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This is the first of what I hope to be many testimonials of success on the slow-carb diet. This is the story of Likwidtek, the moderator of the 4hourbodyslowcarb subreddit.

My wife and I attempted slow carb a few years ago. I lost 28 pounds in about 3 months and then we just stopped. I was nowhere near what my goal was but we just kept cheating and over time we stopped weighing ourselves.

Dealing with a failed first attempt

Cheat day turned into cheat weekend, turned into cheating all the time and before you know it, we gave up. Slowly over the next few years the weight slowly started to pile back on. I have a million reasons and excuses why we failed the first time but they’re all B.S.

Eventually I was forced to take it very serious. I started having pretty bad acid reflux and my blood pressure was getting out of control. If I didn’t change something quick, I was going to die early. I started getting very scared thinking about if my wife and I would have the full life together that we really wanted. My Mom passed away at 50 from heart problems and I didn’t want to put my daughter through that.

I started looking at pictures of me when I was down 28 pounds and looked at some of my recent photos. I was disgusted and ashamed. It’s really weird how deceiving the mirror can be. It’s not until you look at a before and after pic do you realize how fat (or on the flip side – how skinny) you’ve gotten. I kept convincing myself that my clothes were shrinking. I had to start buying pants from the fat man store! I started having weird feelings in my chest. The doctor told me I was stage 1 hypertension and at 33 years old this was crushing to me.

Enough.

Enter my amazing wife. Let me first say, my wife loves me to death. Seriously, no joke. She’s the best. Now the bad part about this is, my wife’s way of loving me is by feeding me. Not in a weird “feeder” relationship way, but she loves making us great meals and tasty baked goods. She is one of those gifted food geeks and it just so happens that I love food. Perfect match right? 😉

Every time my wife would make us all something delicious, one of my best friends would always joke, “You will NEVER be a thin man!”. I gained a huge amount of weight ever since meeting my amazing wife. She would often rub my belly and joke “I built this”. It’s true, and while it was fun, my wife pushed forward and made a very hard decision.

The thing that made her happiest, and the way she knew best how to love me was slowly killing us both. My wife suddenly decided that she was going to make some changes. She did this without really clueing me in. Rightly so, because more than likely I would have complained and come up with a zillion excuses why it was a bad time.

I have our friend to thank too. He had lost over 200 pounds on slow carb. We visited with him for the first time in a while and he was even thinner than we remembered. He was thinner than me! He did it! Why the hell did we stop? Look at how amazing he looks. How happy he is! Why are we not doing this? Why did we give up!?

Enough.

Making it work this time

We started back up with slow carb again. We did it for about a week without “officially” getting back in. We just sort of tried it on for size and after about the first week or so we decided, yeah – we can do this again. But we needed to get serious. So we sat down and really dug into why we failed last time.

If I were to tell you the biggest lessons learned that we have this time over our first failed attempt, it would be to eliminate every and all excuses for cheating. We did that with creating “Plan B” meals.

Have plan B meals

Plan B meals were simply something that someone like me, destined to eat like a college kid bachelor, kitchen idiot, me, could whip up in under 10 minutes or so. These are not gourmet meals at all. They are simply a “meal” that is easy, quick and accessible and will prevent us from cheating.

We’ve had a few Plan B meals that we rotate in an out. We experimented with some in the beginning that we learned slowed our fat loss more than others, and quickly changed them out. Others, we actually quite enjoy. But no matter if you simply make sure you have a single portion of peanuts with you at all times, or hidden cans of veggies and tuna at work, you make sure that there is NEVER an excuse to just say screw it and go to Taco Bell. Plan well. Pre-make, portion, and freeze meals to have ready at the drop of a hat. Plan B meals were the biggest reason for our success this time.

Track your progress

Aside from the Plan B meals, I found that using a better system for tracking my weight helped tons. I tried a couple charts and apps but none of them had everything I needed. I needed more detailed information, a goal line, a trend line, things like this. I went ahead and made one that had everything I was missing. It’s free and totally sharable, and you can get yours here.

I know not everyone has a health scare to get their butt in gear. All I can say is that if you’re obese, you may not have one now, but you will eventually. This scare has really helped me stick with it this time. We have kicked butt for the past 7 months or so and we do NOT cheat outside cheat day. If you can figure out a way to not cheat, stay as strict as humanly possible during the week but still go nuts on cheat day you’ll do great. Track your weight religiously and stick to your goal. Making it visible works wonders.

I started this diet at 275 pounds. So far I’ve been on the diet for 224 days (a little over 7 months) and I’ve lost 71 pounds. That’s an average of 2.21 pounds per week for over 7 months. My lowest weigh in so far is 204 pounds. I’m almost at my goal with only 6 more pounds to go. If you’d like to know more, I wrote a guide that sums up everything that my wife and I have learned over the past 7 months. I hope it will help you too.

Good luck! You got this!



If you have a success story you’d like to share, please send it over! Send me an email – jason@findingmyfitness.com.

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