In January 2018, I was 214 lb, decided that was quite enough of that, bought a digital scale off Amazon, and started my downward journey towards better health. My first major goal was to get back inside a healthy weight range before worrying about anything else. As a 5'7" male, that meant dropping under 160 lb, and number I had not seen since my university (if not high school) years.
I am happy to report that I achieved my goal to reach that for my birthday this year, which was earlier this week! I am thankful for the community here in /r/loseit, and I'm pleased that we have been collectively pushing a simple, consistent message that is largely free of pseudoscience and trendy marketing crap aimed at capitalizing on this multi-billion dollar industry.
What I've learned over the past year and a bit has stayed remarkably consistent and true:
- small, frequent changes are easier than few, large changes
- slow, sustainable progress is better than fast, untenable progress
- discipline is more effective than motivation
- diet is more effective than exercise for weight loss
- difficulties encountered are 20% physical, 80% psychological
- weight loss is simple, but it is not always easy
I still believe in all of those points, even more strongly now than I did in the past. I won't rehash everything here, but if you're interested in what I have to say, check out my post from last May: I just went from "obese" to merely "overweight"! Here's what I learned (with lots of graphs)...
As of today, I have amassed quite a bit of data: 442 days, 1970 weigh-ins, and 1670 food entries. I also started tracking body fat and muscle mass percentage last July, and added in daily exercise tracking a few months ago.
Weight loss graph
This is the main chart, showing the daily minimum recorded weight. As you can see, even though I weigh myself a few times a day and look at the lowest weight, it still fluctuates by quite a lot. This is one of the hard truths about weight loss: it is anything but a smooth, predictable ride. There is usually a 2-3 lb difference between my lightest and my heaviest on any given day. There have been some weeks where I go up 10 lb or more, only to lose that (and then some) the following week.
My point is that short-term fluctuations don't mean much. You need to look at the big picture. Think about how the temperature outside changes from day to day, and even from morning to afternoon to evening. Just because there's an unexpectedly balmy day in January (I'm in Canada) doesn't mean spring somehow arrived early. It's the overall long-term trend that tells the true story.
So go ahead and enjoy that extra thick slice of birthday cake, or indulge in amazing meals when you're on vacation. Make a deal with yourself: if you can hit your calorie goals for a whole week straight, reward yourself with a treat day! One day once in a while, won't ruin your plans.
Weight loss trends
This is an interesting graph for a couple of reasons. It shows the general direction of my weight loss (or gain) over the most recent 14 days (light line) and 30 days (dark line). When the line is below the X axis, I was losing weight. When the line is above the X axis, I was gaining weight. It's obvious that things go in cycles, as is common for many bodily functions.
More importantly, it shows that although my rate of weight loss was not perfectly consistent, I was still losing weight the overwhelming majority of the time. The biggest peak is the result of the one-two punch called Christmas and New Year's. 🤣 But even with that, the cycle continues as usual, and I was still able to keep the line more below than above the X axis.
I found it interesting that the difference between the peaks and valleys increased as time went on. I don't know exactly why that happened, but I suspect that as I lost weight, restricting my caloric intake became more and more difficult. I essentially have less wiggle room at 160 lb than I did at 200 lb. That means it is easier to take in more calories than I need, more often. At the same time, ramping up my physical activity would have a proportionally greater effect too. This results in greater weight loss fluctuations, but the overall downward trend is maintained.
Weight loss plateaus
This is another neat chart. Given that body weight bounces up and down constantly, it is possible to see how often I set a new low weight record. Then usually my weight bounces up and around a bit, drops down some more, and the cycle continues. It used to be I would hit a new record low every few days or at worst a week or two. But again, as I approached a normal BMI, my TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) dropped as well. This made it more and more difficult to maintain my previous pace, and the plateaus stuck around longer and longer. Now, it's not uncommon to go a few weeks before the right combination of events allow my weight to break through the plateau and record a new low. My current plateau is 158.8 lb, set 23 days ago. My best this week is 160.0 lb, so I'm not too far off.
Don't be discouraged if you're not seeing frequent drops in weight. This is perfectly normal. Remember, you're looking at long-term goals and not short-term fluctuations.
Calorie intake
This chart shows how much I ate each day compared to my estimated TDEE. Red means I ate more than I burned that day, green means I burned more than I ate. The taller (or deeper) the line, the greater the difference. As you can see, I haven't been the best example of willpower and self-discipline, but at least my green lines outweigh the red lines by a significant margin. I was still able to lose 55 lb in one year despite this.
I think one thing that helped was not tracking my physical activity. It is very tempting to say "well, I burned off 500 kcal today, so I'm going to eat an extra 500 kcal, because I deserve it!". While this would seem to be harmless at first glance, the problem is that we tend to overestimate exercise energy and underestimate food energy. By deliberately not taking into account how much I walked or biked, I gave myself that extra bit of safety margin. So even if I did go over my daily or weekly calorie budget, the fact that I also biked 100 km saved me. Had I accounted for the exercise, I would have been tempted to eat the whole pizza instead of just a few slices, or finish off that tub of ice cream.
Having said that, I will now be accounting for physical activity in my daily energy calculations. For one thing, I am now in my target weight range, so my focus will shift towards physical fitness rather than pure weight loss. For another thing, I have been counting calories for a full year now, so I have a pretty good idea of what I can eat and how much I can eat. Building cardiovascular health and strength training uses different data from weight loss, and thus I will be modifying my approach accordingly.
Body fat vs muscle
I bought a second scale last summer that could record additional metrics: body fat percentage, muscle mass percentage, total body water, bone mass, and BMI. I'm not going to put too much faith into the accuracy of a $25 device from Amazon, but I figured that as with weight loss, a long-term trend would still be useful to have.
The chart on the left shows how my body fat and muscle mass as a percentage of total body weight changed over time. In July 2018, I was 185 lb with about 27% fat and 34% muscle. By March 2019, I was 160 lb with 21% fat and 37% muscle. Fat is going down and muscle is going up!
If I take those percentages and multiply them with my body weight at the time, I get an interesting result. While I am definitely losing fat mass, I am also losing a bit of muscle tissue. Not anywhere near as much as the fat, but that's still 3 lb over the course of 8 months. I did lose a total of 25 pounds in the same amount of time, so I'm not too worried.
Curiously, if I add up the amount of fat and muscle lost based on the percentages (15.5 lb and 3.3 lb, respectively), that only accounts for about 19 lb. Yet the scale says I lost 25 lb in that timeframe. What happened to the other 6 lb? Water? Bone mass? Or just inaccuracy in how the percentages are measured in the first place? 🤔
Thanks for reading, hope it helps somebody out there!
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