Have you ever wished you could just avoid preparing and eating meals and just get all the nutrition your body needs in one delicious (preferably chocolate flavored) pill you can take once an hour while you keep on working on more important things all day? Yeah, me, too. So does my wife, the board-certified family physician who is about to get her results for her American Board of Obesity Medicine results (we all believe she passed). Turns out, medical research supports the idea. And I’m about to apply it for at least a couple of weeks.
First, how did we get where we are today? In February of 2014, I was 155 pounds. I looked great and felt awesome. Then, I let life get in the way of my maintenance of that state of Greatness! Over the past 36 months, I have let 31 of the 75 pounds I lost in 2013 re-accrete in my abdominal viscera and I find myself halfway back to a less healthy hell and I now need to make some changes to get back down to a BMI of 25 again. Thus, I am about to shock myself with an easy, inexpensive weight loss plan I call the Clif Builders Bar plan.
Anyone who knows me knows, my mantra for RightSizing your body can be summed up as Eat Less CRAPF (the P is silent, just like the processing) and Move Your Fat Ass More! Mean as it sounds, this is just a catchy restatement of the scientific fact that eating more calories than you use each day results in increased fat mass. There is no two ways about it. If you eat more calories than you use, you store the excess calories as adipose tissue and get fatter and fatter each hour that you do it.
Having studied for Susan’s obesity medicine exams for all of 2016, I know there are lots of different dietary plans one can follow. The DASH diet, the Paleo Plan, the Adkins Plan, the Mediterranean Diet, the Asian Diet, Weight Watchers, Nutri-System, Slim-Fast, Hi-Pro, Hi-Fat, Low-Fat, No-Fat, and the North-South-East-and-West Beach Diets; more choices than at which you can shake a stick. Like many doctors tell me, “The best medicine is the medicine you are ready, willing, and able to take over the long term,” the best “Eat Less CRAPF” diet is the one you are ready, willing, and able to follow for an effective period of time.
My choice to readjust my dietary navigation in life is the dead reckoning idea of eating nothing but meal replacement bars for a sustained period of time. Hence, the Clif Builders Bar.
There is plenty of scientific support for meal replacement bar plans. Most people’s biggest dietary problems are macronutrient and micronutrient balance and portion control. Meal replacement bar plans (assuming you pick the right meal replacement bars) are a good way to overcome those problems. And the best MR Bar I’ve found is the Clif Builders Bar.
Most nutritionists recommend a macronutrient trilogy of 50% carbohydrates, 30% fat, and 20% protein each day. I prefer a bit more protein than carbs and the Clif Builders Bar hits my sweet spot (in more ways than) one with 43% carbs, 29% fat, and 28% protein. The fact that I can buy their chocolate-covered goodness for $1.05 per bar at Sam’s Club or BJ’s and eat five of them a day (1/3 of a bar every hour on the hour for my fifteen waking hours) for $5.25 a day (less than one max-fancy venti Starbucks latte) is an awesome bonus.
So, here’s the plan. I’ll be taking five Clif Builders Bars, cutting them into thirds, and eating one of the thirds every hour from 5:00 am through 8:00 pm each day. This will allow me to trickle into my body a balanced flow of 90 calories per hour. I did this yesterday after starting at a weight of 186 pounds yesterday morning. After a 1-hour, 3-mile, max-incline, max-resistance on my sister’s Free Motion cross trainer, today, I weighed 180.7. Yeah. I don’t believe it either. But, I checked it three times just to be sure.
I’ve recruited a mutual accountability partner to work with me for at least these next two weeks. The same one I had back in 2013. He’s agreed to do the same MRB program with me. I won’t say his name or his beginning weight. But I will nag him here if his progress wanes. He can, and should, start his own blog if he wants to nag me about mine.
Until the next time.