Jim Rossman ambles around my neck o’the DMN woods periodically. Mostly though, our paths cross when I am acquiring yet another now-defunct iPod model from him. Not that I tend to wash the ones I have or misplace them or step on or anything.
One day not long ago, I saw Jim and he was, as the saying goes, a shadow of his former self.
“Jim!” says I. “You look great!” And, just in case the reason wasn’t some dark slimming outfit he was wearing or that I didn’t have my contacts in, I added: “Have you lost weight?”
To which he said yes. I knew he’d been wearing this nifty new Vivosmart (which he reviewed here), although he reminded me that just wearing something is no guarantee you’ll lose weight. In fact, he doesn’t even wear it all the time like tracker-obsessed I do.
He mostly relies on Lose It! The app helps him keep tabs mostly on what he eats. He said he tends to eat the same things — half-pound of turkey for lunch, for instance, or Zoe’s Kitchen steak kabobs with a double order of roasted vegetables for dinner. So when he punches the first few letters of those into his phone, up pops the info. It also tells him how many calories a day he’s allowed to lose two pounds a week — a very sensible rate of loss.
Since May (when he determined to start losing weight) he has dropped 74 POUNDS! SEVENTY-FOUR!!
Jim told me he limits his eating window to eight hours; for him, that’s noon till 8 p.m. He’s not a breakfast eater, thus refuting the oft-quoted rule that you need to eat that first meal in order to drop pounds. Besides, for him “breakfast” meant stopping by his favorite doughnut shop every day and getting two big ol’ — well, I forget, actually. I remember one was a sausage something surrounded by dough. AND the first of his Diet Cokes.
He attributes a lot of his weight loss to stopping his six? eight? more? Diet-Cokes-a-day habit. They just left him feeling bloated, he says. Plus, they’re flat-out not good for you. They’ve even been shown to possibly raise the risk of developing diabetes.
Now he drinks only water or unsweetened tea.
What else does Jim do? Well…guess you gotta watch the video and find out. And if you’ve lost a lot of weight in a sensible manner (no only-pickle-juice-and-cheese kinda diets please) by all means, drop a note to lgarcia@dallasnews.com.