Hey everyone, today I hit my half way point on my weight loss journey. I started at 268 lbs at 5'11", and today I am 218 lbs (and still 5'11" of course). 50 pounds down and 50 to go to reach my goal weight of 168!
To achieve this, I used a variety of tools to assist me, including a fitbit to track exercise and calorie intake. I tried to aim for ~1,500 calories/day using OMAD, which was hard at first but once I adapted became super easy. It's uncommon for me to even get hungry outside of dinner time nowadays, and if I do, a small (100 - 200 calorie) snack gets me through it easily. I take multi-vitamins every day to compensate for the lost nutrition from eating so little.
As for exercise, my wife and I had gotten gym memberships in February and started to go for walks/jogs for an hour three times a week. Unfortunately covid put a stop to that. We were worried at first that we would slip back into old habits, but fortunately we had some nice days in March/April to go for walks around the neighborhood. We would usually walk for 3 - 4 miles. I've always heard that one thing about exercise at this level of calorie intake (only just above a VLCD) is that you risk losing muscle as well as fat if you don't eat a lot of protein and use the muscles. For me, this was actually desirable, as men in my family seem to be genetically prone to amassing muscle really easily, and I was no exception. I spent some time in the military, and put on a lot of muscle during that time around my thighs and calves (underneath the fat that accumulated after I separated). It prevents me from wearing anything skinny/slim, and is just not the body type I aspire to achieve. So since I'm hoping to lose some muscle mass, I just don't really worry about protein vs carbs, etc. Some days I eat high in carbs and some others high in protein.
Finally, one of the most useful things for helping me lose weight was to also try to start dressing better. For the longest time all I've worn are the one pair of jeans on a daily basis and an assortment of mono color t-shirts. I thought I was being "stylish" by wearing a different color T-shirt every day. If it was hot, I would wear basketball shorts. Once I dropped from a 40 inch waist to a 36, I could finally fit into some of my old clothes, and some that I had bought as I was gaining weight and never wore. I also got on the male fashion subreddit and started taking some valuable advice. Even better, the "frugal" version was super useful for guiding me to some awesome (like 70% off) sales so I could build a new wardrobe pretty cheap. I am a little concerned the things I bought won't fit when I reach my goal weight, but I got them so cheap it's hard to worry about it, and I think if I like them enough I can just get them tailored.
Since we all know about the paper towel effect and how the mirror is a liar, cold hard data is a big motivator for me. I didn't feel like I had lost any weight at all for the first 25 pounds until I took some before and after pictures. I'm a huge data nerd as well, so to celebrate, I wanted to share the excel spreadsheet I made to track my progress. It tracks all kinds of neat stuff like BMI, body fat % (by BMI and by the U.S. Navy method using measurements), and daily weight. It then uses that information to plot a graph of weight loss and predict (based on a linear trend) the date at which I will reach my goal.
I'm not an expert with excel, so please forgive me if some things are done in a weird way or get broken.
Some notes about the spreadsheet if you want to use it yourself:
- Start with picking metric or imperial. A lot of cells are dependent on this so you should set this first and leave it.
- After setting metric/imperial, enter your constants, which are used throughout the spreadsheet for calculations of BMI and body fat %.
- The only information you need to manually enter into the tracking table is weight and measurements. Everything else is calculated automatically via formulas.
- You can start entering data on any date you want, but make sure from then on something is entered every day to keep the count going. If you skip a day, you can either just repeat the previous measurement, or enter a weight halfway between.
- Bust isn't used for anything, but my wife asked that I add it so she could track if her boobs decrease in size as she loses weight. You can leave it blank if it doesn't apply or you don't care about it.
- The prediction is based on a linear trend of weight loss, so it won't work for your weight loss goal if you don't consistently lose a certain amount of weight in a certain amount of time (such as 2 lbs/week, etc.). If you lose weight logarithmic-ally, (such as starting quickly but slowing as you approach your goal) it may be accurate at first but become less so over time. You can tell if the prediction is accurate or not by the R2 value on the graph's trend line. the closer to 1.00, the better the linear trendline's fit for your data. Below 0.95 - 0.90 will not be a very accurate prediction.
- The prediction adjusts as you enter more data , and I would recommend at least a few weeks of data before putting any stock into its accuracy.
Thanks for reading my post! Let me know what you think of the spreadsheet and if you have any tips/suggestions for features. I thought about tracking exercise/calories as well, but I felt like the Fitbit already does that better than I could.
As a bonus, here's my before/after as of today.
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