Life At Slow-Mo

Getting off the scale Thursday morning, I was happy as a lark. I reached 94.05 kg. That means if I behaved properly that day, the next morning I might break to the 93 kg range. Being stuck at 94 kg for two weeks, I was near desperate. This is the break that I have been waiting for.

That day happened to be a holiday. Several cousins from my wife’s side and their families were coming to hang out at our home. Wanting to be a good host, I shopped for booze the day before. I was serving beers and makgeolli, and also whiskey and sodas for the men to make their own highballs.

I have done some observations, and I came to the conclusion that beer was the worst enemy for my weight loss. Some liquor was fine. So I planned to have only a small beer (I only had small 150ml glasses at home to serve alcohol) and one highball. That’s it.

After lunch, the men gathered at the carport. The day was hot, and the cold drinks were just the thing to quench our thirst. I quickly forgot my plan, and before I knew it, I had more than two drinks. As I told you before, I could not take much alcohol. Before long, my head began to throb.

Because of the gathering, I ate larger portions of lunch and dinner that day. I already closed my eating window for my intermittent fasting at 6PM. By 10PM, the hunger combined with the headache was too much. At 10.30PM I caved in and ate a leftover chicken wing with rice to ease my suffering.

The next morning, I wondered whether I should weigh myself. Yet I knew that I had to face the music sooner or later, so I chose sooner. I stepped on that white square flat thing and looked down. The LED display blinked the number 95.15.

Damn.

That means in just one day, instead of breaking into the 93 kg range, I went back to 95 kg.

Damn, damn.

I suspected that I might gain some weight back, but not so much that it erased two weeks’ worth of hunger and craving-fighting.

Damn, damn, damn.

Let’s say that breakfast-lunch-dinner-wise, I had taken in about a break-even amount of calories. So the only additional calories came from the drinks and that late-night chicken wing. I tried to break down the drinks that I had and check their calorie content. They came down to this:

Drinks	Calories/Unit	How Much I Had	Calorie Intake
Whiskey1	110/shot	5 shots	550 calories
Bintang Beer2	141/330ml	110ml	47 calories
Bundaberg Ginger Beer3	165/375ml	120ml	52 calories
Schweppes Ginger Ale4	120/330ml	160ml	43 calories
Total from drinks			687 calories

I missed the fact that alcoholic drinks are derived from sugar, and therefore pack a lot of calories in a single shot. Although not the worst, a shot of whiskey still contains as many calories as a small cup of ice cream.

Checking for the chicken wing and rice, I found this.

Food	Calories/Unit	How Much I Had	Calorie Intake
White Rice	204/cup	1 cup	204 calories
McDonald’s Fried Chicken – Wing	153/wing	1 wing	153 calories
Total from food			357 calories

In total, I took in over 1,000 extra calories from those alone. However, taking that many additional calories is not enough to make me gain a little over 1 kilogram in just one day. It takes 7,700 calories to hike that much weight. What gives?

It might be because of a lot of things. Because it was a hot day, I drank a lot of water. I might still retain a substantial amount of liquid when I weighed myself. Or it might be because of the alcohol.

Some studies show that other than its calorie density, alcohol can also impede fat burning. Because the body sees alcohol as a toxin, metabolizing it takes priority. That means, whatever you eat that day will be processed after the body is done getting rid of the alcohol. The body takes a longer time to metabolize that day’s food intake, which defeats the goal of intermittent fasting.

That doesn’t mean you can have drinks while fasting. Experts agree on two drinks maximum per week. What I had that day is tantamount to three weeks’ drinking. No wonder I gained that much weight in a single day.

I should have stuck to my original plan of having only two drinks. Now I have to pay the price by having my weight loss pushed back another week. I have only myself to blame.