First, a disclaimer: My experiences will not be relevant to everyone and what worked for me may not work for you. I am female, late twenties, 5’4”, with a stocky, muscular build. I started weight loss at 185 pounds, which is about 10 pounds into clinical obesity for my height. I have no history of disordered eating. Keep all those things in mind. That said—I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who do have some demographics in common with me and who might benefit from reading about my experiences. I’ve certainly enjoyed and benefited from reading your experiences. So here are all the big realizations I’ve had along the way.
I was a little overweight before the pandemic, and then, like many people, I piled on about 20 more pounds. As a side note, I was honestly terrified of trying to lose it. I read so many horribly discouraging articles from high-profile magazines, citing MDs and PhDs, talking about starvation mode and your body “wanting” to get back to its highest weight and stating that weight loss is almost impossible, so once you’ve gotten fat you should just make peace with it. I won’t lie, I was pretty devastated by those, because I was really unhappy with my body at that point and knew I couldn’t get any heavier. I want to thank this subreddit full of real people for helping open my eyes to the fact that those articles are usually at best disingenuous and at worst pernicious bullshit wearing a veneer of biology, even when they get published in the New York Times.
Anyway. Once I figured out how calorie counting actually worked I started playing with calculating a TDEE. This calculator is my favorite because it’s so comprehensive and has much more useful activity level options than most. I decided to aim for 1400-1500 calories per day and see what happened.
-My first breakthrough was that I don’t need breakfast. I don’t wake up very hungry, so why bother? Classic carb-heavy breakfast foods just make me hungrier anyway. That made eating within my daily goal a lot easier—I prefer to spread my calorie allowance across two meals, not three. I like big dinners, and I cannot lie. I haven’t formally cut a single thing out of my diet because fuck that, but as a result of ditching breakfast I’ve sort of accidentally stopped eating cereal. Which is probably fine. Find an eating schedule that works for you personally. Some people swear by breakfast and can pass on heavy dinners.
-My second breakthrough—and this one might be more controversial on this sub—is that with a little trial and error and research, it’s actually totally possible to lose weight estimating calories without weighing your food. I don’t even write anything down, I just keep a running mental tab. I knew there was no way I’d ever commit to weighing food, so I just decided to wing it, and it works fine. Plus, my partner cooks dinner almost every night, it’s often fairly complex, and I’m not about to stand at his elbow measuring all the ingredients. Again, Your Mileage May Vary, and you obviously have less room for mistakes if you have a very small TDEE, but you’d be surprised how good you can get at eyeballing shit with a little experimental weighing (“wtf does an ounce of cheese look like?”) and a lot of googling at first. If you’re totally psyched out by the idea of weighing your food? You might not have to.
-My third breakthrough was realizing that at about 10-15 pounds down, before I could even see any results aside from a slightly softer stomach when I lay on my back (I think my body got rid of the excess visceral fat first, which may not be very glamorous but is SO important to your health in the long run), a bunch of little physical annoyances just evaporated. The weird, vague, foot and ankle pain that had plagued me at a brisk walk for two years disappeared, along with episodes of tendinitis and plantar fasciitis. I also completely stopped snoring. It is amazing how many problems a little weight can cause. It’s interesting to note that for me, at least, these problems hit me right when I edged into obesity, and disappeared when I left it.
-My fourth breakthrough was realizing that I was losing a pound a week even though I couldn’t easily eat under 1500 calories a day without being uncomfortably ravenous. My TDEE is higher than calculators guess, and I’m pretty sure I can thank my muscles for that. I build muscle on my butt and thighs very easily. I used to be a barista, which kept me surprisingly toned, and now that I don’t stand up all day, I make up for it with at least a mile or two of walking every day and a set of lunges and squats a couple times a week. Muscle is hungry. Build some!
-My fifth and final breakthrough was the realization that maintenance breaks are good for you. Not only are they rest from the little built up physical stresses of deficit, they’re a trial run for later, even if your TDEE will still change. I took a long ~3 month break, starting after an injury, because who wants to heal broken bones on a deficit, which then blended into the holidays, because who wants to live in the house of an excellent baker and cook over the holidays on a deficit? I relaxed my mental counting, held onto my knowledge of the relative caloric densities of different foods, and…just maintained. It was easy! Now that I’ve unlearned excessive snacking it’s really easy to trust my actual hunger cues. I know this is another case where I’m lucky, because lots of peoples’ hunger cues are totally borked. But for me, I’m not worried about maintenance anymore because I know that A.) my body is actually adjusting to its new energy requirements and I have no reason to believe it won’t continue to do so and B.) although I may have my occasional big face-stuffing day on special occasions like everyone else, I’m just never going to be able to get back in the “eh, kinda nibbly, might have a second dinner” mindset because I have un-knowable knowledge of how caloric things are. Cheesecake ain’t a snack, etc. It’s like a gentle mental block, and frankly that’s a good thing. I still eat everything that I love, but I know how to be smarter about it. In short, I feel a lot better moving forward towards actual maintenance after my big break.
So that’s where I am now. Not quite done yet, although I feel great and am giddy about being down 2 pant sizes. I was perfectly happy at 145-150 in the past, even though that’s smack on the borderline of overweight/slightly overweight, so I may aim for 145 and see how I feel. I will never be small and dainty. No way will I ever be some calculators’ “ideal weight” of 119 pounds without contracting a horrible wasting disease, and that’s fine. I guess that’s actually my last realization: BMI is a great estimate but please don’t assume you need to be at the low end of normal for your height. Bodies are different.
That was long. Sorry. I hope something was helpful to someone!
