagine a picture of yourself at your ideal weight as a puzzle. Lots of pieces and they’re not quite assembled. There are spaces between them. You can see where you’re headed, but it’s not yet a reality. No one piece is identifiable on its own, but, as each piece is joined to another, the picture becomes a bit clearer; what’s imagined gets closer to reality.

Each of my regular blog entries will reveal a new puzzle piece to help you reach your ideal weight and, I hope, link it to a piece that I’ve already revealed and set you up for subsequent puzzle pieces. With the puzzle pieces, you’ll assemble your diet regimen and reach your ideal weight.

My regular blog entries will reveal, piece by piece, all the pieces that have to be joined in order to solve the puzzle, i.e., to reach your ideal weight. By the time you’ve done what needs to be done, you’ll have grasped all the elements of the diet regimen and will be well on your way to your ideal weight.

Read me regularly. Ask questions. Challenge me. Criticize. Ask for clarification. Ask for whatever. Just do what you know you really, really want to do. As Polonius said to Laertes, “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Here’s what you’re going to do: First, you’re going to calculate your ideal weight. Second, you’re going to find out what your overweight percentage is. Third, you’re going find out what percentage of your body is fat. Fourth, you’re going to find out how many calories you need daily to maintain your ideal weight. Fifth, you’re going to find out how many extra calories you’re eating every day—those are the ones you’re going to eliminate.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It’s not. Here are the steps.

Step One 1. Determine your ideal weight. It’s simple, but it’s slightly different for men than for women.

a. Men: start with a 110-pound base weight. For every inch over 60″, add 5.5 pounds. Thus, a 5’10″ man should weigh no more than 165 pounds.

b. Women: start with a 100-pound base weight. For every inch over 60″, add 5 pounds. Thus, a 5’10″ woman should weigh no more than 150 pounds.

Step Two 2. Determine your Body Mass Index (BMI). Your BMI is very useful in measuring how healthful your weight is for your height. (You can change only your weight, but not your height—so far.) There are charts all over the internet showing the correct BMI for the gamut of usual height-weight combinations. For those who care, the BMI was developed in order to compare one population’s average BMI to the average BMI of another population, e.g., New York’s feral hedge-fund managers to Miami’s new, post-Madoff homeless, and was never intended to be used for individual assessment; however, since it’s so easy to calculate, it became an indicator of sorts. The formula to calculate BMI is the same for men and women.

a. Divide your weight in pounds by the square of your height in inches and multiply by 703, the area code of Northern Virginia.

     i. For example, a 5’10″ guy who weighs 205 pounds has a BMI of 29.41 (205/70²*703 = 29.41).

     ii. The received medical wisdom is that one’s BMI should be greater than 18.5 and no more than 25. At 29.41, this guy is at the top of the “overweight” classification and about to spill over into the “obese” classification.

b. While your BMI is only a ratio, it’s a very important jumping off place to determine your body fat percentage and that’s a very, very important percentage.

c. Your BMI can also tell you how much over your ideal weight you are. Divide your BMI by the maximum acceptable BMI (25). For our example above, 29.41/25 = 1.1764. Subtract 1 and convert what’s left to a percentage. Our example is 17.64% overweight.

d. It’s particularly important to bear in mind that your BMI is only an indicator. If it’s high, i.e., greater than 25, it should give you pause and motivate you to determine whether or not you’re really overweight.

Step Three 3. Determine your Body Fat Percentage (BFP). Your body fat percentage is based on your body mass index and is calculated differently for men and women.

a. The formulas I’ve provided below give a rough reading of your body-fat percentage, but they’re certainly in the ball park.

     i. Everyone:

          (1) First, multiply your BMI by 1.2;

          (2) Second, multiply your age by 0.23 and add it to the first number;

          (3) Men

               (a) Subtract 16.2 from the total from (2). That’s your percentage

               (b) For example, the body fat percentage of a 40-year-old male with a BMI of 29.41 is 28.293%. In other words, he’s almost 30% fat.

          (4) Women:

               (a) Subtract 5.4 from the total from (2). That’s your percentage.

               (b) For example, the body fat percentage of a 40-year-old woman with a BMI of 26.54 is 35.650%. In other words, she’s more than one-third fat.

     b. A man’s BFP should be no less than 4% and no greater than 21% and a woman’s BFP should be no less than 12% and no greater than 28%

     c. I’ll discuss professional methods for very, very accurate BFP readings in a later posting, but, if you use the appropriate formula and it shows that your body fat percentage is too high, you can rely on that overall evaluation. It might be off by a few points, but it’s certainly accurate enough to give you a reliable and, probably, alarming heads-up.

Step Four 4. Determine your Basal Metabolism Rate (BMR), i.e., your minimum daily caloric needs. You need to calculate how many calories, in an ideal world, you’d need to maintain your ideal weight, which you calculated in step one above. Again, it’s slightly different for men than for women and, just to keep things honest, it changes as you age. The formula is called the Harris-Benedict Equation.

     a. Men:

          i. Multiply your ideal weight by 6.23. Add 66 to that figure;

          ii. Multiply your height in inches by 12.7. Add that figure to the first one;

          iii. Multiply your age (in years) by 6.8. Subtract that figure from the first two.

          iv. The total is the number of calories needed to maintain your ideal weight if you were in a coma.  If you are in a coma, let someone who’s conscious do the calculations.

          v. Thus, a 5’10″ 40-year-old man would need 1711 calories to maintain his ideal weight.

     b. Women:

          i. Multiply your ideal weight by 4.35. Add 655 to that figure;

          ii. Multiply your height in inches by 4.7. Add that figure to the first one;

          iii. Multiply your age (in years) by 4.7. Subtract that figure from the first two.

          iv. The total is the number of calories needed to maintain your ideal weight if you were in a coma. If you are in a coma, have someone who’s conscious do the calculations.

          v. Thus, a 5’10″ 40-year-old woman would need 1449 calories to maintain her ideal weight.

     c. Lifestyle: multiply your needed calories by the following figures to determine what you need if you aren’t in a coma.  Again, if you are in a coma, have someone who’s conscious do the calculations:

          i. Sedentary—1.2

          ii. Lightly active—1.375

          iii. Moderately active—1.55

          iv. Very active—1.725

          v. Strenuously active—1.9

Step Five 5. Determine the minimum number of extra calories you’re ingesting every day to maintain your current weight.

     a. Use the formulas in Step 4 (BMR) above, but use your current weight rather than your ideal weight.

     b. Subtract the number of calories needed to maintain your ideal weight from the number of calories needed to maintain your current weight.

     c. The difference is the minimum number of extra calories you need to eliminate from your daily diet.

Hint:  Regardless of your lifestyle/activity level, use your ideal-weight BMR calories, i.e., your coma-level caloric need, as your daily maximum number of calories.  Regardless of your current lifestyle/activity level, the extra calories you burn will make your diet regimen that much more effective.

For example, suppose you’re a 35-year-old female who tips in at 185 soaking wet.  Your ideal weight is 130.  Your ideal weight’s coma-level BMR is 1366 calories.  Your current weight’s coma-level BMR is 1605.  That means that, if you’re at rest 100% of the time, you’re ingesting, on average, 239 extra calories every day in order to maintain your overweight bulk.

Now, take it a step further.  Suppose you’re moderately active.  Disregard the number of calories your ideal-weight’s moderately-active BMR needs to maintain itself; stick with the 1366.  At the same time, your moderately active lifestyle indicates that you need 2488 calories every day to maintain your overweight bulk.  That means you’re eating, on average, an extra 1122 calories every day compared to your ideal weight’s coma-level BMR.  Cut those 1122 calories out of your diet.  That way, you’ll eat only enough calories to maintain yourself at coma-level, i.e., 1366.  Your “moderately active” lifestyle suddenly is converted to exercise.  That’s a big, big step.

This is a spreadsheet. It's six columns by nine rows. Mine is three columns by thirty rows. Size counts.

I have a small spreadsheet (Excel, Quattro Pro, etc.–3 columns by 30 rows) that calculates all the above after you enter your height, age, and current weight. I’d be happy to send to whoever needs it.  Let me know in the comment section that you want it. Provide the preferred format and an e-mail address.  It’s free.

You’ve come to the right place.  This blog’s for you.

I’ve been told that, in order to gain your confidence and then your loyalty as blog readers, I need you to identify with me. That notion conflicts with my very, very strong feelings about personal privacy. So, I’m confronted with a hurdle right out of the box.

I’ll do my best and I hope that that’s good enough.  Where I’m not explicit, I hope you’re savvy enough to infer.  I’ll try not to be too subtle so that those slouching down in the back of the class can take part.

I realize that the only way you can identify with me in this context is for me to tell you that I’ve been overweight all my life and that that life spans more than 60 years. From as early as I can remember in grade school until today, my weight has always defined me to me and, I’ve always suspected, to everyone else, including siblings.

If you haven’t already inferred the following, you need to pay closer attention:  my history gives me street cred to deal with all issues of weight and obesity for chunkies of all ages.  However old you are, I experienced what you’re experiencing at the age you are now.  It’s all a well-traveled road for me.  Been there, done that.  I’m out of clichés; let’s move on.

I suspect that my youth—indeed, most of my life—has not been happy. I can only suspect because my memory of almost all personal emotional events in my life is non-existent or, at the most, dim. My recollection of all sorts of facts and figures, including trivia, is quite good, so I must have purged or at least repressed memories of my personal life.

First, we'll look for repressed memories of malpractice suits.

Since I’m intelligent (Mensa member, IQ 159), I must have had good reason to purge and repress and, since that’s probably the case, I’m not going to dredge up what my psyche has slain and buried. (Psychiatrists and psychologists are gnashing their teeth as you read!)

I don’t recall how much I weighed in grade school, but I know that I weighed more than 300 pounds as a ninth-grader (15 years old) and things didn’t change until the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at college. I don’t know how I lost more than 100 pounds in those three months, but I did; that I didn’t die doing losing so much weight so rapidly is testimony to the innate stamina with which youth, even morbidly obese youth, is blessed. I do recall that my weight loss involved a lot of dieting and walking during the hot, hot summer.

I worked in a warehouse and walked 1.25 miles to work, 1.25 miles home for lunch, 1.25 miles back to work, and 1.25 miles home in the evening; that’s five miles a day, five days a week, for three months.  A lot of walking in the hot, muggy summer.  I think I followed The Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet authored by Dr. Irwin Maxwell Stillman that surfaced in the late 60’s.

Bigger than I've ever been, but not bigger than I thought I was. You get the idea.

My blog is based on my 45 years’ yo-yo dieting experiences coupled with my current (since 30 April 2009) very effective, very organized, amazingly easy, well-thought-out, irrefutably healthful, undeniably tasty (to me) diet regimen. In three months, I’ve lost 25 pounds. And, believe me, if I didn’t live in a rural area, the weight loss would be even greater—but it’s hard to bicycle on gravel-dirt roads.

If your goal is only to lose weight, you’re not as focused as you should be. Your real goal is to lose fat. Understanding that is absolutely necessary to doing it. Certainly, by losing fat, you lose weight; however, you don’t want to lose muscle and you don’t want to lose other tissue. You want to lose only fat. It’s a complex process that can be more convoluted than The Da Vinci Code by slim and trim Dan Brown, so pay attention and you’ll learn how to do it.

All the basics—and they’re really quite simple, despite the immensity (pun intended—gird your loins, there will be a lot of them!) of our common problem—will be laid out in the next few days, but they don’t tell you how to achieve your goal, i.e., how to achieve your ideal weight.

My regular blog will do that.  Stay tuned.  Comment.  Spread the word.  Keep me honest.  I’m smart as hell, I’m arrogant, and I’m surprisingly reticent, but, despite my education and experience, I don’t know it all, so it’s up to you to clue me in when I wander off, okay?

You need to know the relative amounts of body fat to all the rest of your body that’s not fat, i.e., bone, water, muscle, tissues. The proper relationship permits and promotes a good quality of life and a good prospect for your well being. Men should have, at an absolute minimum, 5% body fat; women should have, at an absolute minimum, 15% body fat. If you have too much body fat, then you’re certainly overweight, if not downright obese. Some fat, of course, is necessary, but, when it exceeds 16% in men or 28% in women, then it can be lethal. Excess body fat is clearly linked to liver disease, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, respiratory dysfunction, gall bladder disease, and joint problems.

Stay True to Blue Because Greener is Obscener

Now, what the hell is BMI and what is meant by overweight and by obesity? Just like everything else in a society which knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing, these terms are based on numbers, i.e., ranges of weight-and-height relationships.

These ranges are referred to as BMIs, i.e., “body mass index,” and your number should be no lower than 19 and no greater than 24. There are several tables all over the internet which analyze the hell out of the numbers, but read about this topic first so that you’re not so shocked that you won’t continue. For the timid, it would be a good idea to ask a trusted friend to sit with you as you read.

Essentially, you’re overweight if you have more body fat than you need, but not so much extra that it can have a serious and profound adverse effect on your life span. It’s a range between normal weight and level I obese.  This is a BMI range between 25 and 29.

You already know that you’re overweight. That’s why you’re reading this blog or why some passive-aggressive person suggested it to you. In any event, the rule of thumb provided above under “What Should I Weigh?” establishes that you’re overweight. Your BMI is >24 and/or your waist is greater than 35″ if you’re female and greater than 40″ if you’re male, and your shape (apple or pear) tells you how close you are to death from weight-related problems.

Convert Your Apple to a Pear on the Way to Your Ideal Weight Range

In my research on weight management, I was amazed when I stumbled across the fact that your shape plays a role—an important role—in how adversely your obesity can affect you. The question to answer is: are you an apple or are you a pear? It sounds silly, but both shapes are dangerous, but apple shape is the more dangerous of the two. If you’re apple shaped, then most of your fat is around your middle and such placement has a higher correlation with stroke, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease, hyperuricemia, and, in the case of women, polycystic ovary syndrome. If you’re pear shaped, i.e., if most of your fat is located in your lower body, i.e., hips, thighs, legs, etc., you have a higher correlation with prostate enlargement and prostate cancer. Men are more likely to be “apples” and women are more likely to be “pears.”

It’s not known why some folks are “apples” and others are “pears,” but it seems that about one-third is caused by genes and hormones; however, because our environment is home to an ever-increasing use of the female hormones estrogen and prolactin and estrogen-like compounds, folks become “pears” more readily than they otherwise would. If they’re exposed to corticosteroids, they’re more likely to become “apples” and such men are more likely to develop enlarged prostates and prostate cancer.

It’s usually not easy to determine whether you’re an “apple” or a “pear” from your full-length mirror. You’ve got to measure yourself in order to calculate your waist-to-hip ratio. Even though math is involved, it’s easy. Here’s what you do. Measure your waist at its narrowest. Measure your hips at their broadest. Divide your waist measurement by your hip measurement. That’s your waist-to-hip ratio. So, if your waist is 50″ and your hips are 71″, your waist-to-hip ratio is 0.704. For females, if your ratio is >0.8, you’re an “apple”; if it’s 0.8 or less, you’re a “pear.” For men the cut-off is 0.95. Your bulk can shift as your weight changes, so monitor your waist-to-hip ratio at least monthly.

There’s not a lot more to understand. Lose weight. You’re aiming not for thinness, but for leanness, i.e., the right proportion of fat to non-fat in your body. Lose as much fat as possible and, in the process, shift what’s left from fat to muscle. Strengthen your cardiovascular system. Develop a taste for wholesome, healthful foods. Banish all bread products, all sugared products, all fried products, and all fast-food products from the rest of your (now longer) life.

Okay, once it’s established that you’re on your deathbed from cancer, stroke, heart disease, high blood pressure, liver disease, or whatever, you can pig out. That’s permitted; however, don’t precipitate the deathbed scenario just to gobble up a supersized McGreasy—that’s cheating.

I know it’s a surprise to learn that such conditions could occur when most fast-food staffs comprise high-school students and uneducated or ineducable losers just a rung or two above vagrant and/or homeless status.

Beyond the just mentioned level of innate unreliability of fast-food staffs, bear in mind that the employee entrance is usually a revolving door. The staff changes more often than do the uniforms and the hair nets. Whatever positive effects entry-level employees might get from MacTraining are lost as soon as a so-called trained employee leaves. His/her replacement might not be as bright or as dedicated or as motivated as the employee who left for less greasy pastures. The revolving door used by all the teens who work in fast-food restaurants is a constant, chronic problem.

As for long-term employees (they exist, really!), there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being a fast-food employee; however, when that’s all an employee ever wants to be, then s/he might not be particularly motivated to cross all the t’s or dot all the i’s.

As for the high-school teens preparing fast food, my impression of teens is that their rooms are always messy and that, even with Herculean efforts, their parents can’t motivate them to clean or straighten anything. With their almost universal disregard for orderliness, cleanliness is bound to be the next item sacrificed.

How could anyone suspend disbelief long enough to think that those same teens will follow pesky sanitation and cooking rules during the morning, noon, and evening fast-food rushes? At the least, you’re courting a debilitating bout of the green-apple quickstep every time you eat fast food.

Bear in mind that fast food uses a lot of salt. Not just a little extra—a lot extra; more than three times the daily limit for many fast-food addicts. Salt makes you retain water, so you get bloated and heavier. That’s depressing and, to deal with that depression, you eat more fast food. Nice cycle, don’t you think? Also, too much salt is bad for your cardiovascular system.

Actually, a bout of food poisoning might be the next-best thing to happen to you (deciding to eat sensibly is the best thing). It could scare you enough so that you’d come to your senses; however, if you don’t come to your senses and if you’re not poisoned by the food, you’ll certainly succumb, eventually, to diabetes, hypertension, stroke, high cholesterol, tooth decay, and/or arthritis, to name only a few of the better known coffin nails obesity provides.

Former Meals Now On Wheels

I suppose the upside to losing a limb to diabetes could be that it would hamper your ability to get to a fast-food restaurant as often as you’d like, but it seems like a high price to pay for a self-discipline substitute. Your call. With all the other illnesses you’re going to contract, you’ll be eligible for much, much better parking until you die. It’s not nothing, is it?

You on Fast Food is the same as Yeast on Alcohol: You're both dying!

Here’s why: in making alcohol, yeast commits suicide. Yeast can exist happily in solutions high in sugar because sugar is its food; however, yeast waste, alcohol and carbon dioxide, is increasingly lethal to yeast. Naturally occurring yeasts start to die off when alcohol reaches 6%-9% by volume. The yeast strains used by winemakers have a much, much higher tolerance for alcohol and don’t start to die off until the alcohol reaches 13%-15%. Very robust yeasts, like those used for sherry and port, can tolerate alcohol levels of 17%-21%. But, in the end, all the yeasts die.

They simply can’t live in their own waste, but they’re not bright enough to stop producing waste and they’re trapped in the wine vat. They really don’t have any choice but to eat sugar, produce waste, and then die from their own waste. That’s what you’re doing.

You’re eating fast-food crap, filling yourself with life-sapping waste (carbohydrates and fat), wallowing in it, and then dying from it. Now, if you’re no smarter than yeast, that’s okay. The gene pool won’t miss you; however, if you’re smarter, then it’s not okay because you can stop producing waste and you can get the hell out of the vat into which you’ve put yourself. I certainly don’t claim that it’s easy, but I do unapologetically maintain that you’re now on the hook because, after reading the above, you know better. You’re now obliged to stop your slow, inevitable suicide. It can be done. By you. Now.

Off To A Good Start!

Need reïnforcement about the perils of fast food that are above and beyond the vast waist-land promised by the salt-and-fat-and-carbohydrate-laden food itself? Read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. See the film of the same name by Richard Linklater released in 2006. Read Eat Your Heart Out by Jim Hightower—hell, read everything Hightower’s written. He’s intelligent, funny, down-to-earth, and his criticisms are spot-on, regardless of the target.  Both are available at www.Amazon.com.

Fast food is expensive, it makes you fatter, and you’re much more likely to contract food poisoning from a fast-food restaurant than at home. Fast food is slow death for adults and somewhat faster slow death for kids and adolescents. To feed fast food to the fruit of your chaste love is tantamount to child abuse.

The average fast-food meal costs ca. $6-$7 per person. If you eat fast-food three times a day, seven days a week, that’s at least $7,000 per year, per person. You can eat tastier, more healthful food at home for less than $4,000 per year per person—easily. Also, how much spoiled food from your refrigerator have you thrown away because you ignored it in favor of fast food? A lot and you know it. Not only do you have a waist that’s hard to mind, you’re a wastrel who’s hard to mind!

Most adults need fewer than 2,000 calories per day to function quite well. A small fast-food meal is almost 1,000 calories. Supersize the meal and pile on all sorts of fattening, unhealthful condiments and you’re easily entering into glutton territory. You’ve got to be a damned fool not to realize that eating fast food is slow suicide brought on by depression and then promoted by the additional depression precipitated by the weight the fast food adds to your bulk. There’s no real, fundamental difference between your addiction to fast food, an alcoholic’s addiction to alcohol, or a smoker’s addiction to nicotine. The addictions are simply variations on a theme.

So, if you’re bold enough and confident enough to pick up my gauntlet, then you’ve fantasized about chaining yourself in a dungeon with a huge television, a remote, and regular portions of healthful and wholesome food. That won’t happen. It’s time to set aside your chubby, inner child. To paraphrase Paul (1 Corinthians 13:11): when I was a child, I ate like a child. I babbled as a child, I rationalized as a child, and I gorged as a child; now that I’m a hugely overweight, even obese, adult, I need to set aside childish things and talk, think, and act like an adult.

Don’t refer to food as “healthy”; food is either healthful or unhealthful. Healthy means indicative of good health—that’s all it means. Years ago, a tan indicated a healthy complexion; nowadays, it’s deemed a precursor to leathery skin in old age if you manage to dodge an early, painful death from the melanoma bullet.

Healthful’s what you want. It includes wholesome and, if wholesome, healthful food doesn’t suit your taste, but is good for you, e.g., spinach, it’s salutary. (And you thought this was just another dieting harangue!)

You can’t eliminate whole food groups, e.g., fats, carbohydrates, and proteins, from your diet with complete safety, not even in the short run; however, not only can you safely eliminate certain foods from your diet, e.g., chocolate (don’t call me, I’ll call you, Hershey’s!), pizza (ta-ta, Pizza Hut, Domino’s, and oh, so sweet Papa John’s!), peanut butter (toodles, Jif, Peter Pan, and Skippy!), anything that’s cream- or cheese-based, e.g., cream of whatever soups, (ciao, Campbell’s), casseroles with cream or cheese, cheesecake (adios, Sara Lee), ice cream (sorry, Ben; sorry, Jerry!), macaroni and cheese (so long Kraft!), cookies, pies, cakes, torts, and anything fried, whether or not it’s breaded (kiss off, KFC!), but you must!

So, eliminate:  All fried foods—no ifs, ands, or buts—they’re gone; whether breaded or unbreaded—nothing fried or sautéed shall ever pass your lips again.

Everything that has come to be known and loved as a dessert must be forsworn—if it comes with sugar, don’t touch it:  Cookies; Pies; Cakes.

All high-carbohydrate foods—they’re slow death—have to be eliminated (not from the face of the Earth, but certainly from your face):  Chocolate; Pizza; Peanut Butter; Sausages.

You get the idea?