Recently, on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023, I stepped on to my Withings scale and saw the numbers 182.7 sparkle up at me.
As of that moment, I’d officially lost 45 pounds — 45.3 to be exact — less than six pounds from a weight loss goal I’d set three and a half years ago. That’s down from 228 pounds, the heaviest I’d ever been in my life.
I’m now entering the home stretch of a weight loss journey that has NOT required any of the following:
- Intense regular exercise — I don’t want to downplay the importance of exercise, because it is absolutely vital for a lot of reasons. But many weeks have gone by where I haven’t done any focused exercise at all. I love walking long distances, but there are plenty of days when I never leave the house. I have a gym membership and enjoy strength training, but I don’t always go and have often blown it off for months at a time.
- Dietary restrictions — While I’ve reduced the amount of food I eat, I haven’t completely cut anything out of my diet. I still drink beer. I still eat junk food. I never feel deprived.
- Nutritional discipline — There is no low-carb, low fat, keto or paleo stuff going on here. I do prefer to eat a vegan diet, but that has absolutely nothing to do with my weight loss.
Still, 45 pounds are gone, and I am confident I will shed these last few pounds within the next two to three months. Beyond that, I’m also confident that I will keep the weight off. More confident than I’ve ever been.
These seemingly erratic details are not those of a strict weight loss plan, but a lifestyle change. It took a long while, but I believe I’m finally there. Not at my goal weight, but my goal habit.
So what am I talking about, exactly?
There are many aspects to this, but there is really only one core principle: I track my calories. Consistently, day in and day out, I log everything I eat and drink (within reason), and aim to keep my caloric intake within a certain range.
It might sound like a pain in the ass. And at first, it is. But over time, it’s become just as routine as showering and less of a hassle than shaving.
It’s often referred to as “calorie counting”, but in practice that’s not literally what it is. I use an app called Lose It! to log my meals, and wear my Apple Watch every day to track my energy expenditure. Those two tools work together and do the “counting” for me.
Now to dispel a few other myths about this method of weight management:
- It’s not meticulous. I don’t weigh or measure my food. I guesstimate based on previous experience, especially while eating out.
- It’s not time consuming. Most of my meals take mere seconds to log because I’ve entered the same foods so many times.
- It’s not obsessive. I am consistent but not 100% thorough… relatively low-calorie things like vegetables and black coffee typically don’t get logged at all.
- It’s not fussy. Besides aiming for a daily protein target that I don’t always hit, I don’t fuss over “macros” (macronutrients such as protein, carbohydrates and fat) as many fitness professionals urge us to do.
- It’s not boring. Occasionally I still indulge and go over my budget. Sometimes WAY over my budget. But when I do, I log the calories honestly, wince at the numbers, and move on.
This habit of logging my food is not something that’s come easily to me. I struggled with it for years, even though I knew that it worked. But seeing results is encouraging, and seeing the weight come back during times I didn’t stick with it was enlightening. Ultimately I realized it boiled down to two choices: either embrace what works or don’t. I chose the former, am over time I’ve grown more and more accustomed to it. It doesn’t feel restrictive, it doesn’t feel like a bother or a nuisance. It simply feels like part of my life.
I believe that flexibility is a big part of why this has worked. I don’t deny myself anything. I’m eating all the same foods I did before, I just moderate them. If I go over budget one day, I try to make it up for it the next day or later in the week. And thanks to my Apple Watch, if I’m active enough, my caloric budget increases accordingly thanks to Lose It!’s “bonus calorie” feature.
Basically, all of this has trained me to make better choices — sometimes consciously, sometimes not — always with the awareness that if I go back to eating indiscriminately as I used to, all of it goes out the window.
The other big factor is something I’ve only discovered in the past year or so: I don’t always need to trouble myself with a steep caloric deficit. In fact, in the long run, it’s better that I don’t.
Early on in my journey, I would dial my caloric budget to lose either a pound a week or a half pound a week. That worked really well the first three months or so, but after that I struggled with it. I would constantly go over my budget and it wore me down to the point where I fell off the wagon several times. It’s the frantic feeling where you feel like you’re not in control anymore, and your appetite will not cooperate with you. It sucks. This is where many people give up, I think, and why calorie counting methods get trash-talked so often.
Finally, around April of 2022, I tried something new: instead of dialing my budget to lose weight, I set it to maintain my current weight. From there, I aimed to eat a bit less than maintenance as often as I could. And it didn’t matter how much it was… 120 calories less, 50 calories less, 10 less, whatever I could manage. If I could pull that off, great. If not, no big deal.
Remarkably, this was when things started crystallizing for me. Even though this new strategy only bought me an extra two hundred calories a day, I had a much easier time staying under budget and found myself feeling less frantic. And best of all, I continued losing weight. The progress was slow, but I was okay with it.
And as the number on the scale dropped, my maintenance budget hasalso slowly decreased. Over time I have grown accustomed to eating fewer and fewer calories without being consciously aware of the reduction. At the moment, the difference between the maintenance budget for my current weight (182.7 lbs, 2464 calories a day) and that of my goal weight (177 lbs, 2426 calories a day) is only 40 calories. For a bit of perspective, at my heaviest (228 lbs), my maintenance budget (not that I ever thought about it back then) would have been 2762 calories a day… well over 300 calories from where I am now.
This gradual adjustment is essential, and it’s why the word “habit” is so important. Making food choices and logging them has become something I do reflexively. Without that habit, I wouldn’t have gotten this far and the chances of maintaining my weight loss in the long term would be very close to zero.