Month: March 2022

After four weeks, I’ve lost 16.6 lbs and am down to 225.4 – I lost 1.4 lbs this week.

I could have lost 1.8 lbs, but Saturday I decided to try to make Giordanos thin crust sausage pizza work for lunch. I calculated that a small pizza was 2,554 calories, but though I tried eating just 1/4 of it, I couldn’t help but eat 1/2, for 1,277 calories. For dinner, I went with a Wendy’s single with cheese, which is 590 calories. I probably should have had a 200-calorie Nutrisystem dinner instead, but you can’t deprive yourself all the time. Oh, well.

The more I do this program, the more I can see some brilliance in it. First, they have their food, which I am convinced is engineered to be healthier than the processed foods you can get in the store. Next, they encourage adding foods you like – in moderation – as extras (PowerFuels, SmartCarbs), or as a Flex Meal. The moderation part is essential, and that was the immediate lesson when we started – it was hard not looking at the very small portions and thinking “WTF?”, but after sticking to the plan, it’s also obvious that we frequently over-eat. While some people can handle it, most have bodies that will just add the pounds.

The biggest brilliance to the plan is that it’s immediately training you how to eat without the plan. That is to say, it puts you in a mindset to think about what you eat so that when you inevitably stop buying the Nutrisystem food, you can continue maintaining or losing weight. So many diet plans are extreme, so that people may lose weight fast, but once they are off the plan, it all comes back. Nutrisystem is a great was to train people how to eat better – especially in moderation!

This is all amazing to me, since I was very skeptical of the plan before starting. I’m a believer now.

After three weeks, I’ve lost 14.8 lbs and am down to 227.2 – I lost 4.2 lbs this week.

I’m happy to be back on track, after over-indulging last week (sorry, not sorry!). It’s still crazy to know I’ve lost so much in three weeks. Every time I get on the scale in the morning, I start laughing because it keeps going down. This is annoying to my wife, who is not losing as much as I am, but doctors have said that men lose weight faster than women.

One of the keys to the program is logging your food into the NuMi App, which is free and available to anyone.

I set mine to remind me when it’s time to eat, and if I eat a non-Nutrisystem item, you can easily scan the UPC to get the nutrition info, or create custom foods. It’s very cool that restaurants must provide nutrition info, and I’ve been looking at the info for some of my favorites – Taco Bell, Wendy’s, Mr. Submarine – and plotting what items I can get and stay under the 1,500 limit. It’s not too hard, and very eye opening.

For example, on Friday nights, as we are driving home from weekly grocery shopping, I’ve gotten in the habit of getting three Beefy 5-Layer Burritos from Taco Bell – Yes, Fridays are my Taco Bell night! Problem is that each Beefy 5-layer burrito has 490 calories according to their website. Two would be a bit much, and One doesn’t seem like enough, so I have started getting 1 Beefy 5-Layer Burrito and 1 Soft Taco Supreme, which is 210 calories. 490 + 210 = 700 calories, which is almost 1/2 the calories for the day. In order to prepare for my indulgence, I make sure to keep my breakfast and lunch calories a low as possible and maybe skip the afternoon snack.

After two weeks, I’ve lost 8.4 lbs and am down to 233.6 – I only lost 0.6 lb this week (for a very good reason).

Week 2 is where the plan really kicks in. The calorie count rises to 1,500 per day as we start to add outside food to the menu. Generally, the recommended daily calorie intake is 2,000 calories a day for women and 2,500 for men, so at 1,500, I should continue losing weigh at a decent clip. here’s how the plan looks from now on:

Now we have PowerFuels, SmartCarbs and Flex meals.

The Flex meal is literally a meal on our own as we “flex” off the plan. I’m not yet confident I won’t over-indulge, so I’m holding off on Flex meals. Since we are eating the Nutrisystem food 5 days a week, we’re technically flexing every weekend anyway.

PowerFuels are lean proteins, low-fat dairy and nuts to keep you feeling full. The idea is to add them to the meals, and use it as part of the afternoon snack. Since I’m allergic to nuts, I’ve focused on 2oz of Chicken or 1 Egg. It doesn’t sound like much because it’s not much, but it really does the trick in satiating me more.

SmartCarbs are whole grains, beans and legumes, fruit and starchy vegetables. I’ve focused on potatoes – 1/2 cup of baked steak fries or a red potato. I’ve also added a wheat tortilla for my afternoon snack, which has become a fried or scrambled egg with diced green chiles in the wheat tortilla.

From the start of the plan, I make time to walk for 30 minutes a day. When the weather gets warmer, I can return to biking in the evenings as well. The funny thing is, exercise is never really the key to weight loss, it’s the food you eat, yet people still think if they go to the health club daily they can eat what they want and stay in shape.

So…why only -0.6 lbs this week? It could have been -4.2 lbs but Saturday night was a guy’s night out with friends at Giordano’s and I ate 3 pieces of Stuffed Sausage Pizza. Based on the Giordano’s website, that was 722 calories per piece for a whopping total of 2,166 calories! I hesitated with the 3rd slice, but in the end do not regret it. The next day, my weight was +3.6 lbs from Saturday morning. Oops.

The official start date for this plan was Feb 28, and I weighed 242 lbs.

After one week, I have lost 6.8 lbs and am down to 235.2. Wow.

Needless to say, I am completely shocked that this plan is actually working. I mean, sure, limit your daily food to 1,000 calories a day and you just can’t HELP but lose weight. The most surprising thing about this is that I can’t say I ever felt “hungry” this week. It really seems like Nutrisystem has engineered their food to have low calories but still deliver adequate protein, carbs and fat. Sure, some of the food is bland, but a lot of it tastes pretty good. Another key to the plan is that the portions are small. My first inclination previously would have been to eat 3-4 portions of some of this food, but I made the commitment to the plan, so I followed it as directed and got some good results.

The Breakfast – Snack – Lunch – Snack – Dinner meant that I wasn’t going more than 2 1/2 hours without eating something. I found that there’s a difference between feeling “full” – not have any craving to eat something – and feeling “satisfied”, which felt like I was 90% full and COULD munch on something, but I wont because I don’t NEED to munch on something. That was an interesting revelation, that I needed to retrain my mind and body to resist excess snacking in favor of a more targeted approach.