Hi all. I lost a significant amount of weight between 2010-2011 and recently found a cache of data that I thought I had lost that was even more complete than I remembered. I found it really interesting because these days it's almost a foregone conclusion that you use an app like My Fitness Pal to keep track of diet, people will tell you that you must use a food scale, you can find endless strategies on reddit, etc - but I thought it would interesting to show how I accomplished this in era before smartphones, with little to no advice, just because I got tired of being fat and decided to start counting calories and see what happened.
I was 20 years old, 5'5" F, and was used to averaging around 165 pounds in high school but had suffered the freshman 20 and was now sitting around 180, just barely cracking obese. I weighed in at, I think, 181 when I decided I was over it, but later I got a digital scale and back-corrected my analog measurements by the percentage difference between the scales and found my starting weight, had it been measured on the new scale, would have been 184. So I count 184 as my starting weight
I actually wasn't confident at all that I could lose weight, I thought I had a slow metabolism yadda yadda, but at least I wanted to prove it. So I opened up a Google Doc and simply started writing down what I ate, looking up the calories, and adding it up. I also created a Google Sheet and put in my weight every day. It just so happened that the school year had just ended and I moved out of the dorm and into my own place, so I wasn't walking past a dessert bar every day or any of the other nonsense. My first several days looked incredibly reasonable, less than 2000 calories, which I took as evidence that I would never be thin... but then my weight started to go down. I vaguely had the idea that 135 would be a good weight for me, 15 pounds below what I had ever seen on the scale, and that also happened to be where I would land if I lost 10% three times. So I set stepwise 10% goals of 166, 149, and 135 and took off.
One of the things I want to say is that, at first I was really just estimating. Eyeballing. I eventually graduated to measuring cups, but I never had a food scale. I totally dig that the food scale makes things more accurate, and I have one now, but it's possible to lose weight without the most precise equipment if you are reasonable and honest with yourself. I also should say I did not have a driver license let alone a car at this time, so my transportation activity definitely helped with reaching my goals. Many years later, after I got licensed, I began struggling with my weight a bit again and the precision of the food scale is very helpful now that I have less leeway because I have to freaking drive most of the places I go.
I would also say that being on this weight loss journey likely influenced my adult eating habits. Obviously, in high school I did not eat to be a healthy weight, and when I started tracking it became clear that only a few things were problems: basically, seconds at dinner and the slightly too frequent "I feel like a chocolate bar" or "I feel like some ice cream." On days I didn't do those things, my calorie count was perfectly reasonable and at a level that continued making me lose weight. So I was on the one hand relieved that I really didn't have to do anything crazy, and on the other hand kept stock of how often I could squeeze in those higher calorie treats and keep losing, because presumably that was a level of indulgence I could maintain forever. With regard to the seconds at dinner, dropping my vegetarian upbringing and eating more concentrated protein was a game changer - it was something I was already starting to do, but I really hadn't realized until I tracked that a large amount of carbs packaged with my protein was part of what made me eat too much at dinner to achieve satiety.
The Imgur link shows the THREE YEARS of weight data I collected. I hit my initial goal within 9 months, and continued to shave off a bit out to around one year. I largely maintained between 125-135 after that. I also took some screencaps of my food diary Google Doc, which I kept up for not as long, showing how I approached the tracking at different points. Up until I actually met my weight goal, I manually added up calories. After I met my weight goal, I experimented with different, less quantitative methods of assessing what I was eating until I finally dropped the food diary altogether after about 9 months post-goal. My weigh-ins also became more spotty as time went on, but I apparently continued putting in numbers at least sometimes until mid 2013 - and I can tell you it wasn't until about 2 years after the weight graph ends that I started having issues again due to lifestyle changes affecting my activity. By that time, I had a smartphone and found MFP and took up my weight management in a more modern way.
Enjoy, and I hope it provides some insights for those of you starting out or wondering how things are going to look once you get to maintenance.
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