First I want to say congratulations on taking a major step for better health. Its trite, but for it to work this needs to be a lifestyle change, not a 90 day thing. Seems like there are plenty of ways to skin the cat but let me give you one more example.
Background - I am currently 40, was 38 when I was diagnosed with cancer (don't worry, I'll live). My body comp was similar to yours (6 feet, usually weighed between 195-215) and I cared more about my career than my health. And when I did care about my health, it was more of a "oh shit, I am fat, need to slim down to get laid" kind of thing, and I would do a P90X routine and eat egg whites, skinless chicken breasts w/brown rice and limit my fat content, trying to create a caloric deficit. It sort of worked, if I busted my ass for 90 days I would get down to 185 but the food was so bland my weekly "cheat day" would turn into 2 days, then 3 days, then back to 2 hundy for me. So while I was sick, I did a shit ton of research into health, about metabolic diseases, why people get fat, get heart diseases, cancer, diabetes, etc. I mean, I literally did this for hours each day for 6 months during my recovery. I eventually found and read the book "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and it literally changed my life. It isn't a diet book, its a book about the almost complete corruption/incompetence of nutritional science and how it was perverted by politics. The bottom line is his hypothesis that highly processed carbs cause obesity, not animal fats / high cholesterol foods (nothing totally surprising in this forum, but still not conventional wisdom). Ok, I get it, so I needed to experiment on myself and eat a diet that buys into the author's (Gary Taubes) hypothesis. And that diet is the "Paleo Diet", or Primal Diet, or whatever you want to call it. So I shifted from egg whites to whole eggs, bland skinless chicken that left me unsatisfied to grassfed ribeyes, and ditched the rice, milk, etc for more veggies. The results were shocking. So here is what I did -
My Diet / Workout Program
Diet is roughly going to be 80%+ of your success so focus on this. In general - I cooked all of my own food (so I know with certainty the ingredients), which consisted of plants and animals as close to nature as possible. So hunting/eating a wild deer > Whole Foods grassfed beef > Whole Foods corn fed beef > supermarket CAFO ground beef. So unrefined coconut oil > refined coconut oil > vegetable oil. Daily example diet below -
Bfast - 3 Vital Farms eggs, #4 rated WF bacon, organic roma tomato, organic spinach, 1 serrano, 1/2 habanero, 3 organic mushrooms, sautéed in unrefined coconut oil.
Lunch - blended berry shake - handful of organic almonds, chia seeds, flaxseed, 1 scoop of whey protein, 3 strawberries, 5 raspberries, 10 blueberries, 1/2 small banana, 1 stalk of kale.
Dinner - 12 oz grassfed ribeye from WF, with broccoli, garlic, some lemon, sautéed in olive oil.
Quick note - you need to learn to cook. Steaks, while awesome, get old. Now I have about 9-10 recipes I rotate and things don't get old.
I did the math once, came out to around 2k calories but never counted calories. Just ate real, whole foods until I was full. Also tried not to eat after 5pm.
My workouts sucked because I was recovering from not only cancer, but shoulder surgery. So I was one weak motherfucker. Weak as in cant do one pullup and seeing my PT 3x per week trying to do 5 lbs shoulder raises weak. That's weak. So I did what I could, which was some sort of workout 4-5 days a week. Either an intense 5k run or lifting weights as best I could. After 6 weeks I could start doing pullups and benchpressing (started with only the bar!!). It slowly came around. For you, I would keep it simple - 3 days of basic strength routines (squat, deadlift, press, benchpress) and 3 days of cardio first thing in the morning. If you feel exhausted, simply skip it and come back hard the next day. Be active, but really no need to hurt yourself.
Results
Started Jan 1 at 212 lbs and lost 18 lbs first month (!). My alltime best weekly weight loss in my life was about 1-1.5 lbs per week, now I was at over 4lbs weekly and feeling incredible. I could feel the fat falling off my body. My weight kept coming off quickly and stopped right at my high school weight (175lbs), just 10 weeks after I started. My diet continued the same but weight loss promptly stopped. It was as if nature said "ok Johnny, you are at the right weight now, you are in equilibrium, carry on".
Results Confirmed By Medical Doctors
So at this point, 175 lbs and confident as a motherfucker, that I was on top of the world and rather smug that my research proved true. But there was one final test - how do I look on the inside? Maybe I lost weight but I'm clogging my arteries or whatever. The prior year, I did an all day health exam at a nationally renown clinic in Dallas where they tested me from head to toe. These guys found my cancer and saved my ass. So there's that. But also, I weighed 200 lbs, had a body fat % of 22%, hdl 52, trig 85, and there was a small blockage/calcium deposit (not a MD, forgive my layman's terms) in one of my arteries. My doctor said rated it an "11" on some scale. I think 200 is a heart attack, so its low but high for my age. She essentially said "this number never gets lower but if we keep it the same we should be ok". So in mid May (about 140 days after starting this lifestyle change) I go back for my annual appt. The results? 177 lbs, 12% bodyfat (skinfold calipers but backed up a DEXA scan), hdl 89 trig 59, and that clogged artery number was an 8! She said she had never seen something like that (or at least told me that to make me feel better). I interpreted it as I reversed early heart disease. Hyperbole? Maybe. But there is no argument that every single possible health factor improved since I started this diet. Also loved the look on their faces when I told them I was eating mass quantities of saturated fat!
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Please note that I am not a "all carbs bad, all fats good" kind of guy. Plenty of good carbs (green leafy veggies) and bad fats (processed cooking oils) out there, but when you eat a diet as close to nature as possible, the output naturally skews towards higher fat content and lower carb content than "typical"
Writing this almost gets me emotional
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. Its because I now "have the answer", its a rush of relief after doing such nonsense over the last 20 years trying to look fit. Keep in mind this is n=1, but I am convinced. Oh, and two years later and my weight never got over 185 lbs. That's never happened as an adult for that amount of time. Good luck to you.
John
