Here is a long, detailed dissertation describing my weight loss journey.
Anyways, in order to lose weight, all you have to do is count calories. Seriously! However, an extreme calorie deficit might be counterproductive. Allow me to explain.
But before going on, please keep in mind that this is JUST MY PERSONAL EXPEREINCE AND THAT RESULTS CAN VARY FROM PERSON TO PERSON.
I am a 5'9.75" man who weighed ~206 pounds on 1/1/2021. My goal is to go down to 155 lbs. At the beginning of the year, literally all I did was strictly limit my net calorie intake to ~1250 calories a day (+/- 100, mostly -) and immediately started seeing results.
This is THE BEST calories-burned smartwatch I have ever owned: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XM5PKDV/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1. And it is only around $35! I also own a nearly $100 Fitbit watch, but it massively overestimates the calories I burn and is hard to use. What a rip-off! The watch linked above seems to be extremely accurate, is waterproof, and lasts for literally weeks on just one single charge! I almost NEVER take it off.
Anyways, starting 1/1/2021, I carefully recorded the number of calories I consumed and subtracted that number from calories I burned according to my smartwatch. I almost ALWAYS made sure that my net caloric intake was less than 1250 calories.
How did I come up with the number 1250 calories, you may ask? By using this website: https://www.fatcalc.com/rwl. Using the calculator, I learned that my TDEE was 2,734 calories and that limiting myself to 1250 calories a day would result in a weight loss of roughly 0.35 pounds a day or around 2.44 pounds a week, thus reaching my goal in around 147 days. However, this ended up being a modest overestimation of weight loss.
However, I did virtually no exercise or anything like that. Until March 24th, I have been working from home due to COVID. I have spent most of the past one year or so lying on my bed. As a result, I typically burned only 30 (-25/+70) calories or so a day from just physical activity. So my daily caloric intake from food was still usually 1250-1300.
I heard that ~1250 calories a day is WAY TOO LOW for someone my gender and height, but I did not care. I kept on hearing that I needed to eat at least ~1500 calories a day, but I wanted to lose weight fast.
From the 1st week of January to around the 3rd week of February, my weight went down from 206.2 lbs. to 186.6 lbs. That translates to losing roughly ~2.638 lbs. a week.
However, during around the last week of February and the first week of March, I continued to strictly limit myself to ~1250 calories a day but did not lose any weight whatsoever. For 2 entire weeks, I limited my caloric intake massively and my weight still stayed at EXACTLY 186.6 lbs. every morning! I did some research and learned about so-called "weight loss plateaus." Basically, when you run massive calorie deficits, for some people, their body's metabolism slows down and adapts to the extremely low-calorie intake as a sort of survival mechanism. One solution I read about was to increase your calorie intake for 3 days to a week or so to allow your body to reset its’ metabolism and then go back to the diet. I saw people online claim that they actually LOST weight after stopping the diet for a few days or so to a week. I thought it was bullshit but decided to give it a shot.
Please keep in mind that MANY, MANY people believe that “weight loss plateaus” are just a myth. The idea that extreme caloric reductions eventually lead to a weight stall due to decreased metabolism is unproven and just a theory, despite many people claiming to have experience it, including me.
Starting around the 2nd week of March, I upped my calorie intake from ~1250 calories a day to ~1800 calories a day (+900/-300). And to my surprise, after a week of increased calorie intake, my weight WENT DOWN from 186.6 to modestly over 185 lbs., the first time I had seen progress in 3 weeks!
And starting March 18th, I continued my ~1250 calorie a day diet (with a few “cheat days”) and went down to 180.6 lbs. on March 31st! That is roughly a weight loss of 2.5 lbs. a week! However, starting April, I went into another weight loss plateau. My weight stayed roughly the same, even slightly increasing from 180.6 to around 181 lbs., from April 1st-April 5th, and that is with substantially increased exercise!
I started doing part-time work at a local business on March 24th. I have been walking the way there and getting a car ride on the way back home. It is roughly 1.2 miles away, and according to my calories burned function on my smartwatch, I have been losing ~200 calories thanks to walking to work. From the 24th-31st, this appeared to really accelerate my weight loss, even as I also increased my food intake by ~200 calories to compensate for this massive increase in physical activity. But from April 1st-April 5th, my weight slightly increased despite massive calorie intake reduction AND a relatively enormous increase in exercise (I had gotten virtually no exercise whatsoever for the months prior).
So from April 6th-April 8th, I upped my calorie intake to roughly 1800+ calories a day and continued my diet on April 9th. On the morning of April 9th, I weighed roughly 180.6 lbs. (almost no progress whatsoever for 9 days before that), ate roughly 1500 calories but exercised (walking) and burned 250 calories (net 1250 calorie intake), and on the morning of April 10th, my weight went down to 179.8 lbs.!
So from 1/1/2021 to 4/10/2021, a period of 99 days, my weight down from 206.2 to 179.8. That is a total weight loss of 26.4 lbs., which roughly translates to 0.267 lbs. a day or 1.867 lbs. a week. But had I known about “weight loss plateaus” prior to beginning my diet and did not spend an entire 15 days or so naively eating the same number of net calories despite seeing no progress whatsoever, it probably would have been a weight loss of ~0.3 lbs. a day or ~2.2 lbs. a week. That is less than I hoped for, but still pretty good. The weight loss calculator moderately overestimated the amount of weight loss.
Right now, I weigh roughly the same as I did during the Summer of 2017. Around August 2017, I weighed around 180 lbs. and almost completely ignored my weight for the next 3.5 years, subsequently leading to a weight gain of around 26 lbs.! But I feel lighter than I did 3.5 years ago! 3.5 years of weight gain lost in 99 days!
My goal is to go down to 155 lbs. I lost 26.4 lbs. and have another 24.8 lbs. to lose. That means I am about halfway done with my weight loss journey.
But I plan on increasing my net caloric intake from ~1250 calories a day to ~1400 calories a day. I have experienced painful weight loss plateaus and want to test whether or not a more modest weight loss schedule would prevent those. Maybe “crash dieting” like I have been doing is really damaging my metabolism and thus is counterproductive. I want to see if a more modest weight loss diet would prevent weight loss plateaus like many on the internet claim it does.
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