Last spring (2024) I bought four pairs of shorts that were exactly the same as four pairs I already had, except for one difference. The waistline for the new shorts allowed for an extra inch of space. The previous shorts I had purchased a couple years earlier (2022) when I was somewhat obsessed with particular body metric goals and ate and exercised to keep myself very fit. Apparently by 2024, I had let things slip a little bit.
Fast forward to this spring, and I have slipped further. Now even my replacement shorts have become tight. They are so tight that they are leaving an indentation on my mid-section. Fact is, I have been hovering around 170 lbs. Back in the spring of 2022, I was 155 lbs. Last spring I was vacillating between 160 – 165 lbs.
I’m faced with a choice. I can buy shorts the next size up OR I can lose weight. I have chosen the latter option. Here I stand; I can do no other.
Keeping my weight in check has become more difficult because I can no longer jog due to back pain that is exacerbated by running. Running was such an effective way to manage weight. I’ve discovered that our elliptical machine also exacerbates my back pain, so that’s out, too. Well, I’ll go to war with the army I have.
Walking doesn’t bother my back much, so I’ve been walking. Now that I’m serious about losing weight, I’m “stepping up” my walking game–pun intended. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve averaged around 20,000 steps a day, with a few days over 25,000 steps, and yesterday was over 30,000 steps! I woke up with leg cramps early this morning. Nevertheless, I started today with a 30 minute power walk, and as I write this, I just finished up a midday walk.
My current, general schedule for walking includes 3, 30 minute power walks–morning, noon, and night. I also take a leisurely daily walk with one, two, or three of our dogs.
Walking, alone, won’t do it. My eating habits must change.
For many years, I have habitually skipped breakfast and eaten salads for lunch. I continue to skip breakfast, but this week I shifted away from salads. Now for lunch, I eat a handful of pretzel crisps, a half dozen baby carrots, and two tablespoons of hummus. Truth be told, my salads had gotten quite large. Certainly they were nutritious; however, they were coming in around 450 – 500 calories. My new lunch menu is about 200 calories. Just over the course of the workweek, that’s dropping from 2250 – 2500 calories to 1,000 calories. If I maintain discipline over the weekend, too, the lunch calories drop from 3150 – 3500 to 1400 calories.
Beyond the lower calorie count, the pretzel/carrot/hummus (PCH) lunch has other advantages. The prep time for PCH is about 1 minute versus 10 – 15 minutes for a salad. While it was possible to wash the lettuce the night before, even if I did that, I still had to spend time just prior to lunch heating the beans and tofu, adding the beans and tofu, adding Kalamata olives, adding green olives, adding cottage cheese, adding olive oil, adding vinegar, crushing crackers and adding them, spicing the salad just right with Tumeric and black pepper, and then mixing it all together. Then I had to put all that stuff away–spices to the spice cabinet; beans, tofu and cottage cheese to the fridge; crackers, oil and vinegar to the pantry; and the salad spinner to the drying pad, after I took time rinsing it. And if I didn’t wash the lettuce the night before, salad prep REALLY took a long time.
PCH is quick. Thus, I can spend more time walking midday, and less time on food prep and breakdown. Also, with PCH, I can snack on it while working, which is very hard to do with a salad. Snacking while working allows for even more walking time, time that otherwise would have been “eaten up” by my salads extraordinaire–pun intended (I’m on a roll).
Finally, I consciously created a mindshift.
I have replaced eating as my midday treat with walking as my midday treat. Rather than eating being the pause that refreshes, walking is the pause that refreshes. I thus work diligently through the morning hours, looking forward to a midday walk, and then I get back to work, fueled by PCH. The emphasis on the food is diminished, which is helpful when trying to lose weight. Nevertheless, the chilled carrots are a wonderfully and naturally sweet, juicy reward after my walk. I guess I can have my carrots and eat them, too.
My long-term goal is to be healthy. Part of that will be evidenced by my shorts fitting properly, again. In the near term, my goal is to drop to 160 lbs by the time I go surfing later this month. In Costa Rica, I requested a wide board with a lot of volume to make paddling easier and to absorb my errors in technique. I had a lot to learn at surf camp, and I appreciated a forgiving board.
However, this month, I will be using my own board. To be sure, my board is a beginner board, with generous volume and width; however, it has considerably less of both than the one I used in Costa Rica. Accordingly, by shedding 10 lbs of body weight, I’ll be making my life easier in the ocean, on this smaller board. There will be less weight to paddle out to the break, less weight to pop-up, and less weight for the board and waves to support.
I’ve written about my new PCH lunch. There’s another, more famous PCH–the Pacific Coast Highway. It starts in Dana Point (DP), about 60 miles north of where I’ll be in Pacific Beach (PB). At any rate, whether I’m in PB, DP, off the PCH, or somewhere in North County SD, my PCH, combined with walking, is an easy change I am making now to increase my enjoyment of surfing, then and there!
Had to leave my worries all behind
“Pacific coast highway” by The Hip Abduction and Trevor Hall
Loving how the ocean meets the sky
Wishing you could see this frame of mind
All of them been asking, “Where’d you go?”
If you never been, then, you never know
I’m forever following the golden coast.
With Love ,
P. Gustav Mueller, author of The Present