I'm sharing this information here to thank the many people who have discussed and/or humored my efforts to lose weight since November of last year. As of Sunday night, I met my goal of losing twenty pounds before my wedding (nearly three weeks early!), and as you might expect, I feel great. Not just about hitting the number, but physically and mentally as well.
Since I made my progress public to people who asked, and turned it in to a game/science anyway, why not show the data?
That graph comes from my Livestrong.com account. Kyle has been a big help in keeping me active with running and walking, but the biggest change came around quite possibly my favorite thing in the world: food.
I had to eat less.
While the concept is straightforward, the first part of the graph shows the kind of diligence I needed to get started. I weighed in every morning before eating/drinking anything, and everything I ate from that point forward was measured and recorded for calorie count. There was no time spent worrying about fat, sugars or anything else beyond "eating healthy" when possible. And naturally, fat calories are more "expensive" in the diet, so I ended up avoiding them often anyway.
I burn somewhere in the neighborhood of 2800 calories a day without planned exercise, so I consistently consumed around 2400 calories. The 400 calorie difference represented the loss, and extra calories I burned from running meant I got to eat more. I think the exercising-for-food incentive (sounds a little sad, maybe) really worked for me. The reward meant less dread before going down to the gym, especially since the bulk of my diet happened in the winter in New England (not great running weather). Plus, there was no guilt if I skipped the gym, because I still ate 400 fewer calories and moved closer to my goal.
Clearly, the first ten pounds were, on the surface, far easier than the last ten. What the graph doesn't show is how my body had to adjust to getting probably 800-900 fewer calories a day. I thought I knew what cravings were like...but I honestly had no idea. Even if I wasn't eating, I was thinking about eating...at home, at work. And it doesn't help when there's only a salad and yogurt waiting in the fridge. Still, the second ten pounds came off more slowly (I believe in a healthy fashion) and have largely stayed off. Around the end of January, I stopped needing to count calories because for the most part, I had memorized the amounts I was taking in. And once the diet changed, there hasn't really been a significant uptick or regression, except for the holidays (traveling can have that effect).
I guess the two things I want to communicate are simple. For me, and I think for many people, getting help and being honest with everyone involved (including yourself) is the only way to lose weight effectively and not immediately regress. It needs to be in the forefront of your mind, others need to know that you're really trying to do it, and if the scale says you're moving forward or backward,
you are. The scale is brutally honest, and I needed to use that to my advantage for motivation.
Secondly, I believe weight loss is just numbers. It's not fat, it's not points, it's not mood, it's not "body type", it's just this equation (Talan is a big fan of this one):
[Calories you eat in a day] - [Calories you burn in a day] = [Net for the day] Ultimately, if net is negative on a consistent basis, you'll lose weight. My "program" involved looking up the ingredients of everything I was eating (or the final products, like yogurt or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich) and recording the calories. Then add them up, and keep that number negative. It's hard, I would never say it's easy because it isn't.
But I only had success with this when I made it my focus, dropped the BS, and ran the numbers.
