My Weight Loss Blog

This is a guest post by Dr. Kal from Dr. Kal's Weight Loss Tips.

Photo credit: peasap

After reading about John’s recent diagnosis of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) and his new Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) Machine, I thought about how hard he is going to have to work to cure his OSA. One of the only ways to cure OSA is to lose weight. However, to lose weight you must get a good night sleep. Obviously, getting a good night sleep is difficult when you have OSA.

Weight Loss

The old weight loss equation was simple. If you wanted to lose weight, all you would have to do is consume fewer calories and burn more calories. Unfortunately, 98 percent of Americans, who tried to lose weight and keep it off, were unable to do so with that equation.

My new weight loss equation is a little more complex, but still simple. If you want to lose weight and keep it off you must:

• Eat less
• Move more
• Stress less
• Sleep more

Sleep

63% of Americans sleep fewer than 7 hours every night. That statistic is surprisingly similar to the stat that 67% of Americans are either overweight or obese.

Obviously, sleep deprivation is not the only factor in the United States’ obesity epidemic, but it is a significant contributor. Sleep deprivation causes weight gain and inhibits weight loss. Lack of sleep does this by:

• Creating imbalances with your hormones
• Increasing your stress levels
• Slowing your metabolism
• Decreasing your energy levels
• Increasing the time you have available to eat

Hormonal Imbalances

Lack of sleep creates imbalances in hormones that are essential to obtaining and maintaining a healthy weight.

Sleep deprivation increases your levels of:

• Ghrelin – One of the hormones that increases your appetite
• Cortisol – One of the hormones that signals stress

Sleep deprivation also decreases your levels of:

• Leptin – One of the hormones that decreases your appetite
• Growth hormone – One of the hormones that encourage fat burning and muscle growth
• Serotonin and Dopamine – Two hormones that encourage the consumption of unhealthy carbohydrates

Sleep deprivation boosts your stress levels and increases your appetite for all foods especially unhealthy foods. Lack of sleep also discourages fat burning and muscle growth. Who knew that losing a few hours of ‘shut-eye’ could be so bad for you?

Stress and Energy

Lack of sleep causes fatigue. Fatigue increases stress levels. Increased stress levels causes overeating. Fatigue will also decrease the productivity of your work-outs. If you are tired, you will not work out.

Fatigue encourages you to eat more and work-out less. That is the anti-weight loss formula.

Metabolism

Lack of sleep slows your metabolism by preventing muscle growth and fat burning. This slowing of your metabolism will decrease your body’s ability to burn calories all day.

Sleep is essential to permanent weight loss. So, get your required seven to nine hours of sleep and achieve your weight loss goals.

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One of the approaches I used successfully when I first had some weight loss success on this journey of mine was to continue eating at all the same places I always had but to scale back how much I was eating. I pretty much know my battle is to reduce consumption and having a focus on that really seemed to make a difference.

As my weight has ballooned back up I've forgotten all the good habits I had started to establish as it pertains to portion size. One of the first things I did back then was to dramatically reduce how much I was eating at McDonald's, which is probably not the first time a fat guy like me has said that. McDonald's is generally not great for a diet, particularly if you have a problem with portion size.

I've never had success in daily tracking of calories but I have had some success in researching a few key meals so that I have a good understanding of what is OK or what is not. (hint, a foot long Tuna combo meal at Subway is NOT!).

I've sort of forgotten what's OK at McDonald's and what is not so I thought I would grab a nutrition sheet and dig in:

McDonald's Sausage Egg McMuffin

Prior to starting this journey a couple of years ago I had developed a habit of enjoying two sausage egg mcmuffin's and a hash brown for breakfast. The good news is I know that is SO bad and grossly filling that this time around I have been staying away from that meal. Let's see if there is any combination of this that could possibly work for a not-so-bad breakfast.

According to the McDonald's nutritional info:

2 Sausage Egg McMuffins and a hashbrown: 1,050 calories.
2 Sausage Egg McMuffins: 900 colories.
1 Sausage Egg McMuffin and a hashbrown: 600 colories.
1 Sausage Egg McMuffin: 450 calories.

Maybe the occasional sausage egg McMuffin wouldn't be a terrible thing but anything beyond that and you are really starting to dig into your daily caloric intake.

Egg McMuffin

This breakfast sandwich is their original classic and from what I remember reading it really isn't so bad from a calorie standpoint. But let's see how bad:

2 Egg McMuffins and a hashbrown: 750 calories.
2 Egg McMuffins: 600 calories
1 Egg McMuffin and a hashbrown: 450 colories.
1 Egg McMuffin: 300 calories.

300 calories isn't bad at all, I easily eat more than that with a "good" breakfast. Of course that includes fruit, dairy and other good things for you – I am ignoring all of that and just focusing on calories which of course isn't healthy either. But what I'm trying to determine here is "what is a relatively filling, cheap meal that I can grab on the go that isn't go to blow my diet." It's not 2 Sausage Egg McMuffin's and a hashbrown but perhaps it is a single Egg McMuffin.

Sausage Breakfast Burrito

Diving into this analysis I was mostly interested in this one because it is something I have become used to eating and I've never before research how bad they were for me. So I was really interested. The problem is that for some reason the nutritional sheet I got at McDonald's didn't show this one, it only showed the bigger McSkillet Breakfast Burrito. So I had to use the numbers I found on the Internet:

2 Sausage Breakfast Burritos and a hashbrown: 750 calories.
2 Sausage Breakfast Burritos: 600 calories
1 Sausage Breakfast Burrito and a hashbrown: 450 colories.
1 Sausage Breakfast Burrito: 300 calories.

So it's basically the same as the regular Egg McMuffin. The problem is that the value meal this comes in, the #11, includes 2 burritos, so by default that's the 750 calories pack. You can order the ala-carte but again I'm not sure if just one will be enough. I do know that I really don't like just 1 regular egg McMuffin as I never feel like that meal keeps me going, but perhaps a single breakfast burrito will. I'll have to try.

For all of you who are no doubt thinking, "don't go to McDonald's, make yourself something at home," you are probably right. But convenience is golden.

As in Golden Arches.

It's not the best picture since I took it with my cell phone looking into a mirror, but that's me after getting hooked up for my sleep study a couple of months ago. Shortly after I took this picture I got into bed and they put more monitors on my face and plugged that wiring harness into the wall to monitor every last thing about what was going on as I slept. What you can't see in the picture is that those wires extend down my legs too – I was a regular robot freak.

But the sleep study was well worth it because it showed that I had severe sleep apnea and it resulted in hooking me up with a CPAP machine, which I am beginning to really feel the effects of. My CPAP machine has some basic usage statistics that I can see and what it is telling me this morning is that i have used it 66/75 days for a total of 315 hours. Most of those 9 days that I missed came in the first month – I had a follow-up checkup a month ago were they made some minor adjustments to the pressure (they increased it) and since then I don't think I have missed a day, and that includes 4 or 5 nights in a hotel.

For you math geniuses out there I'm sure you noticed that I am averaging less than 5 hours a night with it. For the first month I was averaging about 3 hours a night, since I have had the pressure adjusted I would say I am probably averaging more like 6 now. Many nights I do sleep through the night with it, other times I find that once I wake up in the middle of the night I have a hard time getting back to sleep fussing with it and so I won't. This is part of the "getting used to it" process that I am still going through.

So does it make a difference? Hell, yes! I have to admit it's not super obvious at first glance, but it is making a difference. First of all, the results of my sleep study showed empirically that it was making a huge difference in terms of my blood oxygen levels and my ability to get to REM sleep. The scientists looking at my charts would say it is making a huge difference in my health. But of course I never really knew about those problems – when you have sleep apnea you think you are sleeping just fine but you really aren't. The symptoms of sleep apnea like being dog tired all day, stifling huge yawns not just after a filling meal but literally any time during the day from the first thing in the morning to late in the afternoon – those are all gone. I feel much more alert throughout the day, not to mention the odd hours of the morning and night that I sometimes find myself driving long distances – I feel safer on the road.

Life with the mask is a definite pain but I am not snoring at night, I feel rested during the day and my doctors are happy. Sounds like good news to me!

As is no doubt obvious by my lack of posts and my weight loss chart that continues to go up instead of down, I've been in a weight loss rut. Nay, a virtual crater. The Grand Canyon you could say.

I've realized this months ago and have struggled with finding the motivation needed to get going again. Here's how bad it is – I somehow managed to convince myself that what I needed was a redesign of my website to get me kickstarted. And I've proceeded down the path of making that happen. I'm looking forward to a new look around here and think it may well be what I need to start really posting again, but once I realized I was delaying starting my diet and exercise program until my website redesign was done – well, that was too much.

I may have got the kick in the pants I needed last week when my wife weighed in after her first week of a weight loss challenge at work. She's coming up on the big Four-O and is looking to get more healthy herself. After one week she lost 4 pounds! I don't think I had but one or two weeks that good when I was really into it.

Suddenly there is a little competition in the house.

So this morning I put 30 minutes in on the treadmill before work, the first time in many months, and I ate pretty well all day. And drank a lot of water. Protein bar and a glass of V8 for breakfast, egg salad wrap with a side salad for lunch, a Bologna and cheese sandwich for dinner and an apple for a snack.

OK, not the best day in terms of quality but trust me it beats multiple stops at McDonalds, which is something I have fallen into the habit of. Dinner would have been better but it was straight from work to soccer practice and I only had time to grab something quick.

Soccer practice? Yep, I am coaching my son's soccer team again this year. Another thing I did well today was I purposely got more involved in the action by participating in the drills where it was appropriate. I have a 1v1 drill in a 6 yard square box that literally wiped me out after 5 minutes. Pretty sad. But, it felt good to get more physical.

I'm looking forward to sharing my website redesign with you but in the meanwhile I'm going to start posting again and pushing myself to do better. I'm still absolutely convinced that writing about this journey is helpful and feel as though a big reason for me falling off the wagon is that I stopped writing about it as it was happening. Time to get the virtual pen out again and get back at it.

I'd also like to get reintroduced to my fellow weight loss bloggers – anyone new out there that just started a blog yourself? Tell us about it in the comments!

I received a $200 gift card for Macy's that I've been holding on to for a couple of months until last night, when I finally spent a little time shopping for myself. There were a lot of half-off deals on clothing so my plan was to stock up on some new outfits. While I have a dozen pairs of pants hanging in my closet I've been reduced to wearing the last two that fit. When I had some weight loss success earlier I donated all of my "fat pants" thinking I wasn't going to be needing them again.

Wrong!

So I figured I'd be able to load up cheaply on some good quality clothing. I grew up shopping at Dayton's, which in some convoluted way that I can't remember is now effectively Macy's, and it was always a treat to buy clothing there. So I was excited, or at least excited as a normal guy can be, to load up on some good clothing to round out my wardrobe while I wait for whatever motivation I need to try to lose weight again.

As I started to browse the racks of the Men Store at Macy's I started to realize a problem – there were hardly any size XL anything, only a smattering of XXL and forget about finding any XXXL, the size that I really need. I can fit into most XXLs but the problem comes after washing where all it takes is a little shrinkage and my Polo Ralph Lauren shirt would become a rag.

I took a look at the dress shirts where I require a 19/34/35 – only to find that their largest size was 18.5/34/35. So close but that extra half inch makes all the difference.

Not wanting to take a chance on some shirts that wouldn't quite fit I started looking at pants. They had a ton of pants on sale at great prices, but after trying a few pair on I was bummed to see that I was going to need a 42/30 size and there wasn't a pair I tried on that I liked. For one thing almost everything had front pleats, and I've learned that is just not a look a fat guy should be going with.

In the end my trip to the Men's Store at Macy's netted me a new belt and some socks.

So what does a fat guy do? Off to the kitchen store where I bought an All-Clad Stainless 11" French Skillet (darn, I just noticed it is $10 cheaper on Amazon) and a Wusthof Trident Classic 5" Tomato Knife ($20 cheaper at Amazon, drat!).

I rounded out my shopping buying a memory foam pillow that I am hoping will aid my sleeping with the CPAP machine I've been struggling to use (another post for later there).

So that's how a fat guy blows $200 on clothes at Macy's – a belt, socks and some other non-clothes stuff. So many nice looking clothes I couldn't even try on. Really depressing. Almost depressing enough to do something about it. I hope.