How I lost 20 pounds to let my pants hang

Let me start off by saying, I don't care about diets and dieting (I think most diets sound completely awful and unhealthy). However, I do care about being healthy, so I thought I'd share a bit about how I lost 20 pounds over the span of a few months.

The extremely short version is that I stopped eating like a dickhead.

And all that really means is that I began snacking less and started paying attention to my food portions. That's it. No gym, no additional excercise - I changed 2 simple things and now I get to sag my pants until my ass shows!

Feel free to leave now, haha. That's it!

But if you want to know a bit more about it, here's the rest of the story.

I got back from a trip to Ireland last fall and weighed 199 pounds. This is about the 4th time in my life I've seen the scale say 199 and every time, this has scared the crap out of me. I did not want to see that scale say 200-something, so I usually became super careful about what I ate and became a bit more active for a while. Most times I just lost 5-10 pounds.

This last time though, I became really curious. What exactly was I doing that led me to gain 20-25 pounds since college?

So I started analyzing what I ate. My wife has effectively utilized Weight Watchers to drop a few pounders. And If you don't know much about Weight Watchers, basically they take a combination of factors (fiber, calories, and fat), run them through some formula and come up with a point value. Everything you eat has a certain amount of points. Then, depending on your height/weight/gender/job, you get a certain amount of points per day, as well as some overflow points for a given week.

So I had my girly friend figure out how many "points" I was supposed to be consuming each day. I then spent a week and a half tracking what I ate and comparing it to what Weight Watchers said I was supposed to eat... It was bad, haha. I was failing pretty miserably.

Here's what I learned...

1. I generally eat healthy things, which is awesome... but I was eating too much.
2. I snacked way too often. Pretty much every time I walked anywhere near the kitchen, I would grab a snack. Like, if I had to go to the basement, I would make a detour through the kitchen so I could open up the fridge and grab some string cheese or something.
3. My portion control was terrible. I was one of those dudes who completely filled his plate with food and always cleaned that plate. I also usually ate my snacks right out of the container, which makes it nearly impossible to pay attention to portions.

Basically, if there was any kind of food around, I ate it - usually until I was miserably full.

So I took that and made a few changes...

1. I eat a small breakfast every day. It helps me not want to binge eat at lunch.
2. I snack less. I've gone from ~5 snacks a day to having 1 or 2.
3. Portion control. When eating out, I take home leftovers. When snacking, I've stopped eating out of the container. Getting a serving out and putting it on a plate seriously helps - it sounds stupid, but it does.

So yea, that's it. Probably a giant "duh" blog... but something as stupid easy as "paying attention" totally helped me feel more comfortable in my clothes - aside from not being used to this whole sagging thing again.