Greetings, fellow losers! It's been a year of tracking for me, and I'd like to share my insights. As I stated in my introductory post, I was never taught proper nutrition growing up, and have learned so much in the last year.
When I finally decided I had to do something about my weight, I weighed myself in at 201.3 pounds while wearing light clothes, so I call it 200 even. On my 5'8" frame as a then-29 year-old male, I looked fairly large, especially around my stomach. I usually didn't eat high volume foods, but I ate lots of bread, pasta, and tortilla chips, all of which are pretty high calorie. Hunger wasn't normally a problem for me, I just made poor choices. While losing weight, I rarely felt hunger, for which I'm grateful.
Since educating myself on the topics of weight loss via this subreddit's very useful Quick Start Guide and other research I've done since learning of CICO, I've come to adjust my eating habits. I set a goal for myself of 160 pounds, which would put me just inside a normal BMI. While losing weight, I tracked all my food intake via MyFitnessPal, and started weighing myself daily a few weeks into my journey.
At first, I was using measuring cups to measure my food, but it seemed inconsistent. About a month in, I bought a food scale to weigh my food, and discovered that measuring cups are wildly inaccurate because of settling and overflow. Unless it's a powder, and you pack it and level it off with a knife, it's never going to be accurate. A serving size of 1 cup that's supposed to be 40 grams might actually be 33 grams or even 50 grams, there's no way to tell without the scale. Once I got the scale and started weighing everything, it felt like I was eating so much more food. A lot of the things I was eating regularly erred more on the low side when measured in cups.
Around one month in, I bought a Fitbit Charge 2 to help track my calories out. Since I was monitoring my calories in, knowing how many I was burning should definitely help, right? Well, it turns out that all fitness trackers intentionally over-inflate calories burned because people like to see bigger numbers. My Fitbit tracks my sleep and steps walked, which I've found to be much more accurate and meaningful than the calories it tracks. I highly recommend getting one for these reasons, rather than monitoring calories out. If you do get one, cut its listed burned calories by 20-25% when tracking for yourself.
I started incorporating foods I didn't eat regularly into my diet, such as fruits and vegetables, because most of them are lower calorie, and you can eat much more to fill full. I significantly increased my protein intake with more chicken breast, lean beef, and started eating flavored Greek yogurt, which is surprisingly tasty.
I started out eating about 1,700 calories a day, and gradually dropped to 1,500, the lower limit for men. For the first couple months, I ate a bowl of cereal for breakfast, lean meat like chicken breast for lunch, and had whatever I wanted in moderation for dinner, and had a Greek yogurt for dessert. About 2 months in, I learned about intermittent fasting, and stopped eating breakfast, and started having slightly larger lunches. It was immensely helpful in helping control the small amount of hunger hunger I had when I was losing weight, and helped burn a bit of fat along the way by making my body use some of its stored fat to get me around while I didn't eat for 16-18 hours at a time.
In about 150 days, I reached my first goal of 160 pounds, and switched to maintenance. I had been monitoring my TDEE with the adaptive TDEE tracking spreadsheet, and my TDEE over those 150 days was around 2,200 calories. Moving from 1,500 calories to 2,200 was a noticeable change, and I was able to reincorporate many foods I had limited for myself, to once a week or less, much more often.
I still had noticeable stomach fat, but my face looked much leaner. I started looking into getting fit, and started thinking about bulking. I hadn't been doing any lifting or exercise other than walking more and the occasional short bike ride since I started losing weight. After about a month of educating myself while maintaining 160, I decided I still had too much body fat to consider it, and needed to drop to 153 and decide from there.
It took me 212 days from starting to reach my second goal of 153 pounds, or about 32 days to drop 7 pounds from my decision to drop to 153. I've maintained this for the last 5 months, staying between 151 and 155.
On my way to 153, I started running at the track nearby. I bought some resistance bands and I started lifting weights. Since starting exercising, I feel I have way more hunger than ever before in my life. When I got to 153 and spent a few weeks there, I found that my TDEE had gone up to 2,400 because of my increased exercise. I've been eating everything in sight, and maintained that weight for 5 months, which surprised the hell out of me. I've started what people call a "body recomposition" by maintaining that weight and putting on muscle. It's been slow, but I've noticed an increase in muscle and a small decrease in fat.
A couple weeks ago, I decided it was time to cut down to 140 and remove all doubt that my body fat percentage would be low enough for a proper bulk, so I'm back to 1,500 calories. Let me tell you, I'm hungry! I've gone back to intermittent fasting to control that hunger, and it's working for me, and my hunger is almost as low as when I started losing weight.
I've learned a few things from this experience:
- Calories are the only thing that matter in losing weight. Controlling your calories in is a whole lot easier than controlling your calories out. Exercise burns much fewer calories than most people think. High intensity exercise for an hour a day likely only burns 200 calories for most people.
- Logging my food has been the single most useful thing on my journey. A food scale is the single most important piece of equipment to accurately log food.
- There will be days where you go far over your goal, or go out to eat and can't weigh your food, and that's okay. You are building good habits, even if you stumble along the journey. Try to log as accurately as possible, and you'll do amazingly. Most restaurants have similar foods, so if you can't find a nutrition chart for that restaurant, find a similar one from another restaurant and log that. Close is so much better than nothing at all.
- Your log is not your judge. Don't lie to it.
- Hunger is not an emergency.
- The difference between being heavily overweight and normal weight at the same activity level is only a couple hundred calories per day.
- Nutrition is so very important. Getting the right amount of vitamins and minerals is vital to physical and mental well-being. Potassium is so low in most people's diets, yet it's so important. Eat more potatoes and bananas, or buy NoSalt to add to your food. It tastes just like regular sodium chloride, table salt.
- Fruits and vegetables should be eaten every day, even if you're not a fan of most of them. Get a few you like, and alternate through them.
- Don't worry about the scale number. My Fitbit and Libra weight logs show that the numbers change daily, mostly based on water weight, not fat. If you're at a deficit, there's no need to worry. The number will go up and down, but the fat will come off.
- When you reach a goal, you should go a couple pounds beneath that goal, because when you start maintenance, you will almost immediately jump a couple pounds due to more gut water and food in your stomach.
- Just because one method, like intermittent fasting, works for one person, don't mean it will work for everyone. Track your calories, and figure out a plan that works best for you.
- Never give up. This is your life, and you can take control of it and achieve your goals. Be persistent. Build discipline. Motivation is fleeting, but discipline will keep you on the path. Make a couple goals each day and try to reach them. Don't let any day be a zero day.
Good luck to all of my fellow losers, and thank you for everything, /r/loseit! Here's to another 365 days of counting calories.
