Losing weight gets more difficult as you get older. Here I am at 58, attempting to stay below 200 lbs. Sounds simple, right?
I began my quest sometime in 2022. I was 5’6” and a whopping 248 pounds! Whoa! (No, that’s not what the scale said out loud, but….)
Anyway, I was amazed I’d gotten so heavy. I had a straight-up Dadbod! I started trying to get it together by fasting using the 16:8 ratio. You’ve probably heard of this: you don’t eat for 16 hours then supposedly you can eat at will for the next 8. Well, not at will; I was very selective. I ate one meal a day. There was a lot of kale, cabbage, collard greens, string beans and broccoli. I did have meat also; I am a carnivore by nature and I have times where I crave meat! A good burger, some fried chicken, pork spare ribs, or a well marbled ribeye cooked medium are so right for me.
Prior to eating my one meal, I would make sure I drank about 12-oz of water and fill up on the good stuff (the veggies, in case you were wondering about it) first. With the meat I just limited my portions. Oh, and I pretty much abandoned most carbs.
It took a couple-few weeks to get used to it, but I managed. Yes, there were times I missed having a plate of spaghetti, or some red beans and rice, but I managed to tough through it. I did make sure I stayed under 2500 calories every day. Some days, in fact, it may have been more like 1500.
After dinner, I would do a light workout of YouTube videos with calisthenics and light cardio and completed the sessions by hitting the elliptical for about 12 minutes, just to get the weight loss machine inside my body “turned on.” You know, get my metabolism revved up. It was sputtering like an old Chevy when I first started this regimen, backfiring and everything! So I figured less was better. If I tried to go longer than a few minutes, I would most definitely pull something. I just knew it.
I sprinkled in some gym time as well. I would go to LA Fitness and use free weights. I had a routine where I rotated through about 7 stations, then I would top it off with a 2-mile run.
This was the most difficult part, the running. It took such a toll on my knees I knew I couldn’t maintain it long term. The pain was just too great. I even adjusted my stride and my gait to not bend my knees at such a steep angle and fortunately, I was able to do this for about a year and the weight did come off. I got down to 192 pounds and felt great. But I couldn’t take the running anymore. So I began walking (but not speed-walking like Bryan Cranston in “Malcom in the Middle”). I planned a route at my job and around my neighborhood. I would get a nice brisk pace and even had a nice incline along the routes as well. So far so good, my knees didn’t hate me, and I got a rigorous cardio workout. I even had a walking playlist I walk to that gives me the cadence I need to maintain a vigorous momentum.
My playlist was my walking buddy. I had the songs “Now that we found Love” by Heavy D and the Boyz, and “Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan on my playlist, just to name a couple tracks. Some tracks are faster, like “Clear” by Cybotron. They take the pace to the next level.
Phil's News For Those Mid-Life Blues 
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