Hello r/loseit!
I'm making this post for the newcomers. As we are reaching the new year, there will be an influx of new people coming in tryna shed those pounds. As someone who's also on the journey (I'm roughly 2 months in ATM and I've lost a total of 8 lbs), it's important to navigate these rough waters together! Here are some research I did and stuff that worked for me physically and mentally, hopefully this helps some of you.
Before we begin, a small disclaimer
I am neither a doctor, dietitian or fitness professional. If you have access to a personal trainer, you should absolutely listen to them instead of this post as they have more in depth knowledge. However, if you don't, you may use this post as a starting point.
Weight loss should be a slow process
Don't try to rush it. Just remember this, how long did it take you to get to this point? Well, the good news is, weight loss should take you a much shorter time if you come prepared. No one ever woke up one day and said, I want to be fat, it just sort of happened over the years.
However, you're going into the weight loss process with knowledge, this would give you an insane advantage to level the playing field.
There's only one way to lose weight
I'm sure you've heard this before. Weight loss comes down to Calories In, Calories Out (CICO).
Your body expands energy to keep you alive, this is calculated in BMR or Basal Metabolic Rate, ie how much energy you need daily to just survive. Extra calories you eat that remains unused are stored as fats.
Let's turn that around for a moment, if you eat under your calorie requirement, you're body would then need to turn into these fats to pay back that energy deficit.
For your reference, 3500 calories is roughly equivalent to 1 lbs of fats. Hence, by eating 500 less calories a day for a week, you're on track to lose 1 lbs of fats a week.
In fact, even bariatric surgery is a form of CICO, ie you're altering gut hormone level so you end up taking less calories.
How to start CICO
r/CICO has a lot of resources on their sidebar. However, let me give you the short breakdown to save you some time:
Calculating BMR
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Use a BMR calculator such as this one
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You'll get results based on your activity level, remember that you should always use the sedentary unless your a professional athlete. This is because, even though you walk a lot during your job, your heart rate isn't elevated too much unless you are absolutely out of shape or walking really fast. 3mph according to this thing.
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Any activities that you do, ie walking, running should be logged through a separate calculator. Keep in mind however that calculators like these often over estimates how much you're really burning. So, usually, unless the workout is an intense intense circuit training, long distance running / biking, I don't bother logging it and just take the extra calories burned as a bonus (if it happens).
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There you have it. You have now found your TDEE or Total Daily Energy Expenditure. This is the Calories Out component of CICO.
Logging your calories
For this step, you should absolutely get a food scale. They're cheap and you don't need a fancy one (I can get one for $5 including shipping where I'm from).
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Download an app like MyFitnessPal. I personally use Healthify since I like the UI better and it's easier to find asian cuisine in their database.
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Now that this step is done, all you have to do is to log your meals. I personally use the predetermined calculation in there. This is not as accurate, however, as I don't eat a lot of saucy food, I prefer this method as inputting individual ingredients in there for asian cooking with a lot of ingredients can get tiring really quickly. I do however overestimate the calories provided by the app just a little bit ~100 cal to account for a tbsp of cooking oil.
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You should always remember, you can't out train a bad diet. However, a good diet with bad routine will still bring you results.
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Its okay to treat yourself once in a while, as long as you are within your caloric intake. It's also okay to break it once in a while, remember to live a little.
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You will also feel slightly hungry while your body is getting used to proper portion sizes, however this will go away. Eating a big portion of vegetables and fruits (anything with a high fiber content really) will help circumvent some of this. In my experience, the hunger goes away after 2 weeks.
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In case you're wondering, intermittent fasting absolutely helps with CICO as eating in the 8 hour window usually means you'll end up missing a meal.
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A UK show called Secret Eaters showcases how extra calories can sneak into our diet. So I do recommend you give it a watch.
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Your total caloric intake during the day is the Calories In part of CICO.
Mindset
Now that we have mentioned the technical details of weight loss, let's talk about mindset.
I'm sure a lot of you have tried going on this journey before, just to completely lose motivation and yoyo back to your original weight, or even gained some.
Upon looking back, I realized the reason I have failed was because I tried to do too much, too soon. I tried various exercise programs (P90X, Insanity, T25, ICF) as well as various diets (mainly keto, underfeeding myself to a crazy low amount for a few weeks, cutting all the "fun" stuff out of my life) just for me to successfully lose weight but unsuccessful in keeping it off.
This was my body's way of telling me, "hey dummy! I need some nutrients. I'll make you suffer for this!". Now I fully understand what it means to shift towards a healthier lifestyle. After all, unless you're doing a cutting + bulking cycle, there's no reason to aim to lose all that weight just to gain it back again after a few months, right?
Shifting towards a healthier lifestyle should be done gradually. Don't be gung-ho in starting cardio, weight training and caloric deficit all in the same day. Introduce them slowly to your life and let your body adjust.
I personally started with cardio, then CICO, then weight training and it took me around 2 weeks to really adapt to a healthy habit before I could add another one. Adding everything in at once will leave you lethargic and unmotivated.
List out all healthy habits you'd like to incorporate into your life, try it out for a week to see how you like it and if you don't, try another one. This could range from, walking 10000 steps a day, to weight lifting, to swimming etc. The list is really endless.
However, keep in mind that the one key habit you absolutely need to incorporate is CICO.
I should also mention this piece of advice that is taken from the wiki in r/fitness.
“Substitution” is a well known psychological effect: when you announce your goals to people, you receive psychological satisfaction, and it makes it less likely you achieve them.
Share your accomplishments, not your goals.
Exercise
If you're wondering why this is so low on the list, it's because it's completely unnecessary. However, I'll list out the two types of exercise I know about here just in case you're curious how they can contribute to your weight loss journey.
- Cardio
Your calorie burning exercise. It makes you extremely hungry at first so give your body some time to adjust. A good session of interval training increases your TDEE by 400 - 600 calories so you can eat more and honestly, this extra calories is the only reason I'm doing it. You could also of course just use this as a bonus calorie burned, however as having too high caloric deficit might harm your progress in the long run, I would not advice it. Cardio also increases your endurance depending on it's intensity.
- Weight Training
Have you seen those fat to six pack transformation videos where the person looks completely shredded at the end of his journey? This is what weight training is for. Reducing caloric intake will lead to muscle loss eventually. However, according to bro-science (I can't seem to find a research on this, but this is what the consensus seem to be), if you're new to lifting, you can still make use of the newbie gains and slow that down or even gain muscles during your journey as your body could still use your fat storage to fuel your muscle growth to a certain point. 1 lbs of muscle also takes 3 times the calorie to maintain itself when compared to 1 lbs of fat, thus increasing your TDEE very slightly.
Fitness related gadgets
I'm a data driven person and the reason why I'm having fun during this fitness journey is partially because I get to collect the data and see the changes happening live on my body. These are absolutely not necessary, however if you're like me, they're pretty nifty.
- Heart Rate Monitor (XiaoMi Band6)
As I do cardio daily, I think this is my most useful purchase. This particular brand is cheap and I guess you get what you pay for. The footsteps tracking is absolutely garbage but I use it mainly for it's heart rate monitor that is used to estimated calories burned. It's pretty inaccurate as well, but I prefer having at least some data rather than no data at all . If you're looking for one that is more accurate, you should get a chest strap as that is miles more accurate than a fitness band.
- Body Composition Scale
The body fat percentage on this thing is also pretty inaccurate and dependent on a few other variables. However, you can use it to see if you're trending up or down in body fat and that's all I care about.
- Bluetooth Earbuds / Any earphones really
These Bluetooth ones are quite nice when you're lifting as there are no distracting wires. The gym is my "me time", I like to just put music and lift weights.
As a side note, please do not buy these gadgets at the start of your fitness journey. Use them as a reward to reinforce your healthy habit.
That's all peeps from me peeps! I hope this helps some of you out there and apologies for the long post! Happy New Year everyone!
If anyone who's more experienced with the subject matter would like to chime in or correct me, please feel free to do so through the comments.
Edit: Apologies for the multiple edits. I'm on mobile and I keep finding grammatical errors ðŸ˜
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