For some, the world of supplements can be a confusing, overwhelming and sometimes challenging space to navigate. With so many supplement brands and varieties available at the store and online, and considering consumers are constantly bombarded with opinions from media, close friends, self-proclaimed health coaches and social media, the barrage of options and voices can often point people in the wrong direction.
I was concerned that CICO only weight loss (little to no extra exercise) would lead to significant losses in muscle mass. So I ran a little experiment on myself, I got a DEXA scan, lost another 25lbs and got another DEXA scan.
Please note prior to the first scan I had already lost 103lbs.
That is showing at only ~6% of my weight loss is lean mass and ~94% is fat.
I am theorizing that the vast majority of my lean mass loss (water and muscle) happened during the initial 103lbs of weight loss, and now it's really just the fat being used. I am going to guess that if I were to attempt to go too low that would change. I am going to get another scan after another 25lbs and will report the results here. Details of my diet are below.
The following is for informational use only, I am just saying how I am doing it. I am not saying any one way is right or wrong.
Things I am doing:
Intake Calorie Counting, Originally TDEE set to sedentary minus 1000, however, when that number dipped below the NIH recommended minimum of 1500 per day, I manually adjusted the counter to stay at the 1500 minimum. (It doesn't go in my mouth if it's not already on a log)
I take evening walks several times a week, usually 6.5 miles in length
My job has sporadic periods of heavy physical activity.
Things I am not doing:
Keto or any sort of Macro control/counting. According to the data logs, my CFP Macros vary from 40/40/20 to 33/33/33 on average. (Please note, Pizza and ice cream are considered crucial parts of my weekly food intake)
Strength Training, yea I am not going to the Gym, I plan to in the future but right now it's a bit of an overload.
Cheat days/meals. I have stayed constant on my caloric deficit targets (+/- 5%) since October 2018.
Intermittent fasting: I eat when I am hungry, usually around meal times. Most days I skip breakfast though.
Fluid intake control: If I am thirsty, I drink something, if I am not thirsty, I don't drink anything. (Please note I drink lots of diet coke for what it's worth)
I would also like to give a plug to the r loseit discord. There are a lot of good people there, some just starting out, some who have lost more than I. Link to the lose it discord.
Back in 2018, when I was 17, I weighed 335 pounds (I'm 5'6 btw). I hated my body, I hated my life, I was depressed, no self esteem whatsoever, and I wasn't in a place where I could ask for help.
I ended up desperate, and thinking gastric bypass was the only way out. So I went to a weight loss clinic. They wanted me to come to 6 months of visits to make sure I was fit for the surgery, and I THANK GOD for that. If I had had the choice right then and there, I would've gotten it. But after a couple weeks of thinking about it, and thinking about my mom's complications from her gastric bypass surgery, I decided not to have it done.
So I looked online for answers. I was never taught about calories or anything from my family, or at school, so I didn't really know where to start. I ended up finding this sub, and I made a post somewhere (pretty sure deleted by now bc I'm self conscious lol) asking for help. I cried while I typed it out. The people who responded were really understanding and caring and were basically like "Hey its okay, I've been there and here's how to get through it." and it was so nice to hear that and their advice helped me so much.
I just hit 235 today (I still plan to loose more) and I just wanted to say thanks to you guys on here for not bullshitting me with some stupid diet or weight loss pill and actually informing me about CICO.
37/F/5’4 SW: 283 | CW: 217 | GW: 130
I live in the US, so I normally weigh in pounds, but my doctor's office switched software recently, and now they use kilograms. I noticed that I have been approaching the 100kg mark, and today I am finally under it! https://imgur.com/a/VhVtgTm
This sub has been a great inspiration so I figured it was time I posted, even if only one person gains some inspiration! I still have a LONG way to go (nearing the 1/2 way mark). I have been using IF & CICO (staying between 1200-1300 calories per day), and it is working well for me. I still indulge when I want, but since I added IF, I am not able to eat nearly the portion sizes I used to. I am planning to add in some exercise very soon (have been waiting for the pool to warm up a little), but even then, I don't plan on doing anything too strenuous. I have had success with weight loss in the past, but never had success keeping off the weight because I always adopted a diet that was too hard to stick to long term. I feel like what I am doing now is really easy and shouldn't be hard to maintain long term.
My next big accomplishment will be getting under 200lbs, somewhere I haven't been in over 12 years!!
Hey fellow losers! I'm a 36 year old fat man working on becoming a 37 year old formerly fat man. I hope this doesn't come off as bragging, I just want to share my story in case there is another guy out there like me who could use some encouragement.
Last July 29th, I randomly stepped on the bathroom scale and saw it stop at a staggering 405. I'm a big guy. I've been a big guy my whole life. Size runs in the family on both sides. In my prime at about 20-21, I was 6'3, 260 pounds and measured 25% body fat in my college health class. All with admittedly no effort or exercise. I am naturally muscular. I wasn't ripped, but you could tell it was there. I was built like a linebacker, but I never played any sports. The coaches in both High School and College practically begged me to try out, but I never had the interest. Not bragging, just trying to paint a picture.
By the time I graduated college, I was just over 300 pounds. I kept putting on weight. 15+ years later and I was flirting with 400 lbs. My health was suffering. I couldn't breathe right, I couldn't sleep right. I was too big to comfortably or safely ride my motorcycle (a passion of mine since I was a kid). I always told myself: "at least your not as big as your dad". Then Dad started losing weight. I passed him up. For the first time, I couldn't say that. I made a decision that day, July 29, 2018, that I would fix this. I wouldn't just lose the weight, but I would get healthy. I would fix my body so that I could be a better husband to my wife and father to my three young sons (8, 8, and 10 if anyone is interested).
My problem: I'm a food addict. Junk food is my drug of choice. When I was angry or sad, I ate to feel better. When I was happy, I ate to celebrate. When I was bored, I ate to fill time. Some people turn to drugs or alcohol, I ate to get high. Like just about any other physical high, it is fleeting and takes more and more to get the same high. I was slowly eating myself to death. My go to was Flamin' Hot Cheetos. I would eat an entire full-size bag in one sitting. Sometimes multiple times a day.
This morning, I got on the scale at 308 pounds. I've dropped 97 pounds in 10 months. It is the lowest my weight has been in 15 years. I feel healthier than ever. I have more energy to spend time with my boys and more energy to spend time with my wife (nudge nudge, wink wink). I can honestly say that I have never felt better in my adult life.
It has not been easy. There is no magic secret to my weight loss. It is a simple math problem: calories in has to be less than calories out. How you manage that math problem is up to you. Keto, low-carb, fasting, whatever you do what works for you. For me it has been just keeping a food diary on the MyFitnessPal app, but it works. By simply watching the amounts of food I eat and making more healthy choices than unhealthy ones, I have averaged roughly 2 pounds lost per week for 10 months. I haven't had a sugary soda since last July. I eat more veggies. I don't really try to exercise or work out, per se, but I am much more active than before. I average about 7000 steps per day according to my smart watch. When i get bored and think I want a snack, I play with the boys or I work on hobby projects in my garage.
Over the past 10 months, I have completely changed my relationship with food. I have changed my diet, yes, but I have had to redefine what food is for me and why I needed to eat so much to begin with. By staying busy and picking up some new hobbies, I have been able to curb the bored snacking. Figuring out other ways to deal with the emotions that drove me to seek comfort at the bottom of a bag of Cheetos was the hard part and everyone has to find their own way to do that.
I am not focused on losing weight as much as I am gaining health. I have come to terms with my body and I know how I am built. I will never be skinny. I'm not sure it is genetically possible for me. My dad is over 6 feet tall and about 370 pounds now. All of my uncles are tall and stocky. Both of my grandfathers were over 6 feet tall and over 240 when they passed on. I may not ever be skinny, but I can be healthy. I don't have a goal weight. I'd like to get back to my 260 pound college build, but if I can, I'll keep going.
For you other food addicts and fat people out there trying to become former fat people. Keep at it. You can do it. It is simple but it is not easy. Find what works for you and stick with it. Focus more on your health than your weight. Don't beat yourself up for missing a goal. Make an unhealthy choice every once in a while, just make more healthy choices than not. Don't give up. Thanks for reading this, I hope it helps someone.
During the entirety of my weight loss, I have been really curious about my activity level, or to put it another way, the "calories out" portion of the CICO equation. So, I decided to do a deep dive into the data I've been collecting on myself, to see what my activity levels REALLY were, and share the results with all of you. It's a bit of a long post!
Before we start, here are my stats: 33F 167cm/5'6" SW: 127kg/279.4lbs CW: 97kg/213.4kg. I've been logging my calories since the beginning of August 2018.
So, most of us here know what our CI (calorie in) is: we log and track our intake in MyFitnessPal/Loseit/etc. And, most of us here ALSO know that fitness trackers and exercise equipment is not very reliable to determine our calorie burn (our CO/calories out). So, what most of us suggest is that we set our calorie limits to sedentary, and be very cautious with eating back "earned calories" that our apps and fitness trackers tell us we burned during the course of a day. Before I go any further, let me just say: this is a good strategy! I did this from August through December 2018, because I didn't have a fitness tracker/way of estimating CO. I did just fine during that time period, and lost plenty of weight.
I got an Apple Watch for Christmas, however, and that really motivated me to see if I could peek inside the black box of my metabolism, and see what was really going on. I started using the 3-Suns Adaptive TDEE Spreadsheet to see what was really going on with my TDEE (calculating it myself, instead of relying on My Fitness Pal's calculations for me at sedentary). I wanted to see how my calculations of my TDEE compared to my Apple Watch's measurements.
In January 2019, I started swimming 3 times per week. My Apple Watch says that I did 27 workouts that month (including walks, or whatever else I was logging with it), for 15 hours and 45 minutes of total workout time (with the average workout lasting 35 minutes). Everything sounds good here, right? ~16 hours of work-outs is about 3 hours per week! Sounds like what "lightly active" on the calorie calculators say! Apple Watch told me I was killing it, and burning 5-700 calories per swim! My weight loss didn't track with those really high numbers from the Apple Watch, however. My calculated TDEE from the spreadsheet showed my workouts were boosting my TDEE by about 100-150 calories (maybe they just weren't intense enough!). I'm glad I kept eating at my "sedentary" calorie allowance, because jumping up to "lightly active," would have been a mistake.
During the month of February, I kept swimming, kept wearing my Apple Watch, kept collecting data, and, by the end of the month, had a new job. That job was (and still is) to be a mail carrier, by bike. That means, in a week, I walk/bike about 13-14 hours just to deliver the mail. I also commute to work by bike (~10 minutes each way). So now, in an average week, I am doing an active job (or commuting back and forth from it) for about 15 hours. It's not particularly high intensity, but, as the data shows, the duration matters.
This is the first graph I made, showing what my Apple Watch thinks my TDEE is, what I calculated my TDEE to be (through the 3-Suns website), what Apple Watch thinks my "sedentary"-activity level TDEE is*, and what my BMR is (using the Mifflin St. Jeor formula). *Just a note: Apple Watch breaks up activity measurements into "move calories" and "resting calories. "Resting calories" are "an estimate of the energy your body uses each day while minimally active. Additional physical activity requires more energy over and above Resting Energy (see Active Energy)." So, without the Apple-ease, "resting calories" are supposed to be your sedentary TDEE. "Active Calories" are, as defined by Apple, "an estimate of energy burned over and above your Resting Energy use. Active energy includes activity such as walking slowly, pushing your wheelchair, and household chores, as well as exercise such as biking and dancing. Your total energy use is the sum of your Resting Energy and Active Energy).
In that graph, you will see that Apple wildly overestimates my "Active Calories" (yellow). What I would have expected to see (if the Apple Watch were very accurate) is that the green line (sedentary TDEE/Apple Watch "resting calories" would be about 200 calories higher than the red line (my calculated BMR). Likewise, I would have expected the blue line (calculated TDEE from the 3-suns sheet) to be about the same as the yellow line (Apple's "Active Calories). That was obviously not the case. What is clear to see, however, is that in the first months of wearing my Apple Watch, it measured my "resting calories" (green line) fairly close to what my actual TDEE was (blue line). After my job started, in the end of February, however, my calculated TDEE goes above Apple's prediction for "resting calories," but stays well below Apple's predictions for my "Active Calories."
Although it looks like my Apple Watch is slowly getting more accurate, it clearly isn't very accurate right now. So, I made a second graph, to plot my calculated TDEE (3-suns sheet) against what Mifflin St. Jeor would predict at 3 activity levels: sedentary, lightly active, and moderately active (what most of us are choosing from while making our calorie allowance budgets). The results were interesting.
Prior to getting beginning my job (when I was just swimming 3x/week), my calculated TDEE tracked pretty well with "lightly active," but was definitely still below it. Glad I was careful with eating back "exercise" calories! After starting my job, however, there is a clear spike. I'm not quite "moderately active," but my calculated TDEE definitely puts me a little above "lightly active." I have to admit, I thought for sure that ~15 hours per week of walking/biking would put me squarely in "moderately active," but, it's just not the case!
I'll keep collecting data on my Apple Watch, and keep minding my calorie budget for now. I hope that my experiences and data from my Apple Watch helped someone out there: while closing the rings are motivating, and the monthly challenges can be fun to accomplish, in my experience, the Apple Watch really shouldn't be trusted to calculate a reasonable TDEE. However, the trusty ol' Mifflin St. Jeor equation, in conjunction with my own data/TDEE spreadsheet, has been really interesting, and quite accurate!
I (27F) need some advice or encouragement. At my heaviest I was 243 lbs. I lost about 30 lbs over the last year due to issues with my gallbladder and having to limit what I could eat. I’ve been a lot healthier feeling since and have been trying actively to lose weight (goal weight 160lbs). I’ve been limiting my calorie intake to 1300-1400 per day for the last month and all I’ve seen is my weight maintain. I was tested a few months ago for hyperthyroidism since my mom has it but I was negative. I just don’t get why my efforts have been fruitless. I’m starting to feel really frustrated because I don’t want to starve myself and he miserable doing this. I want it to be a general lifestyle change which it has been so far I feel. Thoughts? Advice? Encouragement from others who’ve experience similar?
