So I haven’t taken my own advice when it comes to diet and moderation. About two years after that post, I find myself at 225 pounds and unhappy with how I feel. Despite that, I’ve kept a solid streak of working out in some capacity every day, but I’ve obviously increased my consumption.

I’m going to try something slightly different this time, with the goal to find a relationship food that is something I can consistently maintain, or dare I say sustainable. What does that mean? Here’s my framework for approaching this objective:

Objective

To weigh under two hundred pounds on my birthday (late September).

Strategies

Nutrition

Using Attia’s eloquently explained ‘three levers’ approach, I’ll do the following for nutrition:

• Time restriction - Generally eat within a window of 2-6pm, fasting twenty hours a day.
• Dietary restriction - No added sugar. Minimally processed food. Leaning towards low carbohydrate. Severely limit alcohol.
• Caloric restriction - I’m not going to track calories explicitly, but I’m aiming for about 2,000/day while in the dieting period.

Exercise

I’m going to keep with my 45 minutes of Zone 2 four times a week (usually cycling), then fill in the other days with strength training. For the past several months, this has been a mixed back of bodyweight exercises, trap bar deadlifts and kettlebell circuits.

In addition to that, I want to accumulate activity over the day to increase metabolic activity without driving crazy hunger.

Sleep

This won’t change, but the goals are to sleep within the same time range each night and maximize the quality of that sleep.

Tactics

On to the details!

Nutrition

Last time I did this, the Zero app was useful for tracking things. I don’t think I need that right now except for the initial fast I’m going to do to kick things off. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to do a roughly three day fast (probably going to be more like 70 hours) to kick start into ketosis and give my gut a well deserved rest.

Once into that, I’m going to try something like:

5:00 am - black coffee

5:30 am - work out

7:30 am - more black coffee, maybe some Yerba mate instead

2:00 pm - have a smoothie with protein powder, greens mix, some frozen berries and almond milk. Maybe almond butter too.

5:00 pm - dinner with the family. Meat and veggies for the most part.

I’m going to shoot for over 150 grams of protein a day, then fill the rest in with fat and then whatever carbs come along for the ride. Since I haven’t explicitly tracked a protein goal like this during a diet before, I’ll have to tune things in as I go.

I know that I’m supposed to eat shortly after weight training, especially when I’m calorically restricted, so perhaps on those days I’ll shift into a lunch time workout.

Exercise

Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday I’ll be on my bike for 45 minutes. I shoot for a heart rate of 130 and while I haven’t done any lactate testing, that’s the low end of my Maffetone number.

Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, I play around. I tend to lean towards upper body (pull ups, ring dips) because of all my time on the bike. During this, I’ll be more diligent about getting one good deadlift workout a week.

Sleep

By stopping eating at 6pm, this gives me at least two hours before bedtime where my stomach can start digesting. I then try to keep the room as cold as I can and then use a Chilipad on max cold. The pad bottoms out in the low 60s, so it’s either aged or I just generate too much heat. I’ll wear an eye mask to keep things as dark as possible and sometimes wear blue light blocking glasses heading into bedtime.

Well, now that I’ve set up a plan, time to do it! I’m looking to lose about ten pounds a month, or 2.5 a week.