After years of effort, I’m very proud to have reached a major goal — losing 50 pounds! I went from my “worst ever in my life” to my “feeling good and same waist size as in college”. Quite a few people asked about my system, so I’ve organized the food plan here.

Exercise has been “30 mins of cardio, 4x/week”. Defining “cardio” as “working hard enough to be breathing hard and sweating.” Normally a stationary bike or a rowing machine.

Different Plans for Different Ages

One of the challenges of age is that we slow down. When I was 30, I could lose weight from an extreme diet without even exercising. But by 40, the headaches and insomnia made that impossible. Also my body at age 40, and especially at age 50, would simply refuse to shed the pounds. A sustainable non-extreme diet plan became necessary, one that would leave me with enough energy to exercise and be comfortable.

What Kind of Plan Is It?

This plan is closest to what people call “Paleo”, but I hate that term since literally not a single thing you can find in the grocery store existed in Paleolithic times. This is also not “Keto”. Bread is a great source of certain vitamins, your body needs an energy source, Ketosis is very rough on your organs, and if you stop Keto the weight comes back instantly. Also my plan isn’t a “diet”, since that word usually means “temporary measure”, while mine is meant to be a “forever plan”.

Aaron’s Lean Fitness Plan

  1. “Lean Meats and Green Vegetables” is the mantra, especially for dinners. And nothing but water or tea for 1-2hrs before bedtime.
  2. Carb impact is on gradient from “safest” in morning to “worst” at night. So I have 100cal bread with breakfast always, but a small bowl of pasta at lunch rarely, and near zero starch at dinner – not even quinoa, tho maybe a small amount of low cal root vegetable like squash.
  3. Every dish is allowed up to 1tbsp of flavoring, which can be pretty much anything. So teriyaki sauce on vegetables, fine. BBQ sauce on chicken, fine. Salad dressing on salad, fine. But 1tbsp only. Dry spice can be unlimited.
  4. Stay very light on the alcohol. Beer and wine are especially bad. Most cocktail mixers are too. A very small amount of liquor, preferably by itself, isn’t all that harmful. Alcohol disrupts sleep and raises your RHR (resting heart rate). If a drink or two helps you to relax, de-stress, unwind, then that’s valuable. But not daily, and try to keep it around 1, 2, 3oz of spirits.
  5. Add foods which have high water content, especially apples and melon – they are sugary, but contain so much volume of water and fiber that they delay hunger very well and have comparatively not much calories. Running lots of water through your body helps your organs to be efficient and will also (counter-intuitively) make it so you don’t retain extra water. The fad of “gallon a day” is not healthy. But 3-4 pints (half-liters) per day is great.
  6. Track every damn thing that goes in the mouth. I use the FitBit app, but anything is fine. LiveStrong has a nice UX. But it’s essential, for keeping honest with oneself about consumption, and knowing whether “just one more snack” is okay today.
  7. Daily weigh-in on digital scale; I prefer FitBit Aria because it automatically logs my data to the app via WiFi. Same time every day. Either fully nude or always wearing exactly the same thing, so you can’t kid yourself about whether a variation was because of clothing. You weigh the least in morning after wake-up, because most weight loss is via your breath at night (no kidding) and urination. Watching the graph’s long-term trend line is important because it’s common for men to “bobble up and down” by up to 2lbs from variations in water retention, etc (bigger number for women, especially around menstruation).
  8. There’s often a 1-day lag in consequences… I might eat “almost nothing” one day and still “gain” the following morning, only to see my work reflected a day later. Ditto in the other direction — cheating with a slice of pizza, and the following morning you might not see it on the scale, only to have an extra pound appear the day after.
  9. A tiny treat will not ruin your plan. Stress and misery cause weight gain, so if you truly feel deprived around people having dessert (or your fattening weak spot), then take that taste. But keep it tiny, because 2 weeks of hard-won progress can be lost in a single damn night of gluttony. Don’t spend the week after Halloween grazing on “tiny” candy bites. When tracking on the scale every day, it’s not funny to see progress erased like that. Forgive yourself, but don’t make a habit of going off-plan.

The system above has worked for me. It’s not the easiest, but it works and it’s sustainable.

Good luck! If you have questions, successes, or failures, you’re welcome to reach out and discuss in the comments below.