Male Weight Loss Now

Eating out and weight loss are not mutually exclusive. You can eat what you want and still burn belly fat. The biggest perennial failure in losing weight is when you follow hard and fast rules. Because when the male follows hard and fast rules, and then falls off the wagon, he goes into a tail spin. He thinks he will never lose weight because he fucked up. Not true!

You will need to learn to be smart though. I am not trying to tell you that you can go out and eat whatever the hell you want, though. That will not work for you, because if it did, you would not be here reading this piece. Right? In this snippet of wisdom, I am going to give you some ideas about how to be smart about eating, so that you can be, look and feel great.

OK, so what is the big issue here? Let me characterize it for you. The question is: how can I lose weight when I eat out when the restaurant I eat at does not publish nutritional information (specifically calories)? That is the problem. You may abhor watching your calorie intake, but if you want to burn belly fat, love handles and the dreaded “chin meat,” you are going to have to pay attention to what you put in the tank.  Here are some suggestions for you when deciding to eat out:

1. Ask For Calorie Totals – I do this when I go to restaurants. I ask the waitress, manager or owner for the calorie totals for the food that I am eating. If I am regular at that restaurant, you can be sure that they are going to do their best to accommodate. Let these people know what you want. Most of the time, I find that people really want to do their best for you. When you ask them to do something that is of great importance to you, they will often try to find out how to do help you. If you ask, you may well get it. If not, well, you gave it your best shot.

2. Be Selective – decide to eat only at places where you can find the calorie totals for what you will eat. I ate at Panera yesterday with my son, and like clockwork, they had nutritional information and could tell me that my bowl of cream chicken soup with rice was 320 calories and the piece of baguette was 150 calories.

3. The Restaurant “Worst Case” Scenario - this is the case where you are either in a restaurant, bar or someone’s house and they are serving something and you will never be given nutritional information. This is the case when you will need to get even more smart. Here is what I do:

• Use menu to find out the major ingredients – write them down or use your iPhone or other device to record these ingredients
• Look at the food – and estimate what ingredient uses up the most “real estate” of the dish. For instance, if it is a pasta dish, estimate about how much pasta is in there. Write it down Then look at the next most important ingredient, estimate it and write it down. Rinse and repeat…
• If you are with someone – ask them to help you try to figure this out with you, if you feel comfortable. If you are on a date, this might not work, but then again, who knows.
• When you get home – assess calorie amounts to the lists that you made. Health Canada has a great reference resource to find out a vast amount of nutritional information  for some common foods - click here to get your very own copy – Thanks Canada!

Also make sure that you include drinks in your calorie totals. Losing weight does not need be painful, but it does need to get done. As I always say, “you don’t need to like it, but you need to do it.” Lose weight now to save your life, to improve your health and to look God-awful handsome.

I was celebrating a really great week of eating and exercising right. It was Friday. I decided that I deserved a little treat. Since most of my weight loss diet consists now of vegetables, fruit and low calorie stuff, I really wanted MEAT! Since lean meat is not going to break any of my re-established habits, I thought, why not?

Although I am straying far from my Catholic roots of no-meat-on-Friday-during-Lent, I got out the crockpot and made my favorite beef stew recipe, which is below. This is really simple to make although it can be messy, if you are clumsy in the kitchen.

Put the tomatoes and water in the crockpot and turn it on (or dutch oven if you cook on stovetop). Just slightly brown the meat in a pan (add a little oil if you like). I do not use oil, because whatever fat is in the meat, is enough to keep the meat from sticking to the pan. Use some of the juice left from cooking the meat and sautee the onions and garlic. Don’t brown the garlic – it’ll lose its taste.

Dice the potatoes into cubes 3/4″ on a side. Add everything into the pot.  Now, cook the shit out of it. Really, I cook this until the meat is really tender – about 6 hours or more in the crockpot.  I did not use the red wine this time, but if I did, I would use one cup (no, two cups) instead of an equal amount of the water.

For each 2 cup serving (one bowl) of this stew, it comes to about 248 calories. My teenage sons love this recipe and always ask for it. Normally, we would eat this with hunks of crusty French bread torn from two big loaves in the center of the table. Those guys can eat, believe me. 4 Large male mammals can put away a gallon of this stuff in one sitting. Well, not this week (due to calorie restrictions) and I was eating alone.

So, why am I writing this?

Well, as the evening progressed, I decided to have a beer with my bowl of stew – Weihenstephan Korbinian. This is a calorie monster beer – 340 calories per 1/2 liter. As I drank my beer and ate my stew, I decided to have another bowl of stew. Then another. Then another beer and one last bowl of beef stew.

1,672 calories later, I realized that I had fallen off the wagon. I did not feel too good about this, but I wrote it off to a personal weekend celebration.

Now it is Monday morning. I still realize that rules are rules and it is back to the rigor of the program. Yesterday (Sunday) I ate very lean, so I know that today and the rest of the week will be a success.

The moral of the story is, weight loss does not just happen, it is planned. One sloppy day per week, is not going to kill you, but can you do it?  I know I can, but I will continue to be more careful from now on.

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