Image: https://imgur.com/7M0OR9H
So end of November 2019 I was almost 120 kg (164 lb.) and sick of it. I am a 27 year old guy (26 at the time) and never had a gf. I felt my weight was the biggest inhibiting factor in this and after an endless amount of rejections I felt I had enough of it.
So almost cold turkey I started exercising and dieting. I must stress that I don’t like sports at all and I did some simple things like walking the dog every night and swimming for an hour twice a week. Although this probably added to my weight loss the biggest factor I would say was counting calories. I reduced my intake to about 1500 kcal per day. And over the course of the coming months I lowered it even more. At the lowest intake I was at about 1200 kcal a day. (definitely not recommended by nutritionists) but I was sick of the weight and loved the progress I was seeing. I also started tracking my exercise and was depending on my exercise burning about 2500-3000 kcal per day. This means that at the fastest rate I was losing well over a kilo per week. (Something like 1.3 per week during the months where I was losing the most) but there where definitely weeks where I lost over 2 kg. (Usually the number would be lower the week after or before because of natural fluctuations in weight). I made it a habit to weight myself every Wednesday before breakfast and after hopefully a big shite and a wee. Usually I would swim the night before. This means my bassline of weight was always kind of the same. Although it still fluctuated a lot.
During the time where I was lowering my kcal to about 1200 I decided portions where getting to small. So I made the decision to make my portion size a bit bigger and skip breakfast. (I would have breakfast at 12 and dinner around 7) I had no idea that this was called intermittent fasting but basically it is what I started doing. (A lot of nutritionists advice against combining intermittent fasting and counting calories). The only reason I started doing it was because of convenience. I had no idea there might be some benefits to fasting for about 16 hours. (my younger brother who studies nutrition and food pointed this out to me). I work as a bat ecologist and I go to bed late at night and sleep in the next day. This definitely helps with intermittent fasting since I usually have to only wait for 2 hours before I can eat after waking up.
So how did I lower my calories to such an drastic amount? It basically came down to finding food that was low in calories but I still liked. In the morning that usually meant 4-5 pieces of low calorie knackebrod with some low calorie jam or my own home made hummus. (Most store bought hummus here in the Netherlands has a shit ton of oil added and is basically as fatty as mayonnaise). Although I now have found a few brands that are lower in kcal. I used to be a bit of a fussy eater so it took some time to find recipes and stuff I both liked and where low in kcal. I must admit that I only paid attention to Kcal and did not check for vitamins, macro nutrients etc. I would also just eat unhealthy stuff I like, but in very low amounts to keep the calories down. I always say to my friends I did not lose the weight by changing what I eat but just how much I eat. Although this is not totally true because in the process I started eating vegetarian. Also I changed what I eat since I would like to feel full after a meal and just eating one piece of bread with some cheese as breakfast did not fill me up. A great tip I used is to drink a lot after eating (Obviously a drink that is low in kcal like tea, black coffee or water). Drinking after a meal definitely makes you feel full. The catch is you need to wait about 20 min for the feeling of being “full” kicks in. This is basically the period where I needed a bit of perseverance. These days as a guilty pleasure I drink a lot of Pepsi max which is probably also not the best. But at least it hardly has any kcal.
So the way I did calorie counting was with an app called Fatsecret. Although I really dislike the name it was the first app that came up and I just downloaded it and it worked. The most important thing is not what app you use (You can also do it by hand its just more work). It is much more important that you are really honest in counting calories. That meant for me that I took the weight of my food with a little digital scale and put in the amount of grams for everything. I do a lot of home cooking and it definitely makes home cooking a lot more work. Although after a while you get a good understanding of how much calories something is I kept doing this till this day to avoid a slippery slope. It is important to understand that most people who count kcal are underestimating by about 20% then in a lot of places food companies are allowed a 20% margin of error in kcal (Which they are going to use of course) So this means that if you are not being precise you can underestimate by 40%. Basically the difference between 1500 and 2100 calories. which for a lot of people is the difference between losing 2 kg per month and not losing any weight at all.
So last week I reached my target of losing 50 kg. This was not my target at first. When I started out losing weight I would have been so happy to end up at 80 kg but since I saw a lot of progress I kept moving my target weight. (I am now 68). At 80 kg I was not totally happy with the result and I am now right around the sweet spot in weight for my length. I must say that the last 2 months losing weight has gone a lot slower than in the beginning. My basic metabolism has probably crashed from around 2000 kcal to about 1700 which just means it takes more exercise to lose weight. (which sucks because I hate sports).
So lately I have substituted swimming with going to the gym. I have done this for a couple reasons: swimming started to become very boring. Girls in my immediate surroundings where very honest with me (Dutch directness helps sometimes) and most of them are attracted to guys with a bit bigger arms. (mine are tiny these day’s) Its shallow but still a reason I suppose. The 3rd reason is that by adding a bit more muscle I hope to upper my basic metabolism a bit. I still love food so much. I just started to dislike being fat a bit more. So as you would have probably guessed from the last comments I still don’t have a gf atm. I am going to blame the Rona and not my lack of a good personality for this for at least a while. Now I am basically done losing weight I am going to continue counting kcal and intermittent fasting. A shocking statistic is that 90% Of people who have lost a lot of weight put 80% of it back on within 5 years, and I don’t like that prospect. So I am slowly upping my intake to 1700-2000 kcal (depending on where my weight flatlines) I feel like keeping a close eye on my weight and calories is the best way to be in the 10% that keeps their weight. I might add a little weight in muscle who knows…
I would like to finish this crazy long story with a couple of things I learned during all this: You don’t need to be a super disciplined person to lose weight. I am definitely an extremely lazy person. The thing that changed for me is that I felt very strongly that being fat and single forever was going to make me more miserable then eating less. Since I am a bit of a nerd I liked to track my progress with kcal etc. so I could have a better grasp of what I was doing. Although my younger brother is a nutritionist I hardly consulted him on any of this. I guess my stubborn personality makes me too proud to listen to my little brother. I guess we only started talking about it a bit more when he started noticing the changes around 35 kg lost. You don’t need to have a little brother who is a nutritionist either. Also don’t do the crazy diet I did. 1200 kcal is a very unhealthy amount and eating so little is definitely not being healthy but being stupid. which I fully admit to being. Since I hate exercise so much my philosophy during all of this has kind of been: What you can eat in 5 min takes an hour of exercise to lose. Since I hate exercise I chose to mainly focus on eating less. Exercising more and building a bit of muscle is probably a better and healthier way of losing weight. I just could not get myself to do that. Also you don’t need any fancy stuff or expensive personal coaches to lose some weight. You just need a bit of common sense and If anything it should be cheaper than being fat since the only thing you really need to do is eat less.
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