Hey everyone,
I'm a 28 year old male, 201lbs to start which worked out to a BMI of 27, solidly overweight and I looked it. I've slowly gained for the last two years and my clothes no longer fit. If that wasn't bad enough, my blood pressure and blood sugar has been creeping up to the point where I've been starting to worry about my long-term health.
A couple weeks ago was my birthday and I decided I needed to make permanent change. In the past I've tried OMAD and keto but failed after a month for different reasons:
OMAD had quick results but was too hard to maintain. I'm used to skipping breakfast but was not able to skip lunch and so skipped dinner. I would wake up famished and needed to eat before I could go back to sleep. I proved unsustainable for me.
I had some success on keto but that ultimately failed too because it reinforced my taste for high-calorie foods, and was too difficult to keep myself in ketosis while living with my partner and maintaining a social life. Eat carbs for one day, you're screwed, for days afterward.
The problem with both was that they weren't good long term diets for me. I couldn't wait to be "done" with weight loss, which ultimately would have led to a rebound. At the end of the day, I came to view them both as just "tricks" to get you to consume fewer calories. Enter CICO.
CICO appealed to me because it's quantitative, simple, and intuitive. No tricks, no complex science, just math. I've been doing CICO for three weeks now and am averaging a very sustainable 1.33lbs per week loss, without much pain. I'd like to share some tips on what's been working for me!
- A food scale and strict logging is the #1 pro-tip for CICO. I personally have a spreadsheet of every day and the calories of each meal + extra (snacks, etc). Everything I eat I weigh out and plug in. I have a tab on this sheet containing the calories per gram of the most common items in my kitchen so I can quickly calculate calories on the fly. Find a way to make it easy and you'll do it. Cooking at home makes CICO easy for me because you can figure out exactly how many calories are in your pot when you weigh everything out as you go!
- Figure out the most calorie dense foods in your diet and curtail them. For me, peanut butter, nuts, bacon, and potato chips were major problem foods because I could easily eat 1000 calories without feeling full. They're not inherently bad, but the calorie density made overeating easy and common.
- Conversely, figure out healthy snacks from foods you already enjoy and indulge in those instead. My favorite snacks these days are a bowl of greek yoghurt with honey or sugar-free jam mixed in, or cottage cheese topped with pesto. I've also re-discovered popcorn. Popcorn is great and cheap for snacking and can be topped with any seasoning you like. Definitely satisfies my junk food craving. My favorite is popcorn spritzed with olive oil and tossed with cheddar cheese powder and salt. I highly recommend an air popper and oil spritzer for this.
- Keep in mind that while exercise is good for you and you should do it (I run 2 miles 3x per week, have for years), diet is what's going to make you lose weight, or not. Put your energy and focus there.
- A big problem for CICO is eating out and "cheat" days. I eat at a 1000 calorie deficit most days but have actually still been doing a decent amount of eating out and "cheating" on the weekends. Estimate as best you can and try not to go overboard. For nights I really want to go "all out", ie dinner and drinks, I do OMAD in preparation, which has worked well
- Speaking of which, alcohol is a big problem. Try to order low-calorie options (my favorite is whiskey on the rocks) and limit yourself to 1-2 drinks. Log the calories in the booze, of course. I've found, like with food, I'm satisfied after drinking less now.
- Similarly, for those of you who use marijuana and get the munchies, find tricks to mitigate this. Mine is to only take 5mg edibles (less than my normal dose) and only later in the night than I would have in the past. I find ice water with a flavor enhancer is a great thing to sip on and prevents me from wanting to binge.
- Lastly, it's massively motivating to see your progress happen in realtime. Take progress pics, in the same lighting, every week on the same day. I love data and weight myself in the morning every day. I've added graphs to my spreadsheet showing that my theoretical calculated weight loss lines up almost exactly with the actual reads on my smart scale. When you get it dialed in, you'll actually be able to measure how many calories you consumed on a day you didn't track by your weight! You'll also be able to accurately predict when you'll hit your target weight based on your trajectory. See these graphs for what I'm talking about.
Anyway, this wound up being long, and I recognize i'm not as far in my journey as some on this sub (and don't have as far to go). Nonetheless, I'm excited with my progress and feel happy that I feel I've hit on a formula that I can keep up and hope some of my tips will help you too!
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