I've been thinking about how I arrived at my old weight. I weighted almost 260. I think about just how much I ate, how frequently, just how much I had bad bowel movements. I used to eat junk food 24/7. Thing is, at the rate I ate, the number of calories I ingested daily, I was supposed to be a lot heavier than what I was.
I would eat a sandwich with glazed honey, cookies and a coffee for breakfast. A pastry and a coffee for snack at about 9 or 10. Then I would eat a calzone for lunch, with cinnamon breadsticks. Then I would snack something else at 3, then eat a sandwich at about 6 then a pizza at 9. I probably drank beer 3-4 times a week. If I went out at night, I would eat junk food all the time. Thing is that I probably ate close to 3500-5000 calories daily for about 12 years. In those 12 years I gained only 70 pounds. I was eating about 1500-2500 calories above my replacement calories. I should have been significantly heavier than I was. At any family gathering I would eat 3 plates of food and drink beer.
When I finally started my weight loss journey, I did it with gym, low-carb diet and an 8-hour eating window. I mostly ate vegetables, eggs, chicken, broccoli, oats, protein shakes, fruits and meats. I bought everything fresh almost daily (supermarket was right next door to gym). Almost no processed foods. The first thing I noticed was that I stopped having bowel problems and diarrhea. I think I had constant diarrhea and was bloated and had stomach aches for a decade straight. Weight loss came fast, body changed; I was happy.
Suddenly, many things happened in my life, and I had to move in with family. With them processed foods were at my reach again. (I'm a foodie at heart, I managed to get close to my weight goal because I purposely eliminated all of those things from my house) and with them my bad bowel movements and constant stomach aches. I gained a couple of pounds and with that, an insight.
The reason I didn't blow up to 400 pounds when I ate as bad as I did was because I wasn't processing the calories I ate.
Because of the constant diarrhea in my life and stomachs aches (I ate close to 4000 calories daily) but my body probably absorbed only about 2800. I am lactose intolerant, but I ate a lot of milk products, and just lived with it. That combined with my constant coffee drinking habits had me in the bathroom a lot more times that I care to admit.
When I was eating healthy and ate 2000 calories, my body probably absorbed the complete 2000 calories. And If I'm eating healthy and I eat about 2800 calories worth of healthy foods, my body will probably absorb the same amount of caloric value than when I ate 4000 calories worth of bad food. This is a bit counterintuitive, but I believe there's something to it.
Personally, I find it hilarious that my body; by becoming more cleaned, more efficient would make my weight loss journey slightly harder. Of course, when I eat healthy food my body and my mind feel 10 times better than when I don't. So, I'm not complaining (that much). I also find it comforting that my body actually needs much less food than what my mind thinks it needs. But it also is slightly frustrating that going from 4000 calories to 2000 calories was not as impactful as regular CICO would have me believe.
Did anybody else had something similar happen?
Is this intuition about my body wrong? Is there evidence for it?
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