I lost 100 lbs / 45 kg last year. These are the lessons I learned
A story of walking and tracking your health data.
Last year I lost about 33% of my body weight. That’s roughly 45 kg / 100 lbs. Most of this happened over about six months. I was at a point in my life where I had all but given up hope on ever getting back in shape. I had tried all the popular diets and regimes and nothing seemed to ever work for me in the long term. I would lose some, start struggling, and eventually bounce back and regain more. And then, all of a sudden, at the age of 37, I pulled it off and managed to get rid of absolutely all of my excess weight. Today I think I have a pretty good grasp on how and why things worked this time around and I’d like to share it. I’d really like to appeal to everyone out there who thinks that their fit days are behind them and convey one message: IT IS DOABLE! You can totally get there with a very reasonable effort! Hopefully what I learned will also help you.
Disclaimer
You will see me make some pretty strong, confident statements in this post. I do this because I am passionate about the subject and … simply because that’s how I am. That said, I’d like to make it very clear that I have no formal training in neither the medical profession, nor biology, or chemistry or anything related really. I am a software engineer. One pertinent thing you need to know about our trade, is that when we find out we’ve made a mistake, our emotional response is to feel proud … because we’ve uncovered it (rather than shame for actually making it). That makes for a pretty weak filter on saying something inaccurate in an article like this.
So, you know, do your own research and proceed at your own risk.
I can however say that, at the time I am writing this, I do firmly believe everything I am saying here, whatever that’s worth.
TL;DR
It’s really dead simple. We become fat because we ingest more calories than we spend. That’s it! No, really. THAT’S ALL THERE IS TO IT! It’s not because we are not eating enough vegetables, it is not because we are not having enough protein and it is not because we deign have dessert or consume milk or any such thing alone. It is because, when we draw the line at the end of the day, what came in was more than what came out. That’s all. Period¹.
Now, I am not saying this is super easy to fix but it absolutely is simple as a problem statement, and as most of us know, properly stating a problem is the first step to a solution.
So, if we want to lose weight, there is only one way this can happen. Yes, ONLY ONE: we need to invert the balance so that the calories we spend are more than the calories we ingest. That’s all.
There’s really three ways to get there.
A) Eat less calories
B) Spend more calories
C) Do both
Most importantly though, and I guess that’s what this post is about, my bet is that whichever of the three options above you choose, you better make sure you know exactly where you stand every step of the way. I am talking about tracking. You need to track calorie intake, track calorie expenditure and track current status (which can be weight, or fat percentage or both).
Luckily, this has become far easier in recent years than it used to be.
So, getting back to losing weight, the way I personally solved this problem involved the following steps:
- Integrating a non-blocking way of spending calories in a day and measuring them as I do. To be more specific, that comes down to buying an under-the-desk treadmill, having most of my meetings over the Stride or Jitsi Meet mobile apps so that I can be walking while on them, and then simply walking rather than driving or riding to places whenever that’s a practical option.
- Using a calorie counting app (personally, I like Lose It) to track everything I eat and make sure that it stays under or around to what I spend.
- A little bit of mind hacking. A good example for this is having my last meal of the day at least three to four hours before I go to sleep, so that next time I get hungry I am sleeping and have less of a chance to do something about it.
If you have some more time to kill, here’s my story and the details of what I learned
My special relationship with food started really early. As a kid I was slightly on the chubby side, which of course was always pointed out to me by my kid friends (because, hey, that’s what friends are for, right?). As a result I ended up spending my teens making sure I stayed skinny, often at the expense of restricting myself more than necessary. That sometimes led to frustrations building up, which led to the occasional binge followed by some typical compensatory behaviour (mostly fasting and exercise in my case).
I wouldn’t say I had a major eating disorder yet but I was definitely planting the seeds.
Things got worse in my late 20s. My yo-yo-ing finally started taking me into actual overweight so I resorted to tougher and stricter diets. My first big push was a bit over ten years ago where I followed a hyper-protein diet that was then quite popular in France as the “Régime Dukan”. I lost about 20 kg / 45 lbs and then, all of a sudden I couldn’t take it anymore. I had become so frustrated with only having access to a limited set of foods that I wasn’t able to stick with it any more. It took me 4 months to lose my original 20 kg and then about a year of trying to restart it led me to putting 30 kg back.
I tried a few more things through the following years and the pattern was always the same. One step down, two steps up.
This even includes raw veganism (I only lasted about a week with this one until I came down with severe intestinal pain and had to abandon). The results were always the same: resolve would get me down and frustration would then take me all the way back and then some.
I reached my high point at the end of 2016:
145 kg / 320 lbs for a height of 195 cm / 6'5". That was a lot:
It felt horrible. I didn’t sleep well, I was struggling with even a single flight of stairs … actually, forget stairs, for me it was a challenge to turn around in my bed during the night. Trying to do so would absolutely wake me up every single time. I had to prepare for it mentally, mobilize all my sleepy will power and then eventually execute in a rip-the-band-aid fashion.
And the visual aspect of it …. often times, when walking next to a reflexive surface, I would look at them and think: “oh gee, that person there is really ginormous! Looks terrible! … oh wait …”
Again, it all felt really bad!
The really depressing part at that time was that I had never actually stopped trying to solve this. I started tracking my weight in 2011 so now I can look back almost seven years and observe all my failed attempts to get things under control:
Every year I would make a huge effort for a couple of months or so, reach a level where things became really hard, cut myself some slack and then switch into a defeatist mode where I was basically thinking: “Oh well … I had this piece of cake so it’s all going to hell, and I might as well have ten more”. So I would then skyrocket to yet unconquered heights.
I was convinced that this would never get better and was quite depressed about it, so I had pretty much stopped trying or even hoping.
What triggered my next loss episode was a skiing trip to Breckenridge, Colorado. As it turns out, the resort is at an altitude of almost 3000 m (9,600') and the slopes go up to almost 4,000 m (13,000'). I started feeling dizzy shortly after landing in Denver and things only got worse afterwards.
I am usually quite an avid skier but this time around I could barely do more than 300 meters without stopping and gasping for air. It felt quite bad.
So, I told myself, I am overdue for yet another try to bring things under control.
The regime I started with this time around wasn’t much different. It looked like this:
- No sugar and no alcohol. Some carbs but trying to keep them on the low side
- Abundant protein and no particular limit on fats
- Micro fasting: I would only eat between 12:00 pm and 8:00 pm and nothing outside those windows.
I’ll talk about this more but just to be clear: while I didn’t think so at the time, the fact that the above three had an impact was not so much about the choice of foods but mostly because I successfully tricked myself into consuming less total calories every day. It also has the same problem as so many other diets: it tends to be an all-or-nothing belief system. All this is a vast subject in and of itself so more on it later.
Most importantly though, I started:
- Following WHO’s recommendation on doing at least 10,000 steps daily.
This changed everything!
It wasn’t so much the decision to walk per se, but the fact that I had a number, and respecting it meant tracking my steps. I had a very clear picture of how much I had done every day and how much more I still needed to do. It meant I could easily game-ify the whole thing. I could have my personal weekly and monthly records. I could try and surpass how much I had done in a day or a week. It was a game and it was fun. So, I kept walking and walking and walking …
Tracking my steps and checking my weight every morning became intoxicating! Progress can be very motivating and eventually it lead to this:
Physically the change looked like this.
There’s one final piece though. My simple dieting bullets above got me through most of my weight loss but once I started getting close to my target, they started failing me.
What started happening was that every now and then I would tell myself: “Oh come on. I’ve been good, I could allow myself this one cookie” … so I would have the cookie, which would inevitably be followed by: “Well … that’s it, I broke the rules, so it’s all going to hell and I might as well go and eat all the deserts I can get my hands on”, followed by: “OMG, OMG, OMG, I totally fucked up, so now it’s three days of draconian measures again!”.
And obviously, this is not sustainable! It was the same pattern that got me obese to begin with so I really needed something else.
It was about at that point that a friend introduced me to calorie tracking (thank you Lenny!).
You know how sometimes in your life you would have these moments where you get an extra piece of information and everything clicks into place? When a bunch of knowledge fragments suddenly come together and you are finally able to classify them in your head in a way that finally makes sense?
That’s what calorie tracking was for me.
I am not talking about tracking ingested calories alone. Tracking your activity is obviously just as important … probably even more.
So let me dive into this.
It’s all about the calories
Let’s start with two hopefully non-contentious statements:
- In order for your body to create fat (and therefore, for you to become overweight), you need to ingest calories in some form.
- In order for your body to perform any activity whatsoever, including the activities of breathing, thinking and generally living, it needs to expend some calories. Those calories come first from what you have just eaten and then, when that’s over, your energy stores, the most significant of which is your adipose tissue (a.k.a. body fat).
So, when the balance of your calorie input and output is positive you gain weight (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). If your balance is negative, you lose weight (7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13). Also check this one out for a great summary of all preceding references.
It is really important to understand that (barring surgery) this is the ONLY way you can lose weight. So let me state it again:
THE ONLY WAY TO LOSE WEIGHT IS TO INGEST LESS CALORIES THAN WE SPEND.
Now obviously achieving the above may happen by either reducing your intake, increasing your output, or (recommended (by me)) doing both. The next couple of sections dive into each.
Calorie tracking
The more I read on this topic the more fascinated I am with how complex and simple it is at the same time.
Complexity comes from the fact that the process of transforming food into calories is so incredibly intricate. It starts in your mouth, goes on in your stomach and even intestines. It also involves other organs like your liver or muscles. The cellular level process itself (i.e., cellular respiration) is something you could spend hours or days or even a lifetime on depending on your inclination (and I’ll spend some there myself in the next section).
The bottom line however is that, for the mere purpose of weight loss you don’t need to do that. It is actually sufficient for you to simply track the number of calories that you eat and go from there. Because regardless of the amazing nature of the processes that occur in our bodies, one thing is for sure: they can’t make something from nothing.
So, here we are at calorie tracking.
The concept is fairly simple. You start with a budget of calories per day. I use Lose It to calculate mine. That budget comes from your basal caloric expenditure (those are the calories you need for your bodily functions) and adds the calories that you spend in your daily activities. That’s how many calories you can eat to break even and keep your weight. More than that and you are gaining. Less and you are slimming down. Again, a number of apps will happily give you a recommended number.
Then comes the actual tracking. That has two parts too. Tracking what you eat then tracking what you spend and making sure that the sum of it all remains within your budget.
This actually sounds terrible, doesn’t it? I think I’ve known about calorie tracking for at least ten years and it has always sounded to me like mission impossible. Taking my phone out every time I put a bit in my mouth or I walk a few steps ?! So much hassle!
Well, the good news is that this is much, much easier today. Your phone and your watch are likely already tracking your output rather accurately. I use an Apple Watch and an iPhone and I never really seize to be amazed how well they seem to work with only an accelerometer and access to my pulse! Also, all of your data is accessible from Apple Health, should you want to pass it to other apps or download it for you to play with yourself.
Tracking the input has also become much easier. There are a bunch of apps out there, with shared food and barcode databases, that help you with this. I personally like Lose It quite a lot and that’s in spite of the fact that it is a bit of a UX mess. It is trying to do too many things and many of them I find irrelevant (so they must be, right?).
It does however have access to a pretty rich food and meals database in which you can search by either typing names scanning barcodes.
It also syncs with my body scale and brings in my weight progress, which is kind of nice even if not indispensable.
What I really, really like about it though is that it takes into account all the calories that I’ve spent (whether actively or by just being alive) as reported by my watch and phone. Other apps I tried weren’t doing as good of a job with this so Lose It, won my heart (but hey, they should really get on top of that messy UX).
It is probably at this point that we should talk a bit about the following:
Why on Earth would I do something as tedious as tracking calories?
To put it simply, calorie tracking, in spite of all its inaccuracies and inefficiencies, is the only universal way that provides an informed answer to the following question:
Can I now eat this thing that I’d like to eat?
Our feelings of satiety and hunger are kind of supposed to provide exactly that answer, but the fact that we have a global obesity epidemic (14) is a pretty good indication that, left to our own devices, we humans, can’t be trusted with food. Wanting to eat something is basically a worthless indication of whether or not we actually should.
So, if we are to get our weight under control, we need a different method in answering the “Can I eat this?” question.
Every diet out there is trying (and claiming) to provide exactly that answer, but I’ll talk more about other diets later. For now let’s just say, that calorie counting is the only method, with which you actually stand a chance of consistently obtaining a somewhat accurate answer. Once again, you don’t have to take my word for it: 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24.
Things that suck about calorie tracking
So no, we are not yet at the point of having a perfect method and there’s a lot of criticism against calorie tracking. Some of it is summarized here:
Let’s look at this point by point. In the video Adam is complaining that:
- It is difficult to track everything. Yes, completely valid! It totally sucks! Logging the calories for every meal, snack or bite you have can be incredibly tedious. Now we do have to agree that, how tedious something is, is an entirely subjective thing so the answer to this criticism really comes down to whether you are more bothered by calorie tracking or by being overweight and all its consequences. For me the answer was clear, but again, I agree this is entirely personal, if you are happy where you are, don’t do it.
- Using a fixed budget of 2000 calories is very inaccurate. Yes sure it is and there’s no need to use that specific number. As I already mentioned, apps like Lose It will give you a personalized estimate or you could simply look at your calorie tracker and use your daily total calories (active and passive). In my case that number is about 2800, a close friend of mine only gets on her watch 1200. In other words your personal budget number is very easily available to you so there is no need for clinging to the magic 2000 number.
- Calorie tracking is not that accurate. Also true. But A: it’s the best we’ve got and B: it really is good enough because: 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. Think of it this way: if you had a car with a faulty gas meter that’s usually around 20% off, would you still use the meter, or would you prefer some circumstantial rule like, say, I’ll only drive my car on Tuesdays and Thursdays and fill it up every 5th of the month. Traditional diets kind of work (or rather fail) that way. Just as you can run out of gas when you only drive Tuesdays, you can absolutely get fat by being a vegan, eating only meet or only fat.
Ideally, one day we would have devices that significantly reduce the friction of tracking calories. This could come in many forms. Maybe food calorie labels would become ubiquitous, which would likely be a matter of legislation. Or maybe we would find ways of tracking bodily functions to kind of guess what you had, similarly to how we are able to guesstimate one’s expenditure based on their pulse. I have no idea how close we are there but I really hope this path works.
Some people hope that having a picture of your food might one day be enough for a rough estimate, but I guess that’s the one I am most skeptical about.
Until any of these happen though, we are kind of stuck with the tedious and inaccurate process of almost manual tracking.
I do want to offer some consolation: after tracking my food for more than half a year, while I am still mildly annoyed by the process, I find it acceptable enough to do it most days, which is enough to keep me at the weight where I want to be. More importantly, the vast majority of cases it performs as expected: a calorie deficit would have me weighing less the next day and a calorie surplus results in a weight increase. Really.
So here’s a bit of a note on how exactly I do my tracking.
Tracking calore input
As I already mentioned a thousand times. I use Lose it for that part. I do not use its planning features and I don’t care much about the broken down numbers it advises me to have for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. The only thing I care about is my daily budget (adjusted by exercise) and my total consumption. That’s all.
I track most foods in one of four major ways:
- I am eating something with a bar code: Lose it recognizes most barcodes and their indicated calorie values.
- I am having a meal with a calorie label: Lose it lets me enter the calorie value to my meals as pretty much just a number, which is good enough for me.
- I am eating at home: I have a couple of kitchen scales that I use to weigh the main ingredients that Lose It would recognize. This generally comes down to something like X grams of pork, Y grams a salad, 1 teaspoon of vinaigrette, etc. This is actually one of the more tedious options but it leaves me with a good level of confidence about what I enter.
- I am eating a meal in a restaurant: I sort of improvise. I check if the meals exist in the food database and then try to eyeball the weight and generally try to err toward heavier. If not then I try to break it down to recognizable components and repeat. Either way, I don’t feel super confident about it, but so far this hasn’t failed me in a noticeable way.
And that’s about it.
I am not saying it’s perfect. Sometimes I would just lose control and eat stuff that’s hard to track (like bread slices with butter and honey) and not bother calculating the exact amount. I might end up entering some very rough amount like, 2K or 3K calories or I might just write off the day.
I have no idea how to improve on this but it also doesn’t appear to compromise the entire approach for me.
Overall the system works!
Tracking calorie output
I already mentioned I use an Apple Watch and an iPhone. On the watch i use the pre-installed activity rings and their workout trackers. I have to admit they’ve really grown on me!
The circles work the following way: you have one that represents your calorie burn. They call that the Move circle and it’s the one, to which I pay the most attention. You can set your daily calorie goal to whatever you want and the circle would gradually fill up through your day as you are working toward it.
I have mine at 1460 calories. Not sure how it got there but it’s a number that corresponds to a well active day for me so I’ve kept it there even though the watch has been suggesting I move it up or down a bunch of times (I wish they stopped doing that).
Once you fill up your circle, you get some fancy reward animation, which is silly but I still enjoy it for some inexplicable reason.
The blue circle represents standing. It kind of tries to make you avoid long sedentary periods and it does that by making you stand at least one minute every hour for 12 hours (so a total of 12 minutes of standing over a day). This one is the easiest to achieve.
The green circle is supposed to represent 30 minutes of exercise. That one is a bit obscure to me and I haven’t been able to find a very clear definition but it seems as though it tries to make sure that at least some of your move calories were spent in a more vigorous way. I believe it accounts for movement during which your pulse was above some specific value that it probably determined through some mysterious Apple algorithm.
The reason I find it obscure is mainly because the pulse requirement seems to be pretty low and so far I have never seen my move circle complete without my exercise circle completing first. In other words, most of the effort I spent toward my move circle seems to also be counted against the green one, so I am finding it kind of superfluous but … whatever.
In addition to the goofy (and yet rewarding) animations that you get for completing your circles Apple try to motivate you by tracking “streaks” of multiple consecutive when you managed to fill in circles. I have to admit this seems to have a strong effect on me and so far I’ve had multiple 11pm walks just so I don’t break my move streak.
You know … whatever works.
I also track my steps. This used to be the my main driving metric when I started, as one of my early goals was to do 10K steps every day. This has now been kind of superseded by my calorie goal however, since by the time I get my 1460 calories I am usually at around 25K steps.
Still, I like having a look at them most days and I do my tracking there with Pedometer++
Tracking your weight
We already agreed that calorie tracking is not an accurate business (at least not yet), so weight tracking is your checksum. It’s a very good way of making sure things are working. Weight changes are fairly quick to indicate major miscalculations and weight trends are particularly reliable in confirming or disproving your approach. (And no, if you see you are reliably going up a pound a week, do not immediately assume you are building muscle ;) )
I track my weight with a Nokia Body+ scale (it used to be called Withings before they got acquired). I have been using it for almost seven years and I am quite satisfied with it. It is fairly consistent and if I step on it 10 times, I would get the same weight at least 8 of them. Its Wi-Fi connectivity works fairly reliably and its phone app and web interface have no major issues.
All in all, I am quite happy with it.
That scale, as well as most modern body scales today, has the ability to measure an estimate of one’s fat percentage by running electrical current through their body.
I had very high hopes for this and thought it would provide a substitute to the useless Body Mass Index (BMI). And it does to some extent (because BMI is truly utterly useless) but not at all with the accuracy that I had hoped for. The method of measurement produces a fat percentage that easily varies by 2 points in either direction every day and, contrary to my weight, I don’t feel it really corresponds to my expectations that much. The long term trend does make sense however, so I still think setting yourself a rough fat percentage goal is not a bad idea overall.
And that concludes our chapter about calorie tracking. Now let’s move on.
All calories are equal … but some are more equal than others
Chances are that you are already aware of the whole debate around how “a calorie is a calorie” or “no, it is not and you are dumb”.
So here’s the thing. A calorie is an objective measure of energy, so when you track the food calories you put in your body you are basically guaranteed that, as long as you keep your balance negative, you will be losing weight.
Period.
There’s no debate there. Our bodies cannot create energy out of nothing so really, if you spend 500 calories and take 400 in, your body will need to compensate the difference from storage, regardless of whether your 400 calories came from fat, protein, veggies, sugars or other forms of carbs. There is no magic here and that’s simply how it works.
Now this is where the caveats start.
Mind hacking
To begin with, our bodies use different metabolic pathways to absorb carbs, fats and protein and they all have varying efficiency. We seem to be best at assimilating fat (we get 97% to 98% of the calories in it), then carbs (still above 90%) and then we do a bit worse with protein, which could have a rate as low as 80% or even 70%. I personally find that not significant enough to bother tracking differently the calories I get from varying sources. So I don’t. But YMMV.
What I find significantly more important is that those pathways take different amounts of time starting from less than 30 minutes for sugars and going to 10+ hours for proteins.
Before I explain why, please take a few minutes and watch the following video. It is really the best explanation that I have found on how metabolism and the Krebs cycle work:
There are multiple things there that are relevant to weight loss and how “a calorie is a calorie”, such as the fact that pretty much anything can be transformed to anything depending on what your body needs.
Most importantly though, you have this:
10:10: This cycle will only go around if ATP or energy is needed by the body. So, if we are using energy or doing exercise, we are demanding ATP from our system, then this cycle will continue going around. But if we don’t, let’s say because we are sedentary, then acetyl CoA is going to build up and favor the return towards adipose tissue.
So if we combine all of the above, we could end up with the following conclusion:
100 calories from carbs will be assimilated rather quickly and they would all need to either be used for some immediate activity or they are going to storage (i.e., your waistline) leaving you hungry again!
100 calories of protein take longer to process and they also seem to keep you satiated for much of that time.
Or, to put it simply:
Sticking to your calorie budget might be easier if you go easy on the sugar and make sure you always have some protein and fat.
It is SUPER important to mention that completely eliminating carbs would lead to other effects such as rabbit starvation, brain fatigue, will capital depletion (I invented this term) or pure frustration, that would make it just as, if not harder to stick to your budget. So don’t do it! Make sure you allow yourself at least some carbs and the occasional desert!
At the end of the day the following rule of thumb is working pretty well for me: try to eat a bit of everything but keep the total calorie number within your budget.
Addiction
A few years ago I saw this episode of BBC Horizon and I found the concept of food addictions really illuminating.
If you don’t have time to watch it (which is a pity), the bottom line is the following: when provided with unlimited access to either sugar or fat humans (or even rats for that matter) don’t seem to abuse either.
When provided with the combination though, all hell breaks loose and we completely stuff our faces until we eat ourselves to death (and apparently, so do rats).
I have to admit though, that I used to be a lot more excited about the addiction angle than I am now. What’s appealing about it is the notion that there is now a thing that you can just “kick” and solve the problem.
I have subsequently found that this is not really that helpful. In the case of the sugar+fat combination, for example, kicking it would mean saying no to pretty much anything that’s pleasurable to eat (sweet or savory), which quickly leads us down the frustration and bingeing path.
Secondly, looking through some of the research on food addictions you quickly find that we get addicted to pretty much anything, including just volume, and “just kicking it” isn’t really a practical solution to anything here.
Finally, I’ve been coming across things like this:
that talk about how addictions are more of a symptom than the actual root of a problem.
So where I landed with all this is that the existence of food addictions is just another reason why I cannot trust my personal feelings with regard to how much I could or couldn’t eat, and one more indication of how I need an objective measure and a clear boundary telling me when to stop.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record (which I probably already am) calorie counting provides me with exactly that measure and boundary.
What about <my favorite diet here>?
I initially intended writing a large section here but then reminded myself that I really know nothing about these things so I thought better of it and decided to just lay out the way I think about diets in general:
I split diets in three kinds:
- Simplifications: Those are diets that simply try to hide some of the complexity of calorie counting with the promise that the process will become more manageable. The Weight Watchers program is one popular example of this but not the only one another one that seems to be taking off recently is the Lazar Angelov meal plan (or any of a thousand other meal and fitness plans). There’s nothing glaringly wrong with such diets and if they work for you, then great! Keep it up! I do feel however, that they lack flexibility or add extra complexity. You are often required to choose foods from some list or menu, and are kind of left to your own devices when that’s not possible (e.g., when traveling). The WW point system on the other hand is basically just a substitute for calories but rather than a simplification I find it mostly adds an extra layer of complexity for no obvious value.
- Mind hacking: this is where I’d put all the micro fasting, Keto, Hyper-protein and low carb diets. When they work it is simply because, by following the diet you trick yourself into eating less. You simply ingest less calories and you are not really invoking some magical property of your body. By eating only in an 8 hour window, you are simply eliminating a bunch of snacks that you would have taken otherwise and, contrary to ice cream, you can only eat so much cheese. Some of these, like micro-fasting, are OK. Others, like Keto or Ducan would usually exhaust your will capital and you end up with some pretty significant cravings and frustrations. Not to mention that they seem to have rather negative adverse effects on your body but I don’t want to go there in this post.
- BS: there’s really a lot of those and they usually involve some magic component that you have to pay for and they rarely have any positive outcomes, so not worth discussing at all.
Finally, I’d like to point out a fourth option to which people really love resorting in conversation. I’ve heard this a lot in France but I also get it here in the US. It’s usually something smug that goes like this:
Diets are bullshit! All you need to do is have a well balanced and varied nutrition and everything will be fine!
I find this maddeningly infuriating! Not because it’s false, it’s obviously true! The problem though, is that IF I KNEW HOW TO DO THAT WE WOULDN’T BE HAVING THIS CONVERSATION, WOULD WE NOW?
I’ll leave you with that and move to one of the parts that I think were crucial to me:
Hacking exercise into your life
If I had to summarize the things I did differently this time around (compared to all other failed attempts in the past ten years of my life) I would say that it comes down to tracking and walking. And walking is maybe the bigger one.
There is really no good way to put this other than:
WALKING IS FREAKING AWESOME!!!!
If you play a bit with calorie calculators you would notice that the per minute calories spent on a brisk walk come to (very roughly) about .5 of the calories you spend jogging for the same amount of time.
I remember finding this really quite spectacular given how, at the height of my weight, running was roughly 10 times more unpleasant to me than walking. Or, to put it more accurately, walking has always been a pleasure and, in my fat days, running was one of the most horrible things I could think of doing.
This amounted to quite a big discovery for me because it provided me with an actually affordable exercise option! In other words, with walking I had a reliable, sustainable means of increasing my calorie expenditure.
It didn’t stop there though.
In addition to simply spending calories, I found that walking was a great way to eliminate my urges for extra-meal snacks throughout the day, which seems to be backed by research out there (25, 26, 27).
And then last, but definitely not least, walking is a non-blocking activity! What this meant to me is that I could walk while doing other things (like my job) so the main component of my exercise routine did not require that I carve out time explicitly for it. This was really huge for me.
Once I figured all this out I really made sure I was walking every time I got a chance to. I purchased a walking desk treadmill (which is just a fancy way of saying a cheaper-than-usual treadmill that doesn’t support running and has no side bars). I really loved it :).
If you are thinking of trying the same, which I couldn’t recommend enough, then a word of caution: it takes a few days to get used to it. At first you may well experience nausea as if you are feeling seasick. Nothing unbearable but unpleasant all the same. The good news is that this is usually gone in two or three days (it was about a couple of days for me and it was the same with the several friends of mine who tried it).
Another cool part about under the desk treadmills, is that they are equally useful during work hours as they are in your free time. What I mean by this is that their non-blocking nature lets you get exercise not only while you are working but also when you are resting. Going through Facebook? Watching a TV show? Reading stuff on the Internet? Listening to podcasts? You can easily be doing all of this on your computer while walking on a treadmill. In fact the number of shows I watch went up considerably after I took this up … and for what it’s worth, I have written the entirety of this post while walking (and no, that has nothing to do with the poor quality of the post).
The treadmill is only part of the equation though. Another important aspect is just the regular walking. Here too, you can try to work this into your work routine just as well as your leisure hours. Today I do most of my scheduled meetings using Stride Video or Jitsi Meet and walking around the city, or also, on rainy days, in the office twelve floor parking lot. As for leisurely activities: conversations with my friends and family, most of my podcast updates, all of that happens during my outdoor walks.
There’s one key piece here that really matters and that is the choice of the right headset. There are a number of problems that need solving for proper audio while walking including things like removing ambient noise for yourself as well as the people you are talking to, wind, ergonomy, durability, battery life … so I went through quite a number of headsets before I found the one that did it for me.
I tried anything from regular earpods, be it Apple or generic, around the neck sets, VoIP optimized Jabras and Plantronics, high end noise cancellation Sonys, Logitechs and a number of others. They all had issues!
The pair that I finally settled on were the Bose QC 35 Series I or Series II (they are pretty much the same as far as my needs are concerned). They are very comfortable, don’t get too hot if I get worked up, their noise cancellation is superb (and more importantly, the noise cancellation on the microphone works equally well!), their battery life is amazing and I can connect them to my computer and phone simultaneously (but only use them with one at a time).
They are not perfect, mind you. I wish, for example, that I would be able to use them while I am charging them, or that they had an audio mixing chip so that a phone alert doesn’t interrupt my computer conference, but all in all, they are by far the best headset for my needs that I have been able to come across.
Before I move one, there’s one more thing I’d like to address.
Wait, isn’t it well known that exercise doesn’t help you lose weight?
Chances are that, if you’ve been battling weight loss for some time you must have come across the various different places that tell you exercise doesn’t really help with weight loss.
This is misleading at best and it’s about as helpful as telling people: “you know, money doesn’t buy you happiness” … (which is funny because it turns out that it actually mostly does).
The problem that these articles have with exercise seem to often boil down to this:
Your Basal Metabolic Rate (i.e., BMR: the amount of calories you spend for just existing) is so high, that next to it, you can barely make a dent by exercising.
This Vox article for example, has a pretty image showing you how, on average physical activity accounts for only 30% of our total energy expenditure.
What is really confusing to me is: why are we comparing this to BMR? It is no one’s goal to double their calorie expenditure for the sake of it! What we want is to eliminate our calorie surplus and (if possible) get on the negative for a while until we lose the extra pounds.
How much of that you do with exercise, vs. by eating less is something that I find about as personal and subjective as the “What makes you happy?” question.
The first thing to keep in mind is that, you are not trying to double your BMR. That’s not the goal. From a purely weight loss perspective, you exercise is merely one of the tools that can contribute to your negative calorie balance.
Exactly how much of that you would like it to contribute is entirely up to you.
According to my Apple watch, my BMR is of about 2550 calories most days. For the past six months, my active calorie expenditure has been of roughly 2200 calories on top of those. I am a relatively big person and those numbers are not that hard to achieve, so don’t be impressed.
My point here is that, personally, I would rather spend more time walking, which I enjoy to begin with, because A) it helps me eliminate my cravings and B) it allows me to eat more things, which is what I want.
That arrangement is working for me:
That arrangement might not be working for you. Rather than walking a ton, people might prefer to fight it entirely by eating less. Or they may choose to do different things at different times. It doesn’t matter. What really matters is making an informed choice and the only way you could do that in terms of weight control is by tracking input and output calories.
Before you go, a few miscellaneous points I find interesting
BMI (kg/height²) sucks!
My BMI is currently 25.5 and according to the World Health organization I am fat (OK, overweight).
Today I know better than to freak about it but I remember being at a similar weight and height 11 years ago and forcing myself to lose 10 kg (22 lbs) so that I would “get with the program” and reach a 22.5 index. That was a huge mistake as it was one of the main contributors to the hellish yo-yo spiral that ensued.
The limitations of BMI are very well documented and understood. To begin with, squaring your height is kind of nonsensical given how mass is a cubic function of your linear dimensions. The result is that the shorter you are, the more likely it is that the formula would present you as thin. Inversely, the taller you are (which is where I fall) the more easily you would get a “you are fat” verdict. All in all, it’s only a tad better than saying 100kg / 200lbs is the ideal weight!
What’s even more interesting is that we have ample data today to show that even if we accept the formula, the range of 20 to 25 is not appropriate and people with BMI between 23 and 29 seem to be living the longest.
I would guess that the only reason this metric still survives is because it’s backed by organizations such as WHO and I suppose BMI’s shortcomings are less important when it’s used as a statistical tool.
Personally, I don’t believe I would ever bother checking mine again.
Fat percentage
If you look at the history of BMI, you would find that its original purpose was to provide a way of estimating body fat. So I was thinking (and still am actually) why wouldn’t I go and try to measure that, rather than bother with some magical formulas that give ambiguous results.
There’s a number of body scales out there that claim to measure that for you and they mostly mostly don’t. So, while there’s no reason to get too excited yet, I’d say that even with those scales, keeping an eye on your fat percentage trend is not a bad idea. While most of the specific values they give seem to be inaccurate they do remain consistent.
Once again, you decide how useful you find that piece of data.
Personally, I still think weight is the best measure we’ve got, especially once you figure out how to interpret some of your day-to-day variations. Like for example, those due to:
Glycogen
Your body has multiple ways of storing energy. There are some of the most obvious ones like fat for example (a.k.a. adipose tissue), which is your long term store with virtually unlimited capacity. There’s also your blood sugar, which is the energy available for unlimited consumption and that can be a couple of tens of calories.
Then, in between them you have your glycogen stores, found in your liver and muscles. On average you get to store about 2000 calories there and you use that energy first before you really hit your fat storage (although in practice things appear to never be that clear cut in the human body, so it’s not like we have a hard switch for switching between glycogen and fat but kind of sort of …).
So anyways, what I found very helpful to know is that we store glycogen in a hydrated form, so every gram of glycogen comes with three to four grams of water.
An individual weighing 100 kg (220 lbs) can have as many as 170 grams of glycogen, which means a total of up to 860 grams of water. That’s almost 2 lbs.
When you go on a diet (especially if it’s a low carb one), glycogen stores will be quick to empty and that would give you an encouraging boost at the beginning.
The thing to keep in mind however, is that if you sometimes go on a little binge (or a cheat meal if you prefer) and have some unreasonable amounts of desert, that sugar would replenish your glycogen stores and the extra weight would show up on the scale the next day (in addition to the stuff that’s still in your digestive tract).
The bottom line is: don’t worry too much about it! You haven’t yet undone all your efforts. That is, the extra weight is not new fat! You kind of get a free pass once in a while :).
Feel the HIIT
You might have heard of it as High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) or Orange Theory Fitness or Excessive Post Oxygen Consumption (EPOC) and they all mainly come down to Anaerobic Cellular Respiration. Or in other words:
Oxygen is a key part of the Krebs cycle and your metabolism in general so, in order for your body to create energy, it needs a lot of it. Think of it the same way as regular burning, which is kind of what happens with food in your body except it’s at a significantly more paced rate. In order for a fire to burn it needs oxygen, even if oxygen itself is not what fuels the fire. So oxygen is just as crucial for the “burning” of food in the body.
That burning of food is called “cellular respiration” and I recommend the following video as a good explanation:
When you have enough oxygen for what you are doing, your body, or rather the cells in it, perform aerobic cellular respiration. We are very good at that. We are so good at it that we do it all through our lives without even noticing. As a result, any activity that requires energy amounts within what can come from aerobic respiration, is an activity that we can sustain for a very, very long time. This is why walking is so incredibly easy.
Anaerobic cellular respiration is what we do when we need more energy than what’s coming from the aerobic respiration. We activate it either when we are pushing ourselves with a large effort (e.g., sprinting) or when our oxygen supply drops below our usual intake (e.g., if you are holding your breath). Remember this last part because I’ll come back to it in a sec.
What I’d really like to stress here is that YOU KNOW VERY WELL when anaerobic respiration is happening because, whatever the reason, you are likely panting, short of breath, and hurting for air! It is absolutely not a subtle thing that only happens after you do some special number of minutes on the treadmill or when your orange theory chest belt says it.
If you are gasping, your are anaerobic!
The thing about anaerobic respiration is that it really sucks in terms of efficiency. It only engages the early stages of our metabolism (glycolysis) so it produces a very small amount of surplus energy. More specifically: breaking down a single molecule of glucose produces, according to the more recent research, somewhere around 30 or 32 molecules of ATP. Out of those only 2 come from glycolysis. So that’s like turbo boosting a part of an engine that usually supplies 6.2% of its output. And what’s worse is that this small surplus comes at a very high effort cost!
The above video makes an interesting reference to the average running pace of the world record holders for the various distance competitions and this is what we have there:
If we accept that people who run any of these distances are pretty much at their limit on the finish line and couldn’t keep it up for longer than that (which is a reasonable assumption, because if that weren’t the case then they would have likely gone on and won records with the same pace in the longer distance races) then what becomes obvious is that anaerobic respiration gives you a linear increase in performance for an exponential decrease of effort sustainability.
All of this is interesting although not that tightly related to weight loss. The one part of anaerobic respiration that really excites the weight loss crowd is what happens after the effort.
The short of it is that, the chemical role that oxygen plays in aerobic cellular respiration is replaced by lactosis (the same process that turns milk into yogurt). Lactosis is kind of like fermentation except for the end product being lactic acid (which crystalizes, rubs into your muscle fibers and makes them hurt) instead of alcohol (whose end product would have been significantly nicer as a workout fallout but alas).
This is where it becomes interesting. After the effort the lactate resulting from the anaerobic respiration is something that your body needs to get rid of. Getting rid of that lactate requires oxygen (which is why you are still panting for a long time after you’ve ended a strenuous exercise) and it goes with spending extra calories. These extra calories are the thing that gets everyone excited. It even has a catch name:
THE AFTERBURN EFFECT
The entire marketing strategy for some fitness businesses is built on this and … as any marketing thing, it actually comes with a decent number of caveats.
Now, I want to re-do my disclaimer here. I went through a number of peer-reviewed papers about EPOC trying to get a reliable number … or at least a ballpark about how much calories this after burn effect actually represents aaand … I don’t fully understand this, nor am I sure to what extent it is true.
So there’s this study that talks about a ~10% increase in daily energy expenditure due to sprints. Most of that seems to be happening right after the exercise.
Bizarrely, the less your sources are scientific the more their calorie numbers are specific. I kind of like this one though and it also talks about how most of the after burn effect happens mostly right after the activity and the 24 hours thing is a stretch.
Still, I’ve also read plenty of things that talk about other advantages of HIIT such as keeping your body and mind more in shape in later stages of life, or giving better results in performance improvements.
I am out of patience to go and look up all these references but my main take away is: I try to do a HIIT session in the gym around three times a week because I like how I feel afterwards but this is not a significant factor in my weight control strategy
(Gee that section came out much longer than I intended … so let’s follow up with a super short one)
Hey, speaking of, what happens to the fat that I shed?
First of all … I guess it doesn’t really matter but for me it was mostly a matter of curiosity. I would be there climbing up some stairs, pushing an elliptical or running on a treadmill and I would catch myself looking for something happening to my body that I’d be able to point at and say: here, this is happening now and this means fat is leaving my body.
Or to put it in simpler terms: I was mostly wondering what happens to the actual matter in my adipose tissue, the tangible stuff that is on my body one day and no longer there the next. I was wondering if it somehow gets back in the digestive system or … urine or sweat …
Well it turns out that you are simply breathing your fat out. Looking back at glycolysis and the Krebs cycle you can see CO2 as a byproduct in a few places and CO2, as we all know, is what we breathe out. Once we breathe that out, it goes out in the air to be absorbed by plants that we then use to make flour and sugar and fat so that we can eat it again and turn it into adipose tissue once more.
Fascinating, isn’t it?
In Conclusion
I think I’ve blabbered long enough but I’d like to end with a couple of summary points.
Firstly, if you leave with one thing, let that be the confidence that it is never too late. Losing your extra weight is never unachievable even after years and years of carrying it around! It is always something we can do!
And then, in case I left you with the wrong impression, I really don’t have it all figured out. Far from there! The inaccuracies of intake calorie tracking sometimes make me abstain too much, which then results in binges, which I then have to offset with multiple days of being more careful than usual. That’s still a problem that I need to solve. One thing that I am pretty hopeful for is the fact that all US restaurants will soon be required to have calorie readings in their menus so this should remove at least that piece of uncertainty. (But then again, I still have the hope that automatic intake tracking will happen in the next ten years).
And that’s about it. I’ll come back and do another post in a few months if I have anything new that’s worth sharing.
A summary list of the tools I use
Pedometer++: This is my reference step counter. It seems to use a different algorithm than the native iOS tracker and when I compare them both to treadmill counters or to my own manual counting of sample segments, Pedometer++ is consistently more accurate. Also I like the interface.
LifeSpan under the desk treadmill: this is the only one I was able to find and it got me through my entire weight loss. Still, it leaves a lot to be desired. I completely busted one. I think I was too heavy for it. I also have one that started rattling. It was still in warranty when that happened but it’s kind of hard to get hold of their support crew so I am still waiting and living with the rattling.
Bose QuietComfort 35 (Series Whatever) Headset: I’ve been working in VoIP for 15 years at this point and during that time I’ve gone through a lot of headsets. This one is the only headset that solves my problem today. It has great noise cancellation not only on the headphones but also on the microphone, which makes it perfect for having meetings in noisy places such as the street or on your desk treadmill. It can connect simultaneously to both your phone and your computer (although they interrupt each other so that sucks) it has great battery life and awesome customer service (they replaced one for me just because the battery life wasn’t looking as good as promised).
Nokia Body+ Wi-Fi Scale: I am not going to recommend this super heartily but it does the job. The main thing that I want from a scale is that if I get on it three times in a row, the weight I see doesn’t vary more than 100g. This one stays within that limit and that hasn’t been the case with most of the scales I’ve used before. It also connects to Lose It. I don’t really know how it compares to other connected scales but I can say it records results rather reliably in the Nokia cloud service and the app is OK. While they were still Withings it was possible to download the data but this feature disappeared with their acquisition by Nokia, which was quite a disappointment and the main reason for my lukewarm attitude.
Lose It: Great database, and most of all SUPERB integration with the apple watch calorie tracking. This integration is what makes calorie tracking work for me. They’ve done a really good job. On the downside, their UX is way too busy and feels rather amateurish.
Running shoes: I used to be a huge fan of Nike Flyknit and how well it was working out for me in the ungodly hot Texas weather. That was until I started getting these particularly annoying heel pains that turned out to be plantar fasciitis. Since then I’ve switched to the ASICS running models and have no complaints. (Fun fact, did you know that ASICS stands for “Anima Sana In Corpo Sano” or, by their own translation: “Sound Mind, Sound Body”).
Night splint for heel pains: Any brand is fine since this is an extremely simple device. It basically keeps your calf muscles slightly de-contracted all through the night which immensely alleviates and the heel pane (plantar fasciitis) you get from excessive walking or running and lets it heal eventually.
Acknowledgements
My constant walks and calorie tracking in the past 18 months have been rather annoying to my family so I’d like to express my infinite gratitude to Yana for being so extremely supportive, understanding and accommodating. Literally none of this would have ever happened without your support.
A huge, huge thank you to my employer, Atlassian! Being able to take your treadmill to work, or take all of your meetings while walking in the parking lot … that requires significant flexibility from your employer and people you work with. No one ever complained for my constant wobbling on video conference screens (well … almost no one ;) ) and I received nothing but encouragement. Thank you all for your support and understanding!
There was a very convenient list of references that look into calorie balance in this healthline article.
Footnotes
1: I am only talking from weight perspective there. Vitamin or protein or fiber imbalance can obviously cause you other health issues but their impact to weight seems to be much less significant or indirect than the pure excess or deficit of calories
