Alex's Thought of the Day: Diet

I'm not sure if this will help anyone, because if you're anything like me, you've heard it a thousand times and might just not believe it. If you want to lose weight, diet is way more important than exercise. I fought this notion for 15 years, and in 3 months, I've proven myself wrong.

As some background, I played football in college. With a 20 year old's metabolism and 3-4 hours/day of activity (plus walking to classes, walking up and down stairs, etc.) I was able to consume a ton of calories and stay fairly lean. For the past 15 years, I've been fooling myself. I would do a hard 60-ish minute workout, get the same burning, exhausted feeling, and feel like I could go ahead and eat like I used to. That simply doesn't work.

In the past 3 months, I've lost 20 lbs. That's not a ridiculous amount of weight, but it's enough that a lot of people that I don't see regularly comment that I look like I've lost a lot of weight. I'm not working out any harder than before, really. All that I've done is:

(1) avoid total eating melt-down days. We'll see if I can keep this up during football season, but I haven't had an "5 slices of pizza + hot wings +...." types of days.
(2) shift away from sugars. As I pay attention to what I eat, I notice that sugar and salt both trigger this crazy urge to continue eating. In the past, at In N Out, I would order a burger, steal half of my daughter's shake, and vacuum up all the leftover fries. Drinking the shake would make me crave a fry, the fry makes me crave the shake, etc. Now we still go to In-N-Out, but I order a double burger and avoid the fries and shake altogether.
(3) cook dinner at least 3 times per week, focusing on meat, and use smaller plates. This sounds silly, but when I cook, I try to do something that's meat-based (vs. starch) and add some form of vegetable. I use salad plates, and pile everything on. I'm typically satiated after the first plate. This is a sharp contrast to the past, where we would do a lot of rice/noodle based dishes. With those, I eat a full plate and feel like I was ready for tons more.