Back at the end of 2006, I posted my goals for 2007. My main goal was to trim my waist. Even though my weight was staying the same, around 168 lbs, I felt that my body compositon was shifting a bit the wrong way. So at the beginning of this year (2007), I measured my waist (at the navel) and found it was just under 36 inches. Ouch! That was a wakeup call. And so I set my goal to reduce it to 31 inches, what my waist was in high school if I remember correctly.
I measured my waist this morning and it was 32 and a half inches. So I'm well on the way to my goal measurement, though I obviously didn't reach the goal this year.
I experimented with a lot of different things to reduce my waist. From January to May, I tried the increased exercise route - more walking, more interval training - and my waist didn't budge. In June, I made a dietary change: I cut out all refined sugar. With this change, my waist went from around 36 to 34 inches. I was only having a bit of sugar at night, but I guess it was enough to cause problems, because eliminating it definitely helped me.
By mid-October, I was really starting to sweat because my waist seemed stuck at 34 inches. At that time, I looked at the new paleo diet study and found that the participants restricted nuts. I was eating a good bit of cashews at the time, so then I restricted them to an ounce per day. That seemed to do the trick, as my waist has been slowly declining since. I don't think the calories from the nuts were the problem per se, but the omega-3/omega-6 ratio of cashews is not that good, and that may have been creating metabolic issues.
I will continue on with this goal and hopefully reach it in the first few months of 2008. My waist has been slowly declining the past couple months, so I may just need more time to reach my goal. If not, I will do some more fine-tuning on the diet side.
That is probably the biggest lesson I learned in 2007, how powerful diet is. Previously, I thought exercise was king and diet was queen, but now I think the reverse. My own experience showed me that dietary changes were more powerful than exercise. This is not to say that exercise isn't important or necessary, just that dietary problems can cancel out any potential gains from exercise.
The other issue is determining what size my "natural" waist is. Even at low body fat levels, people have different natural waist sizes based on their bone structure/frame. When Schwarzenegger competed in bodybuilding, his waist was 34 inches, but that's because he has a larger, mesomorph frame. Just visually, I'm guessing that my natural waist is 31 inches, but I guess I really won't find out until I get to that level.
