Today I stepped on the scale and saw my first official goal weight - 130 lbs!
When I first set this goal, I chose it fairly arbitrarily based on BMI. It would put be firmly in the normal range (BMI 23.8) and I thought 30 lbs was a good round number as a goal in mind. I told myself when I achieved this goal I'd make a big post about my journey, what was successful for me, and of course include lots of data!
I've had a weird relationship with weight over my life that maybe a lot of you can relate to. As a kid I was normal weight to slightly overweight and then when I hit puberty I got "skinny" (or at least that is what other people said - I think now I realize my weight was very normal for my age and height). I spent my teenage years feeling insecure about my body in the way I imagine most teenagers are, but I wasn't fat and because of my petite frame, sometimes made fun of for being skinny.
Once I went to college the weight slowly crept up. I didn't gain a freshmen 15. It wasn't as stark as that. Instead it was slow and gradual, maybe gaining 5 lbs every year until I reached my highest weight of 165 lbs (BMI obese) in my mid to late twenties. After college I went to graduate school and there were periods where I would try to lose weight. I downloaded MyFitnessPal and started logging. I'd go to the gym with my lab mates and exercise. I started running. But none of that worked back then. I would get discouraged by a lack of results and I was tired and hungry all the time. I don't think I ever became quite complacent because the desire to lose weight was there, I just didn't feel terribly motivated and the lack of success has a lot to do with that
After I defended, started a job as a postdoc, and got settled into the new place I was living, I found the desire to try again. Life felt a little less hectic and more manageable. Starting back in mid-January at 160lbs, I decided to lose weight and reach my first goal. I made the conscious choice to not incorporate exercise at all and instead only focus on eating at a deficit and weighing all of my food and logging it. I think that was the best first decision I made for myself. I would classify my lifestyle somewhere between sedentary and lightly active. As a scientist, my job varies in how active I am during the day. Some days I'm on my feet conducting experiments in the lab and others I'm sitting at my desk all day analyzing data or writing. At home my hobbies are very sedentary though I get some activity walking my dog in my neighborhood. I think not having an exercise routine made it so I was less tired and I didn't need to find time to get a run in or go to the gym. And I think it helped immensely with hunger this time. I wouldn't tell people who enjoy lots of exercise to not do it. But for me, focusing on just eating at a deficit instead of both was better in terms of changing my behavior long term.
So what did I do to eat at a deficit? Meal prep, weigh everything, and most importantly - not restrict what kinds of foods I was eating. I still ate the standard diet of 50% carbs 30% fat 20% protein. This was unintentional and just something I've noticed as I've gone along that on average, what I typically like to eat, just falls out to be this proportion. I think what I really want to highlight especially is the carbs. I have switched over to lots of whole grains (whole grain pasta, brown rice, whole grain bread). My go to dinners every week are pasta and some kind of meat/potato/vege combo. I will typically make up 8 servings of dinner and split it into 4 meals for my boyfriend and me. For lunch, I often make slow cooker meals that I serve on brown rice or some kind of pasta. I make enough to last me (my boyfriend does his own lunch thing) for 2 weeks, portioning out the first week into bowls and then freezing week 2. I knew that for me - I wanted to lose weight modifying my behavior in a way that was sustainable in the long term and I think that's exactly what I did. I definitely can eat this way for the rest of my life because it's exactly how I ate before - just being more diligent about weight and logging which has become very second nature for me.
Another thing that was successful for me was timing when I ate. Ever since I was a kid, my appetite in the morning is absent. I can remember being forced to eat something for breakfast in the mornings and it felt like I was force feeding myself. I am also a grazer/snacker at night. So this time around instead of falling into the trap of fitting all my calories into 3 meals, I just skip breakfast and start eating around lunchtime. From my meal preps above on average my meals come to be anywhere from 350-450 calories, so after lunch and dinner I'll usually have around 350 calories left to snack for the rest of the evening. My go to snacks are popcorn, cheese, deli meat, bell pepper or carrots with ranch greek yogurt dip, Halo Top ice cream, chips (rarely), and tuna fish. I will usually spread out my calories and snack every hour after dinner until I go to bed, and I've found that method helps a lot with my later evening cravings.
Although most of what I eat I make myself at home, I definitely have gone out to restaurants and fast food during these last 9 months. For these days, sometimes I will eat less knowing its coming or I'll just eat at maintenance for that day. I try to log what I can (though there was one week when I went out of town to a conference when no logging happened since everything I ate was conference food or out at restaurants). I would say these occurred once a week to once every 2 weeks. I think doing this also helped me a lot. I would eat what I wanted when I went out, not really concerning myself with just getting a salad or whatever. For me, it didn't put a wrench into my behavior changes because I knew for the rest of the week I was consistently eating at a deficit and this wouldn't change much. And it's true (see data below).
Since I am a scientist, I've been meticulously keeping track of my progress. I weigh myself everyday in the morning and I log the calories I consumed for the day every night. The TDEE 3.0 spread sheet was what I used and it really came in handy with keeping up with my TDEE and progress. The first thing I noticed right off the bat is that my estimated sedentary TDEE for my starting weight and height was off. MyFitnessPal and other calculators estimated me to be about 1700-1750 but as you'll see in my graphs, my average starting TDEE was 1862. Now that I'm around my first goal weight (130lbs) my TDEE is around 1735 which is still higher than what online calculators show. I can't say where this is coming from. I tend to be a fidgety person and perhaps my perception of sedentary is off. I often see a lot women who are petite like me on here thinking that because they are short it's going to be a lot harder to lose weight. As you can see, my restriction has been very minimal, aiming for a -500 cal deficit per week to lose 1 lb a week. From the start of January to now, my weekly average weight loss is 0.83lbs eating around 1316 kCal per week. How much weight I lost per week fluctuated a lot but for the most part, my trend stayed pretty consistently linear (R^2=0.98).
TDEE and calories consumed graphs
I still want to lose some more weight. My new goal is somewhere between 120-125lbs. This will put me more solidly in the middle of normal BMI for my height and based on my appearance I think it'll be a good weight for me. Since I started, I've lost a lot of inches (42-35-42 to 40-31-37 (inches)). I have always been more busty and to my surprise, losing this weight hasn't really affected my boobs like I thought it would. I worried that they would deflate more and I'd get loose skin, but that hasn't been the case as seen by my proportions. I've lost a lot more around my hips and stomach which is very true to my pre-overweight figure where I have more narrow hips and no butt. So for anyone who is worried about that, losing the weight is much more important and it's not necessarily always the case that that will happen!
I hope this post is helpful to others! Being active on loseit everyday has been one of the top reasons this process has worked. This community is the most supportive and kind that I've seen online, and I highly encourage lurkers to become active. I started off posting a lot of questions and sharing my NSV/SV in the daily posts, but now I find myself answering people's questions more often! Getting involved and seeing such a diversity in experiences in very rewarding. Ultimately, the take away from this post is even if you're short, basic CICO with little/no exercise is still a great tool to lose weight and get to where you want to be!
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