After struggling with my weight for about 10 years, I finally figured out something that worked for me. Over a year’s time I lost over 100 pounds. What follows is an overview of what worked and lessons learned.
Disclaimer: While I had success with this, I can’t guarantee that it will work for everyone. Also, I am not a doctor and can’t say whether this is healthy or not.
Track Intake: The first and most important thing I did was track everything I ate. I tried several approaches to this: paper and pencil, mobile notes, etc. In the end, the only one that stuck was using the app “My Fitness Pal” on my phone. The app is free and has a nice a crowd-sourced database of nutrition information.
Just Maintain: The app tries to set a calorie target based on body type, current weight, and goals. When just starting out, I didn’t worry about the calorie goal. I just set it to maintain my current weight. At this stage, the habit of tracking was more important than what I was eating.
Timing Doesn’t Matter: I actually started the process right before Thanksgiving and was beginning right through the Christmas holiday. I think this shows that there is no perfect time to start.
No Cheating: There were no days off from this process. Every meal, every day, everything with calories went into the app. However, I didn’t bother with things that were zero calorie or very minuscule (like lettuce).
Secret Squirrel: In the beginning I actually didn’t say a word about this to anyone, not even the wife. I wasn’t super secretive about it, but I tried hard not to talk about it. It wasn’t until much later in the process, after people started noticing, that I opened up.
Weigh In: I also starting weighing myself once per week. I weighed in every Monday morning, immediately after waking up, just wearing pajamas.
Forgive Yourself: In the early days, the numbers from the app and the scale were sometimes shocking. At this stage I had to work hard to not become discouraged and give up. It was important to forgive myself for eating too much or weighing too much. No matter what I ate, no matter what I weighed, it was better that I was tracking it.
I tracked things like this for a few weeks before moving on to the next phase
The actually fell into this next phase naturally. In “My Fitness Pal” if you are under your calories for the day, the count shows up in green; If you are over, it shows up in red.
Under the Target: With my daily calorie goal still set to “maintain” my next goal was to be in the green (under my target) every day. It didn’t matter if it was only a single calorie. As long as I didn’t go over my maintenance calorie count, I was good.
The Same, But Less: I didn’t change what I was eating by that much, I just tried eating slightly less of it. I tried to make sure I kept eating fruits and vegetables. I tried to make sure I didn’t just replace all of my calories with salt. Ultimately though, I put my focus on calories as the metric to watch. It didn’t matter how healthy something sounded (like peanut butter), a calorie was still a calorie.
Vitamins: I did start taking a multi-vitamin at this point. I’m not sure if it effected much, but it made me feel good about myself.
Never Perfect: The calorie totals I was tracking would never be perfect. It was really just a best-effort estimate. I tried to over-estimate the number of calories in something more often than under-estimating though.
Don’t Overdo It: I tried to be under my goal, but not by too much. If I had extra calories and was hungry, I ate more.
Again, I made sure that I could sustain this for a few weeks before moving on.
It was around this point that I started to set some actual goals for myself. I decided that if I lost 1 pound per week for an entire year, I would be 50 pounds lighter and happy with myself.
Lower Target: I set “My Fitness Pal” to 1 pound per week and it adjusted my calorie target lower.
Slipping Up: I definitely went over my calorie target sometimes during this phase because I was starting to get hungrier. I tried not to be discouraged and just kept tracking. Even when I fell off the wagon and ate too much, I figured I was better off than before by having it tracked.
It Takes Time: Around this time, I started to realize just how slow of a process it is. I started looking at some milestones 10+ weeks ahead and realized that that’s what 10 pounds looks like.
No Gimmicks: I didn’t make a conscious decision to cut out anything from my diet entirely. The only things I stopped eating were because I didn’t think they were worth the calories. If I wanted a cookie, I ate a cookie; I just couldn’t eat something else because of it. I also started to drink less calories only because I’d rather eat them. I still drank things like diet soda (zero is zero); I tried not to overdo any one thing.
Exercise: My only real form of exercise during this process was walking the dog for about a half-hour per night.
I stayed in this phase for at least 6 months.
Even though my goal was only 1 pound per week, I started to average slightly more than that. At this point I was really starting to see some results, so I decided to try stepping it up a notch. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who doesn’t have a lot of weight to lose like I did.
More Aggressive Target: I re-adjusted my calorie target in “My Fitness Pal” for 2 pounds per week. This was really hard because there wasn’t any wiggle room in the diet. There were weeks where I did really well with this, and other weeks where I really struggled.
Accuracy: I kept striving to make my calorie log and weigh-ins more accurate. I bought a food scale to make portioning easier and a digital scale for my own weight. However, all of these measurements are still estimates. I could actually lose a pound by changing which tile the scale sat on.
More Exercise: During this phase, I increased my daily walks with the dog to an hour per night. I tried to keep this as consistent as possible.
At this point, the habits were pretty well ingrained. I just kept doing everything above for the next few 4-5 months until I hit 100 pounds. Writing it down makes it sound easy, but it really wasn’t. The whole process was very hard.
Foot Off the Gas Slowly: I didn’t stop tracking after I hit my goal weight. I merely adjusted my targets back to “maintain”. I actually kept losing another 10 pounds before things started to level off.
This Is My Life Now: It has now been about 4 months since I hit my goals. “My Fitness Pal” is still set to “maintain”. I’m still trying to track everything that I eat. I go back and forth between being in the green and in the red a little bit, but things have been mostly stable.
To quote Forrest Gump: “That’s all I have to say about that.” I’ll try to update this post if anything changes.
2019-01-26