I have five two pounds to lose before May 1st, to get my man-panties body back. My new goal, in part to satisfy my wife who doesn’t appreciate “cycling skinny”, is 170 pounds.  At 6′ tall and maybe 13-14% body fat, that’s pretty good I figure. I’ve come a long way from 195 and 20%+ I can tell you that.

I’ve been at the weight loss/correction game for a lot of years now and other than the low-hanging fruit; cut out soda, eat smaller portions, spread the meals out and include healthy snacks, there is one key ingredient to how I do well that has been consistent…

I am not uncomfortable with being hungry.  When I was heavier, I was no muscle and all flab and I was used to eating as much of whatever I wanted.  Once I saw the error of my ways, I first picked up running and then came to the understanding that because I was used to eating so much I had to be hungry to reverse the process.

The thinking here, right or wrong (don’t know, don’t care) is that my body had become accustomed to “full” being “too full”.  I thought of my stomach was an expandable gas tank if you will.  The more I stuffed in it, the more I got used to that being what full felt like.  This is why gluttonous cheat days are tough on overeaters (and why I abstain from them entirely, save Thanksgiving).  In other words, cheat days should be the “what”, not the “volume”.  It took a couple of weeks to get used to not eating like eating was going out of style – for my body to become used to a lesser “full”.  I get the feeling that if I’d taken a cheat day once a week where I gorged, my body wouldn’t have adjusted, as it clearly did, to eating less.

Now, in my case, this doesn’t mean I don’t cheat with certain diet-banned foods, such as Chewy Sprees or cookies every now and again, I do.  The trick I use is to keep it to a serving size.  Say, for Chewy Sprees, a serving size is twelve pieces of candy.  That’s all I eat in a given day.  If you know anything about Chewy Sprees, that’s not a lot of candy.  There are other tricks I use as well:  For meals where I still feel hungry after my first helping I always wait five minutes before I put more on my plate – this allows my stomach the necessary time to catch my brain up to what’s going on.  To take this a little deeper, I also adjust based on how much cycling and/or weight lifting I’m doing.  Take Wednesday night for instance, it’s pizza night.  I rode hard on Tuesday so I took it pretty easy Wednesday.  I also did my 100 push-ups but ate a fairly light breakfast and lunch which will mess the equation up a bit.  I ate three pieces of pizza for dinner and was just a touch hungry after the third.  I waited the five minutes and sure enough, I was good to go and pushed myself away from the table.  This way of managing my diet ensures that I’ll be right where I want to be for my daily caloric intake.  The only way I get to eat more is if I work more.

Now, there are a few caveats that should be included in this post:
1)  Living like this takes discipline – I know, but it’s not all that bad.
2)  Cheating the way I do is only for certain personality types.
3)  If you are not the type that can have a few pieces of candy without downing the box/bag/container, you are not one of those types.
4)  If you sit in the barber’s chair long enough, eventually you’ll get your hair cut – I don’t bother sitting in the chair unless I want a trim.  Come to think about it, I won’t even bother walking into the barber shop unless I want a chop.  I know what they do in there, it’s not rocket science.