Losing the love handles

 In 2013, one year after I retired from government service and began working from home full time as a writer, I fell and broke my femur. I weighed 235 pounds at the time, weight that complicated my fall and contributed to the fracture. Once I was off physical therapy and able to exercise again, I determined to lose weight. Whenever I looked in the mirror, I could see signs of the excess weight, most notably very prominent were love handles, those ugly folds of flesh at your waist.

I began a program of weight loss that involved cutting out snacks--except for two days of binge eating each month--and exercising daily, stretching, resistance band exercises, and walking. That got me down to 214 in a year, but I still had the love handles and my arthritic knees still hurt.

When a house fire destroyed our residence, and we moved in with our daughter and her family, I still walked, but not as much, and didn't exercise as much as I had when I was not in a house with three grandchildren. Now, that's exercise, and good exercise, but it didn't focus on the parts of the body I needed to focus on, so the love handles stayed.

You might think I'm being obsessive here, but love handles are a sign of visceral fat stored around your midsection, your core, and that's the fat you really need to get rid of. I decided to go nuclear on those unwelcome folds of flesh. My daughter and her husband were on a keto diet and seemed to be doing quite well. I didn't want to go the whole way, but it struck me that the way to get rid of visceral fat was to do something that helped the body burn fat, not carbs. So, I reduced carb intake and began starting each day with a cup of coffee filled with flavored protein powder and coconut oil, cut out midmorning snacks and reduced the amount I ate for lunch and supper. Within a month, I'd gone from 214 to 205, and a month after that, when I'd gone to what I call my 'fat' coffee, one or two times a week, with a high-fiber, low-carb breakfast of oatmeal or cold oat bran cereal the others--with a weekly breakfast of pancakes with the fixings and no lunch--each weekend, my weight went down to an average daily weight of 194 pounds, the first time since 1978 that it had been that low.

I'm now a month into that and holding, but the nice thing--the love handles are gone. That's a sure sign of less visceral fat. The little twinges of pain in my knees are also completely gone.

I can't say this regimen is for everyone. I can only say that it worked for me.