The Hollando Diet

Office collegues remain shocked and awed by my mysterious post-bathroom weight gain. Hence, we have decided to engage in a two-fold experiment.

Part I: Purchase an analog scale. Carefully control all possible variables. Weigh before and after trips to the restroom (the kind of trips that involve a newspaper.) Compare results. Disprove the presence of the mysterious phenomenon, or confirm the mystery and promote unsubstantiated odd theories to explain the inexplicable.

Part II: Begin a “juice fast” using quirky, obscure, non-FDA-approved, so-called “health” products purchased at a major grocery store. The juice fast supposedly results in massive weight loss. Throughout the weight loss process, confirm this strange phenomenon. Determine if a point of inflection exists, i.e. restroom trips involving mass loss below a threshold level will involve the mysterious weight gain while restroom trips involving mass loss above the threshold amount will result in actual weight loss. Large volume weight loss, which is likely to occur during the juice fast, will provide ample opportunity to determine the threshold point. AMPLE opportunity…

In an amazing turn of events, I was able to eat a cheeseburger and cheese fries for lunch… and still lose four pounds! How can it be? The answer may be what I’ve been having (and when) for both breakfast and dinner: low-carb, low-cal yogurt! 90 calories and 5 grams of carbs mean I can have two containers before I go to work and two more containers when I get home. This technique works, especially when combined with yoga and jogging (with the occassional YMCA workout thrown in for good measure.)
Behold the results:
www.hollando.com/diet

Living in or visiting New York City involves a great deal of walking. Walking involves burning calories. Burning calories can lead to weight loss… if more calories are burnt than consumed. Enter the Snapple.

As I recovered from illness at the start of January, I quickly regained my appetite. Mexican food caused a spike in my weight after reaching a low of 172 lbs. Gradually I recovered, only to jump upward again to a plateau of 174 lbs. New York City traveling involved much walking, but a Popcorn Party certainly added a little burden back to my belly. Returning home, I indulged in a little cheese fry indiscretion… with a chile dog… and then a bowl of popcorn and cheese.

So naturally I blame Snapple. It has 25 grams of sugar. That all turns to fat. Curse you Snapple!

What a simple proposition: if you have a certain mass, and you lose some of that mass, then you should weigh less on a scale. Now I suppose complications may arise. Here’s my mystery: I weigh, I then use the restroom in a manner that requires sitting, and then I return to the scale… and I weigh one pound more than I did just a few minutes ago! Thoughts? I can assure the gentle reader that the apparent mass loss involved is quite substantial.

Technically, a diet consists of what you eat. We had dinner the other night at Degree, which is right on the harbor in Auckland. The specialty of the house is a raw steak, served on an extremely hot rock. The technical term for this is “good.”

Auckland has been great; I have yet to have a bad meal. The low end (sushi and kebabs) are superb, and the medium-tier restaurants are far better than their US pricepoint equivalents. The meal above, including beers and two appetizers, came to about $60 US.

As I detail elsewhere, this month I’m in New Zealand.

I’m also carrying around the effects of a semester of MIT classes. Call it the “First Year Fifteen”, although it wasn’t actually fifteen: more like five to eight, depending on where one measures. Put the 160 mark out of easy reach, though. Good behavior during the holidays kept the situation from careening out of control.

One of the surprising things a year ago when I was spending 80% of my time in England was that I actually lost weight, despite travel, eating in airports, drinking at pubs and being 3,000 miles from the gym. Basically, I just didn’t eat as much, and that was mostly because the food just wasn’t all that good. It’s easy to eat less when there’s very little, outside the Indian restaurants, worth eating. New Zealand definitely shares a culinary heritage with the home islands, and never attracted large numbers of Indian immigrants, either. On the other hand, the general quality of the restaurants is better, and I’ve gotten plenty of exercise so far this weekend, including a hike up Mt. Victoria and some extended walking tours of museums and interesting neighborhoods.

No scale in my hotel room, so we’ll have to wait a bit to see how it all turns out.

Perhaps it’s cheating to get on the scale, get off again, etc. But after four false [sic] reads, I came out at 173 lbs. Ha!

But that leaves 23 lbs. to go. Today, from 4:30pm-6:00pm, I exercised at that steam yoga place. Bottom line: I typically lose two pounds overnight, and right now, I’m 174 lbs. So a possibility exists that I could weigh 172 lbs. in the morning. 22 pounds… the pace needs to quicken. Perhaps soup for dinner, a morning trip to the YMCA… good things are happening, but the goal is 150 lbs. by Feb. 1.

At this point, an observation is in order. JJ, my pal from work (who had a major career moment today!), notes the importance of using tape measures to monitor weight loss. She is concerned about my possible weight changes as fat disappears and muscle develops, i.e. increases signifying healthy changes and not gluttony. That additional measurement strikes me as appropriate… especially if that “muscle develops” concern ever materializes.

Somehow (perhaps by skipping lunch after a hearty late breakfast), I managed to lose two pounds yesterday. Well, in truth, I managed to make the scale agonize between displaying 175 or 174 lbs. The kind, warm, generous scale bestowed upon me the gift of 174 lbs. So I’m probably 174.4 lbs. Tough nuggies. It counts.

All right. I’m now at the point at which I found myself upon graduating law school. So I’ve gained and lost my Merrill Lynch baby fat from the first year on the job. I have to watch what I eat at these wholesaler lunches at work.

Now begins the journey. Blueberries or low-fat yogurt for breakfast, hearty lunches, and ultra-light dinners… soup broth and grapes seem to work well. Can I lose a pound per day? The weight chart is posted on www.hollando.com/diet.

Where are my fellow dieters in their progress? Matt seems to be in the lead, safely ensconced in the 150s at last word. Will has had a short-lived setback, but no doubt now he is toying with the low end of the 160s. (???) David… well, curse David’s metabolism. The man has a fission reactor inside him.

Now off to a half-day’s work, reading about 401(k) plans, followed by a haircut (more weight loss??), a trip to Sprint to insure my new cell phone, a trip to Comp USA to buy a print server, and then… off to Mom and Dad’s to rake leaves. Leaf raking is a great workout, and is likely the source of my 1.6 lbs. loss yesterday.