Note: This post is the second of a four-part series, and it includes Amazon links to different foods and food-related products that have helped me lose weight. Ordering from these links helps to support this page.

Lunch

For most of my adult life, I made horrible choices at lunch time. My focus was always on speed, quantity, and taste. Lunch for me used to be an exercise in poor planning and a display of nonexistent impulse control, two of the personality traits that lead me to weighing 410 pounds and a diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes.

It was not uncommon for me to order two large value meals at a drive-in window, and then eat both in their entirety. Lunch used to be deep-fried and rich in saturated fats.

In the middle of the day, with four hours of work still ahead of me, it was easy to justify my poor choices, and I used to offer myself some great justifications.

“I don’t have time to eat anything healthy.”

“I am having a bad day, I need to eat something delicious to make me feel better.”

“I need to do some heavy lifting this afternoon. I had better carb-up.”

“I had a light breakfast. I deserve this.” (This one is funny because a “light breakfast” used to mean one chicken biscuit instead of two, or a chocolate milk instead of a soft drink.)

The truth was, I used to routinely fall asleep in my car after eating lunch. I regularly over-ate myself to unconsciousness in the middle of the day. And then I felt pretty miserable for the rest of the afternoon.

Bloated. Tired. Disoriented. And in a terrible mood.

And what’s crazy is that eating out every day for lunch was not only bad for my health, but, far from being the convenience that I thought it was, it actually used up a significant amount of time and money.

Brown-Bagging It

When I was diagnosed with diabetes, one of the first things I started doing–at the behest of, and with the help of my beautiful wife–was taking my lunch to work every day. In addition to losing weight and feeling better, I instantly noticed two things.

1. The amount of money I was spending every day went down.
2. The amount of time I had on my lunch break for things other than eating went up.

Carrying my lunch has helped me save both time and money, two things that I always seem to be short of. Instead of driving to a restaurant, waiting in line to order, paying, and then eating, suddenly I was done eating lunch within five minutes of leaving work.

Now if I have somewhere to be during lunch, I can eat on the way instead of detouring to the drive-thru.

My standard lunch is a baked salmon sandwich on whole-wheat bread with a hint of mayonnaise. With it I have a serving of sweet potato chips and a bottle of water.

The salmon is usually an entire side of salmon (preferably wild, but that is easier to find in the summer than in the winter) purchased fresh from the meat section of our local grocery store, baked at 350° for 20 minutes. My wife usually adds a little lemon pepper seasoning, a tablespoon of olive oil, a dash of salt and pepper, and cooks it on Sunday afternoon. She then divides it into five sandwich-sized portions.

To mix it up, I will occasionally have a grilled chicken or steak sandwich. However, the default is salmon. Salmon was a strategic choice. It is a super meat; lean, delicious, and full of vitamin D, I have eaten schools of it in the past year, and it has fueled my weight loss.

Putting this lunch together at night usually takes about 5-10 minutes, depending on how distracted I am and how easily I can find my lunch box. That sure beats the half-hour I was spending each day getting and eating lunch from various windows.

What About the Window?

Life happens. I do occasionally still have to eat at a drive-thru window. But now I am much smarter about it.

The keys to eating healthy at the drive-thru are planning and frequency. As much as possible, I try to know the menu ahead of time, and I definitely do not eat out for every meal. In fact, I try not to eat out more than once a week, if that much.

When I do go to the window, I try to steer clear of fried foods and stick to grilled or baked. In my hometown, when I go to a window, I generally go to Rick’s, a local barbecue place that I know uses real meat, because I know the owners. Their processing is done locally, and their food is truly delicious.

When I go to Rick’s, I usually get a smoked-ham and cheese sandwich with green beans. In terms of fast food, it is probably one of the healthiest options in town.

Lunch doesn’t have to be complicated to be healthy, and it definitely doesn’t have to be time-consuming.

Next time, I’ll explain how my snacking habits have gone from destructive grazing to simply amazing using an unlikely secret weapon.

Today I hit a milestone in my quest to become half the guy I used to be.

Drumroll please…

…

…

…

…as of this morning, I have lost 180 pounds!

Only 25 pounds to my goal.

And then I will truly be…

…Half the Guy.

Party on, Internet.

Note: This post is the first of a four-part series, and it includes Amazon links to different foods and food-related products that have helped me lose weight. Ordering from these links helps to support this page.

Have you lost weight?

This past year, I have heard some form of the same two questions every day.

1. Have you lost weight?
2. How did you do it?

The answer to the first is yes, yes I have. I have lost more than the equivalent of one-and-a-half times the entire body weight of my wife.

The answer to the second question is harder to package in a brief phrase. I think most folks expect me to say something quick and easy like, “Surgery,” or “Keto,” or “Pills,” or “Witchcraft.”

From my experience, however, there is nothing quick and easy about losing a massive amount of weight, and there is really not a quick and easy way to explain it.

The underlying principles are simple. More calories out than in, and only enough carbs to properly fuel the body. My goal is to have 45-60 grams of carbs at each meal and 15-20 grams of carbs at each snack. (And by “grams of carbs,” I mean the grand total of carbs AND sugars).

To simplify things, here is the first part of the daily menu that has helped me lose 170 pounds, broken down into four familiar segments. Part 1 is breakfast.

An Ode to Breakfast

I love breakfast food. Like the great Ron Swanson before me, the old me consumed thousands of pounds of bacon.

If there were a pancake hall of fame, my statue would be at the center.

Biscuits tremble at the sound of my name.

You get the picture.

My standard breakfast used to consist of two fast food chicken biscuits and a 32-ounce soft drink. On weekends and holidays, it got much worse. Chocolate gravy, sausage, mountains of bacon, four or more biscuits, hash browns, and multiply that by three if I was at a buffet restaurant.

That kind of eating is both cartoonishly gluttonous and obscenely bad for you. It is also dangerous. It lead me to the precipice of an early death, and it’s part of the reason that I’ll have to monitor my blood sugar for the rest of my life.

But the good news is that breakfast doesn’t have to taste bad to be good for you.

My typical breakfast now consists of an omelette and a cup of coffee with Stevia and Land O Lakes Mini Moos.

The Rushing Man’s Omelette

The omelette is an ideal breakfast for diabetics trying to control their blood sugar. It’s basically all protein, and the options for personalization are endless.

It can include any vegetables of your choice, but I am a man of plain tastes, and the only veggies I’ve ever added to my omelette are diced hot peppers.

We Have the Tools, We Have the Talent

Part of the reason that I used to eat fast food biscuits for breakfast each morning was that I didn’t think I had time for anything healthier. I am a night owl, and mornings have always been hard for me.

Fortunately, when I started cleaning up my diet, my precious wife found an ingenious solution.

From the depths of our kitchen cabinets, she found a microwave omelette maker.

Very patiently, she showed me that I could make and eat an omelette in practically no time every morning.

The omelette that I eat every day takes me only about 11 minutes to make from cracked egg to first bite.

The Recipe

Here’s how I do it.

1. I start with three brown eggs. I scramble the yolks in a bowl with a splash of milk and a dash of regular shredded mozzarella cheese.
2. I then pour the egg mixture into each side of my microwaveable omelette maker. I toss it in the microwave for 3 minutes.
3. When the timer goes off, I add two strips of cooked bacon (I prefer Wright’s delicious Applewood variety) and another pinch of shredded cheese, close the omelette maker, and microwave it for an additional 45 seconds.

The key is to cook your bacon ahead of time. I use a microwaveable bacon cooker to cook a dozen strips at a time at the beginning of the week and then toss the finished bacon into the fridge in a Ziplock bag.

If I can keep the kids out of my pork stash, that usually lasts the rest of the week.

The result looks like a scrambled egg taco. But it is savory and delicious and, most importantly for me, it’s filled with protein and has very few carbohydrates.

Breakfast doesn’t have to be boring to be healthy, and it definitely doesn’t have to be hard to make.

Next time, we’ll explore how I went from ordering multiple value meals at a time for lunch to brown-bagging it every day–and loving it!

The New Belt

One of the biggest weight-gain red flags in my life was raised by an Amish friend.

First, a word of context. I live in Amish Paradise.

My county has the largest population of Old Order Amish people in the entire South. The Amish people from my area are renown for their conservative approach to the Amish lifestyle.

They have no electricity, no cars, no phones, and travel everywhere by horse. People come to my hometown from all over the country to buy things in Amish shops, take wagon rides through Amish neighborhoods, and consume Amish vegetables and baked goods.

My friends from college were amazed when I brought them home and showed them the hitching posts outside of our Walmart.

But I digress.

I have gotten to know a few of these Amish folks over the years. In fact, nearly every belt I have owned since I was 16 years old was made by the same Amish guy.

A couple of years and 170 pounds ago, my belt ran out of holes, so I went back to the Amish guy’s shop and told him that I needed a new one. He eyed my hefty waistline skeptically.

“It will need to be a few inches bigger than your waist. What size pants do you wear?” he asked.

I checked the label. At the time it was 52 inches.

My friend laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think they make cows that big.”

He wasn’t being mean. It was a good joke.

And he was telling the truth.

He really didn’t have a belt that long on hand.

I had to go to another Amish guy down the road to find one long enough to fit me. The finished product was just over five feet long.

My new belt was almost as long as my wife is tall.

Misplaced Blame

The giant belt was a serious red flag that my weight was out of control.

But instead of seeing it for what it was, I remember feeling annoyed that it was so hard to find belts big enough to fit me.

And pants.

And shirts.

And coats.

And ties.

I am 6′ 2″ and wear a size 16 shoe, so I am no stranger to the big and tall section.

But at right over 400 pounds, it was hard to find anything that fit me. I got frustrated and angry at stores for not stocking bigger sizes and at web sites not carrying larger inventory.

I even raged against the drier a few times because I was sure that it was shrinking my clothes (in hindsight, it was pretty funny; imagine that scene in Christmas Vacation where Clark Griswold shouts a stream of impassioned insults at his boss, only replace the boss with a drier, and you will get a close approximation).

The red flags were flying everywhere I looked, but for years I ignored them or pretended they weren’t there. Until one hit me in the face and made me come to terms with a harsh reality.

The Symptoms

I first began to suspect that I might have diabetes in April 2018, and my suspicion was fueled in part by Greek mythology.

My friend Jason is a lifelong diabetic, and he and I are both history freaks. We have spent hours at battlefields, in historic houses, and participating in historic reenactments.

So when he posted a clever observation on Facebook about a character from Greek mythology, I naturally read more. My friend’s post inadvertently ambushed me with some truth that day.

In careful detail, my friend’s Facebook post described the symptoms of diabetes. While I read, the unquenchable thirst burned in my throat and the insatiable hunger raged in my full belly, as it had with increasing intensity for several months, and I realized that he was describing my situation.

The Culprit

But even with a five-foot belt around my waist, a wedding band that would no longer fit, memories of being too big to fit into a Santa costume at work, and of having to stand through a program at the state capitol because I wouldn’t fit in any of the historic chairs, having to buy a special bathroom scale that went above 400 pounds, and a slew of friends and family who had told me they were worried about me, it was still more than two months after I read Jason’s Facebook post before I considered going to the doctor.

Why?

Because I was proud. Because I was ashamed. Because I was afraid.

Because I was angry about all the wrong things.

I nearly ate myself to death for all of those stupid reasons.

And while I raged at stores for not stocking larger clothing, and raged at driers for supposedly shrinking my shirts, and raged at automakers for not making cars with larger seats, nothing changed for me until I got mad at the person who was really responsible for all of my woes.

The man in the mirror.

Once I started blaming that guy for my problems, I could finally do something about them.

Respect the Flags

In nautical parlance, a red flag on the beach means that swimming is discouraged due to some hazardous condition. More than one red flag means that the beach is so unsafe that the water is closed and off-limits to swimmers.

Double red flags are raised at beaches where severe weather is expected or where sharks or other dangerous sea creatures have been spotted nearby.

Most of us wouldn’t ignore double red flags and take a dip with the sharks. But I saw dozens of red flags in regards to my weight and still kept diving into those shark-infested waters day after day.

If you are dangerously overweight and seeing as many red flags about your weight as I was, the time to do something about it is now. Stop what you’re doing and seek medical help.

Perhaps this is the sign that you or your loved ones have been praying for. Or maybe it’s the wake-up call you have been dreading. Whatever it is, don’t let it be another red flag that you ignore.

Trophy Belt

When I finally took action and began losing weight, my Dad helped me drill new holes in that giant five-foot belt. It rapidly became too big.

I wore it until it literally wrapped around me one-and-a-half times, and I keep it as a reminder that red flags are there to help if we recognize them.

Red flags are serious business, but they can be lowered just as much as they can be raised.

Take heed. Take action. Most of all, take care of yourself.

You may be hungry, but the sharks in that surf are hungrier.

Mistaken Identity

“Hey, are you related to the other guy who works here?”

Someone asked me that not long ago at work. The question puzzled me. At the time, I was the only guy who worked there at all. In fact, I was the only guy who had worked at my workplace in more than two decades. All of my coworkers had always been ladies.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m the only guy here.”

“No,” he told me, and he lowered his voice conspiratorially. “The other guy who works here–he’s kind of, you know, big. Are you his brother or cousin or something?”

That’s when I understood.

The man was asking about me.

I had lost so much weight that he was asking if I was my own brother.

Let me tell you my story.

My name is Clint. I am a 35-year-old librarian from Tennessee, and I have lost more than 170 pounds in a little over a year.

I didn’t have any surgeries. I haven’t taken any weight-loss pills. I’m not a runner or a weightlifter. And I don’t have a miracle cure for obesity. What I have is an inspirational story, and I want to share it as widely as possible.

The Problem

A year ago, I topped out at 410 pounds. Each day I ate multiple chicken biscuits for breakfast, and at least two or three times per month I had entire large pizzas for dinner. I guzzled soft drinks by the liter. And I got very little exercise. Everything about my diet was excessive. I ate far too much, far too often, and the object of my indulgence was always food of the worst kind.

At my heaviest, my BMI was 52.6. My waist was 56 inches. I wore a 5XL t-shirt. And in late June 2018, after a near-fainting spell at church prompted my wife to schedule a doctor’s appointment for me without my approval, I discovered that I had Type II diabetes.

To be more specific, my A1C was 13.5. The first time I checked my blood sugar, it was in the 320s. These are dangerously high numbers for diabetics.

The doctor told me that if I didn’t make a major change immediately, I would probably die an early death, and that I would most certainly suffer a number of horrible health problems and complications, problems which could include blindness, loss of digits and limbs, and even paralysis-inducing stroke.

It was the wake-up call that I needed.

But at first, I fought it. I fought it tooth and nail. When my wife told me that I had to get serious about my health, I actually told her, “You’ve got to die of something.”

The truth was, I was afraid, and I felt hopeless. I knew that I needed to lose weight. I had known for a long time. But that huge starting number seemed insurmountable. I thought there was little chance that I could lose down to a healthy weight, and even if I could, that it would probably take me years to get there.

The first enemy I had to conquer was myself. And I did that thanks to the love of a good woman.

With the patience of a saint, my wife meticulously worked to help me fight this disease. She is a pediatrician and her father a type 2 diabetic, so she had a strong foundation of knowledge, but she continued to learn as much as she could about diabetes for my benefit.

She diligently read all the food labels and cooked every meal I ate for those first few months. She taught me what foods I should eat and what foods I should avoid. She showed me how to check my blood sugar. Together we methodically and intently monitored my weight.

She convinced me that I could do it by showing me that I could.

She showed me a deeper love than I deserved. It is a daily lesson in grace; a demonstration of Christlike love like none other I’ve ever experienced.

The Movement

One thing I learned early on in this journey is that exercise is the magic button that lowers my blood sugar quickly and efficiently.

That first night I tried walking a few laps around my parents’ driveway. I didn’t make it far before I was drenched in sweat and huffing and puffing like an old locomotive.

My dad has been a runner for three decades. The first night that I walked around his driveway, he came out to join me.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, between breaths, “Why do you ask?”

“Because you look like you’re about to die,” he said. Dad is the soul of gentleness.

But he was only half-kidding. He walked with me that night, and we made a pact that we would walk around his driveway every night, regardless of the weather.

While we have, admittedly, missed a few nights for one reason or another, we have, indeed, walked in all kinds of weather.

Pouring rain, oppressive heat, spitting snow, tornado warnings, plagues of locusts, dogs and cats living together; we’ve walked in it all, usually three miles a night.

By walking each step beside me, Dad has also demonstrated Christlike love for me, and he has added self-discipline to the long list of things that he has taught me over the years.

Without his help–and the help of my mother, who spent many hours praying that I would change my unhealthy eating habits–I couldn’t have done this. I could barely make a lap around his driveway when Dad and I began to walk. But by his commitment of time and energy, we have walked hundreds of miles together, and he has taught me the critical importance of following through.

The Formula

I wish I could tell you that I had a magic bullet for curing obesity. Unfortunately, one doesn’t exist. Anything that promises you that losing weight will be easy or effortless is a lie.

With that in mind, for me, losing weight has boiled down to three key factors:

1. Eating an appropriate amount of carbohydrates and exercising daily.
2. Monitoring and logging my weight, meals, and blood sugar.
3. Accountability from loved ones.

I have tried fad diets and paid weight loss groups in the past. They always worked temporarily, but I would always gain back twice the weight that I had lost shortly after they ended.

This three-pronged formula has taken me down more than 170 pounds, helped me lose more than 20 inches from my waist, and dropped my A1C more than 8 points.

It is not easy. In fact, it is incredibly difficult. But it is also incredibly worth it.

On days that I stick to that formula, I almost always lose weight. On days that one part slips, I almost never do.

I am not a diet expert or a nutritionist. I can’t promise that what has worked for me will work for you, as each metabolism is, indeed, very different.

But what I can do is share my story with you, and if that gives you the push that you need to live a healthier, longer, fuller life, then I will consider myself a success.

Come with me as I become half the guy I used to be.