by Scott Davis
Also, get into the habit of reading labels. It takes a little longer to shop this way, but at Costco I found frozen tilapia with no sodium and I can eat those large filets every day if I want.
Eating Out
One of the main questions I’m asked about this plan has a direct bearing on sodium intake.
“Can I eat out?”
The answer is yes. But it comes with a warning label: Sometimes you have to get rude. I’m joking, but sometimes it’s as if the wait staff and cooks don’t hear so good.
A terrific venue is Outback Steakhouse. They offer a steak that weighs about six ounces, meaning you leave a bite on your plate to stay at the 5-1/2-ounce limit. That falls in the Best Practices category anyway. The QWLCA strategy encourages ignoring what your parents raised you to do and leave a little food on your plate. Once you develop the habit of not cleaning your plate, it saves several pounds of weight gain each year.
At Outback or any other restaurant, I tell them to grill it plain, without butter, salt, or seasonings. I have learned to be specific because many times I had to return dishes to the kitchen. If it arrives drenched in butter, it has to go. I’ve almost cried before as the waiter turned to take the dish back to the kitchen.
“Can I just lick it first?” I asked.
The waiter laughed but realized I was kidding. I held my ground and developed better habits because the old Scott would’ve said, “Oh, OK. I’ll just let it pass,” and dive in. But that would mean breaking the plan, and the key to this plan is not to cheat.
A key factor to eating out is assertiveness. When I’m not direct and clear in my requests, sometimes the wait staff doesn’t take me seriously. I make sure they know it’s not a suggestion.
I remember telling some waiters, “Don’t put any salt on it unless you want to see me keel over on the floor and die.”
Their eyes got big as I looked over my nose and nodded my head. They scurried to the kitchen with their urgent piece of news. My wife laughed when I did that because she’s a nurse and knows we need salt to live. The waiter doesn’t have to know that little tidbit though.
We regularly eat at many of the common chains (not fast food joints but cook-to-order restaurants), and we are able to find a dish within the requirements of our plan at just about any restaurant. We often place special cooking orders but have little trouble maintaining our diet. Sometimes we simply order salads with no cheese to make it easy on ourselves.
During my big weight loss, we ate at home more often since our old routine plopped us in restaurants almost every day. We still ate out while on the QWLCA plan, and the wait staff became our fans. We saw the same good folks over and over during the months of my weight loss, and they watched our progress and cheered us on. Even at Waffle House, we’d walk in and they’d say, “Oh, look at you this week.”
Yes, Waffle House.
A lot of people ask me how I can possibly eat healthy at Waffle House. Nowadays, you can eat healthy pretty much anywhere. Even at McDonald’s you can order a salad with no cheese. At Waffle House I order the grilled chicken salad. I replace the carrots with onions. Waffle House chicken breasts are bagged in their secret marinade. It tastes so good it must be laced with some kind of drug.
I told the Waffle House cook about my diet, and he surprised me.
“We can wash the chicken for you before we cook it,” he said. “We do that for a few customers.”
“Great,” I said, halfway thrilled and halfway sad because the loss of the marinade. I knew it was too salty.
Every time I go to Waffle House the air is thick with those wonderful waffles. I feel like I’m sinning just being in the place. I always ask them to wash the chicken breast, and I watch them wash it right there in the sink and throw it on the grill. They chop it for the salad, and I bring my own QWLCA dressing. While Waffle House’s own Lite Italian dressing has only twenty-five calories per pouch, it has a lot of salt.
I asked the QWLCA staff, “What do I do at all these restaurants that load their food with salt? I travel a lot.”
“Buy a bottle of apple cider vinegar, and if you take a tablespoon at night it helps flush the salt out.”
Almost every night, I take a swig of potent apple cider vinegar. I figure since apples are on the approved list, surely apple cider vinegar is OK. Strong as it is, even apple cider vinegar isn’t enough to keep us on the straight and narrow when it comes to significant weight loss and life change. When temptation comes, we need help.
As I demonstrate in the next few chapters, I found all the help I needed in a good God, a good help mate, a good staff, and a good amount of willpower fueled by the momentum only significant results can generate.
ON ANY GIVEN NIGHT at around two in the morning, flip over to QVC and you may hear the baritone voice of Scott from Stockbridge: “Yes, Julie, I love this broach. It’s gorgeous.”
When I finally married in my mid-30s, I needed two-and-a-half years to get out of debt from the junk I bought off of TV and stuffed into my closet.
Like the Gut Buster. Yeah, that really worked.
And then the Ab Lounge. My pastor says any exercise equipment with the word lounge in it ought to tell you something. I laid it in front of the fireplace to take naps on it.
I bought a treadmill from the Home Shopping Network. I used it for a week. Now I position my recliner beside it so I can kick back and watch TV while I walk my dog on it. I have a little leash to keep him safe, and he pants and drips and pants and drips and cuts his eyes at me and would cuss me in dog language if he had the breath.
I bought that little cow telephone. It’s shaped like a cow, has spots like a cow, and even rings like a cow. Moooooooo.… Moooooooo. It’s so annoying I can’t wait for the answering machine to pick up. I won’t even tell you what it does when I put it on hold, but it puts the chip in microchip.
I bought a voice-activated remote control for my TV. Have you seen one of those things? I scream into it: “Channel Five!” and it goes straight to Channel Five. It has a glitch though, especially when the TV is too loud. The nightly news teaser will come on and say, “Tonight at 11…” and, poof, it changes to Channel Eleven.
I’m enamored with the latest and greatest. Even if I don’t buy it, I’m interested, and I love keeping up with the latest products. This fascination with all things new explains why I had to have the best gadgets during my weight loss. If I could figure out a way for something to help me lose weight, I wanted it.
I had a blender I used every day to make my strawberries-and-protein supplement shake. It was a good blender, but I always wanted the Vita-Mix brand blender, what I considered the Cadillac, Mac-Daddy blender. My juicer made too big a mess and I was too lazy to clean it up. Problem was, the Vita-Mix blender was expensive, like, the-wife-will-pout-for-a-week expensive. I never wanted to spend that much on a blender, and from the start Donna protested.
When I was single, I made the same amount of money as I do now but I had nothing to show for it except junk. I had every computer and electronic gizmo out there. When I got married, Donna put a stop to that. She’s the boss when it comes to money, and for good reason. Sometimes it’s like I’m a little kid and I have to work on her for a while. It took a year for me to wear her down and get that big blender. She said, “That’s stinkin’ expensive for a stinkin’ blender.”
I wore her down through a masterfully crafted guilt trip.
Honey, don’t you want me to have every resource possible to be successful on my eating plan? This blender will help me eat healthy and lose weight. Don’t you think it will pay huge dividends? What price tag can you put on my health? ….
I join several guys at my church to start each new year with a time of fasting and prayer. We’ve done this for four years now and it’s grown from six guys to about fifteen. We pray and share weaknesses, trials, and struggles, and I cherish the time. I bought the original juicer to prepare for that week. I decided to abstain from solid foods but juice veggies to maintain electrolytes and
nutrients.
I dreaded cleaning up after juicing, and my research sold me on the Vita-Mix blender. I can throw in whole vegetables and fruits, peels and all, and it liquefies everything. No mess. I bought it so I could drink everything without the cleanup.
I use it every day to juice vegetables and make soups. Back when Donna balked at the price tag, I tried to burn up the old juicer. But it just wouldn’t die. I threw in all manner of stuff in bulk. She was in the next room and heard the blender struggling to grind: Whirrruuuuuugggggrrrrrrrrrrruuuuuuugggg. Then came tell-tale smell of an electrical burn.
Donna yelled at me. “You’re purposely trying to burn that up so you can get the new one!”
“No I’m not,” I said, waving my hand above the blender. “Whoooee, where’s that smoke coming from? Hope the alarm doesn’t go off.”
My fascination with technology turned out to be a boon during my weight loss. I’m a fan of all Mac products. I have Mac computers for my marketing and promotions company, Third Heaven Imaging, and I adore my iPhone, iPod, and iPad. I keep waiting for them to come out with an iPizza because it would look terrific, taste great, arrive at your door on time, and be lighter than anything on the market.
Using my iPhone and iPad, I downloaded a couple of apps to chronicle everything I eat. This came in handy during my QWLCA checkups.
My favorite app is called My Net Diary. You enter your profile of how much you weigh, how much you want to weigh, and your exercise amount, whether it’s sedentary all the way up to extreme. The app then calculates how many calories you should consume that day.
On the QWLCA plan, you don’t count calories during the weight loss phase. Instead, you watch portion sizes and kinds of foods. You do the same during maintenance after you’ve reached your goal. It’s helpful to count calories during maintenance since many more foods are allowed, and at that point the staff likes to keep track and assist you.
After I lost weight and reached the maintenance stage, I saw a health expert on the news. He claimed if you eat 1,000 to 1,200 calories a day, you will lose weight regardless of the food you eat. If it’s cake, you’ll still lose weight as long as you don’t take in more than 1,200 calories per day. I can’t say I wasn’t tempted to try it.
His main point: If you eat the right foods, you can eat a lot and it would be a very healthy 1,200 calories per day. It’s a misconception that 1,200 calories is not enough food. It just needs to be the right mix of the right foods.
When I go to QWLCA, I’m able to tap the My Net Diary app and hand the staff my iPad with a detailed list of everything I’ve eaten during breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks for a week. At the end of each day, it calculates the food I’ve eaten and provides my totals for calories, carbs, protein, cholesterol, and my Aunt Bessie’s blood pressure reading. The detail is astounding.
I can type in my weight loss plan including my starting weight, current weight, goal weight, and target date to reach my goal weight. It then calculates whether I’m overweight for my schedule, provides my basal metabolic rate and body mass index, and prescribes the number of calories to consume that day if I want to maintain or lose weight. The basal metabolic rate is the amount of energy our bodies need to function at rest. This accounts for up to seventy percent of calories burned each day and includes the fuel needed for our hearts to beat and lungs to breathe.
The app also features an exercise chart to keep track of how many calories I burn in an intense workout or a morning stroll. It tracks water intake. It provides charts to help track weight loss. It has a library with tons of articles. It’s a wonderful tool to keep track of your entire effort.
Another app called Tap and Track is a quick reference tool if all you want to do is watch calories. You can tap it and search the database for a burger and it’ll show you its caloric value.
I’m not getting paid to endorse any of this stuff, but I love the little apps. They help me even during the act of eating. I’m a fast eater. Though I lost weight, I still wolf down food. I go T-Rex on my plate and come up for air to see Donna finish buttering her toast.
That’s a no-no. I’ve learned in the science of digestion our bodies need about twenty minutes to send the satiety signal to our brains. The communication says, “Hey, I’m full now. I don’t need anything else.”
If we eat too fast, we pack in so much food within twenty minutes that we’re way ahead of the signal. By the time the signal hits, we’re bloated like the Kool-Aid man.
With my iPhone, I’m able to tap an app and key in my information between bites. It helps me slow down. I’m not trying to ignore Donna, but it gives me something to do as I learn about the food on my fork.
At the beginning of my QWLCA maintenance, I chose to listen to the expert on the news and limit myself to 1,200 calories per day. It was my choice, and QWLCA didn’t have anything to do with it. I examined what I ate on an average day and discovered that’s about how much I consumed during my weight loss.
“I’m losing weight on that many calories,” I said to myself. “So I’ll try to keep it at that.”
I got plenty to eat at that rate if it was the right kinds of foods. Donna couldn’t eat it all on some days. She pushed her plate away several times.
I saw her leave leftovers one time and thought about another news report I saw on 20/20. It featured a guy who eats less than 1,000 calories a day. He tries to consume no more than 700 calories a day and has been doing it for nearly two decades in an effort to push the limits of longevity.
The same report showed a caloric study with apes. One ape consumed 500 to 600 calories per day. The other ape ate whatever he wanted. The ape that ate fewer calories appeared twenty years younger than Sloppy Boy, who looked like I did after running through the airport.
The whole theory focused on the fact that we eat way too much in America, far more than God designed for us to consume. We’re literally eating ourselves to death. The guy who eats about 700 calories a day is only 150 pounds and wants to live until he’s 120 years old.
With my luck, I’d be weak and delirious and step out in front of a bus at age forty-eight.
Some people would say, “I don’t want to live that long if I can’t eat. I’d rather die at 60 and be able to eat what I want.” Yeah, well, I’d rather stick around for my family.
Based on all these latest news reports, it appears we’ve been duped into believing the daily caloric requirement is 2,000 calories. That’s the figure the government and food industry consider an average for Americans, and it’s the standard used on nutrition labels. You know how good the government is with numbers. Most people eat more than that even though many experts believe we should consume fewer than 2,000 calories per day.
After all, it’s possible to eat 2,000 calories a day and grow to the size of Jabba the Hut on Star Wars. Two thousand bad calories are killers. The kinds of calories we eat can be just as important as the amount.
Try the Calorie Dare of eating 2,000 healthy calories in a day. Some people may not be able to reach the 2,000-calorie mark. It’s a lot of food if it’s the right food.
If we eat healthy, it’s easier to stay under that threshold. A healthy salad of greens has few calories. A tasty piece of grilled chicken can have fewer than 200 calories. Asparagus and other veggies rate low on the caloric meter. Eat such foods three times a day and that’s a lot of food and few calories.
Verbal Slap
Perhaps the biggest secret of weight loss is momentum. I’m not sure anything is more crucial than compounding interest. This term has more than one meaning for me. I needed something to hold my interest.
I have to see results to motivate me to continue. When I hear slow burn, I don’t think of the safe weight loss rate of some diet. No, a slow burn describes how mad I get when my snail-pace diet won’t let me have a slice of Mello Mushroom’s jerk chicken and pineapple pizza.
I want to see and feel myself shrinking so my confidence goes the other direction. This is a huge reason for my fifth Golden Nugg
et: Fly Solo, Where Even the Airplane Food Tastes Good. If you want to stay fat or get even fatter, go it alone. Live and eat in a vacuum, where no one holds you accountable or challenges your selection of Ho Hos for supper.
In this area, the term helping doesn’t refer to portion size.
I stayed faithful and disciplined on the QWLCA approach because it not only taught me an easy, low-maintenance plan for eating healthy foods but also provided the ultimate customer support. The QWLCA strategy includes real people who coach, encourage, and correct clients with amazing clarity and gentleness. And why wouldn’t they? Most of the staff members were clients too.
I missed only a few days despite my busy travel schedule. I didn’t mind the visits. The people were nice. Everyone in the office had used the plan to lose weight. They made it fun.
On Wednesdays, they provided motivation classes and cooked sample recipes. The group time built camaraderie. Before long, it felt the same as hanging out with a great small group at church. I wanted to keep my appointments because the staff had become friends.
They maintain a progress board on the wall. If you lose three pounds or more a week, you make the board. I saw where some people had lost as much as seventeen pounds in a week. I lost twelve pounds my first week because I was huge. It was mostly water weight. I think I tinkled it off, but I didn’t care how it came off as long as it came off.
The progress board stoked me to keep going every week. When you see one of your advisers write a double-digit number on the board, it makes you that much more determined to match it or beat it the following week. It’s like the home version of The Biggest Loser. It becomes a competition against yourself, the kind that is productive as opposed to Skinny Scotty vs. Supersize Scotty.
One week they weighed me and walked over to the board and placed my name in the top slot. I had lost more weight than anyone that week. I grabbed my phone and took a photo of the board.