I've probably been overweight to one degree or another from the time I was 10 years old. I finally went on my first real diet in college - weight watchers - and was able to lose all the excess weight (about 25 lbs) over about 6 months. But of course the weight came back and although I didn't try weight watchers again, I was somewhat successful following mostly low-fat/low-calorie diets of various sorts.

When I read Dr. Dean Ornish's "Eat More Weigh Less" in graduate school back in 1994, I was fascinated! After just a month or so I had to quit his diet because of how incredibly restrictive it was, but decided to at least try to maintain one part of it - avoiding meat. Ornish believes that almost no amount of fat is healthy, so even lean chicken breast is considered to high in fat. So for the next six years the only "meat" I ate was fish. Despite this restriction I continued to gain weight, and lose some of it occasionally, and gain it back with more added on.

It seemed I was gaining more each time and it was taking more and more extreme measures to lose. I remember for a while exercising 6 days a week for 2 or more hours each day. I'm not sure how many calories I was consuming, but I don't think it was a lot - my dinner would consist of an orange, a bowl of miso soup (at 50 calories) and a cup of herbal tea with nutrasweet! Each time I would get at or near my goal, my motivation would dissapear with the thought that I could again eat "normally" and not have to spend 20 hours at the gym per week!

I followed up my interest in Ornish with reading another low-fat Guru's book, Dr. Gabe Merkin's Fat Free, Flavor-Full. This entrenched me even more in philosphy of low-fat dieting, but also added the additional dimension of adding high-fiber foods and avoiding anything refined like white flour, sugar, etc.

By the fall of 1999 I had gotten to an all-time high of 183, which is around 50 lbs heavier than my ideal weight - in other words I was about 40% overweight! After a few months of procrastination, I used New Year's as an excuse to get started and motivated myself for the grueling low-fat intense exercise bootcamp approach yet again.

Somehow (I can't remember how), I found Diet Diaries and started posting at the very beginning of my new diet stint in January of 2000. As I had planned, I continued the low-fat/high-fiber diet with tons of exercise from January through March, and had a good amount of success with it during this time, losing close to 20 lbs. So far so good, everything was going as planned, and as it had gone in the past.

Then in April I just stopped losing. I had experienced stalls before but was usually able to muscle my way through them by simply eating less calories and/or doing more exercise. But this time I was already overextending myself in these areas and every time I would 6 days streight at the gym for 2 or more hours each night and lose a lb or two for all my hard work, one meal that didn't fit my usual paltry caloric limit would ruin everything. In this vein I kept going up and down the same few lbs for the next 6 months.

Another dieter on Diet Diaries, Danygirl, had suggested Atkins and I was very dismissive. I had read a part of his book a couple of years ago and just thought it was cheesy. However, I was getting tired of all the hard work and not having anything to show for it. In September of 2000 I took a trip with my family to Italy and though I did not pig out and did not gain anything, it really afforded me some time to think about my dieting. It was a break from the low-fat thing so that I could get some perspective. I decided, what the hell, I will try out Atkins. Low-fat was not working anymore for me at this point and I figured what was the worst that could happen in 2-4 weeks of a trial? Maybe I would gain back 5-10 lbs, but I felt I could always take this back off if I had to with a reexerted effort with low-fat.

So I started reading Atkins and doing following his low-carb plan. I got sick of the food fairly quickly, eating mainly cheese, eggs, and fish. I was still not eating meat so this limited my sources of protein. Also Atkins is very restrictive even with vegetables in the beginning of his plan. As I was reading the Atkins book for a second time I was getting that same sense of cheesiness from it. It was also rambling, disorganized, and Atkins seemed more interested in talking about how much a pioneer he was as the lone opponent of the evil AMA for years, and ranting about eating all the steak and bacon and butter you wanted then in giving an informative and balanced view of his philosophy.

At about this point I was on a low-carb bulletin board and someone mentioned the book Protein Power as being another good low-carb book, so I decided to take a look at it, and it was like bam! Everything made sense! It was like Atkins was raving lunatic spouting religious sayings on the street corner and all of a sudden I was getting hard, unemotional portrayal of facts and theories from doctors whose integrity could not be questioned. So I switched quickly to PP and haven't left since!

The first three months were still tough because I didn't really lose much of anything. On the other hand I was lifting a lot of weights and so I figured that even though I may not have been losing net weight, I was losing fat, since I must have been gaining muscle since I wasn't gaining weight, something else must have been lost in to make up for that added muscle. Plus I was feeling more healthy and energetic than I had in years. So I just decided to kind of wait it out and see what happened.

In the mean time, I decided to start eating meat again to expand the variety of foods I could eat. I had always been a semi-vegetarian ostensibly for health reasons foremost and so logically it didn't make sense to remain so if I know believed that low-carb eating was healthy.

Finally in January of 2001, about 3 months after starting to eat low-carb, I started really seeing some progress and the progress has continued since. Perhaps it had something to do with giving up artificial sweeteners, protein bars, and protein shakes, but then again, it could have just been my body taking its time to lose weight, who knows. I'm now down about 23 lbs from when I started doing Protein Power, so the weight loss has been slow, but more or less steady.

I would still like to lose another 10 lbs or so, but I'm not sure exactly because when I've been at that goal weight in the past I didn't have the benefit of added muscles from lifting weights, so that might be too little. I am hoping that my body will simply find a good equilibrium. I am very reticent about increasing carbs once I reach my goal, even though this is what you are allowed to do on Protein Power. The addictive quality of certain foods that are loaded with carbs just scares me, and I would rather make an excess of them just a rare indulgence.

All in all I finally feel like I have a plan that I can and will do for life and one that will afford me great health and enjoyment! I have never felt this positive about an eating plan before in that I'm convinced both in it's healthfulness and in my ability to sustain (and enjoy it) indefinitely. Heck, I've been doing it now for over ten months and I am not in the least bit tired of it, so that's gotta say something about how compatible a plan it is for me!

Copyright © Levi Wallach, 2003