Still tracking calories and it’s still working
When I previously left you I was only a couple months into my weight loss “journey” (as the kids call it these days). At that point I was down about 14 pounds and in a January update at the end of that piece I said:
I did hit my original target weight but decided to keep going and am now currently around 165 lbs. My new goal is 155 lbs, which I haven’t hit since way back in 2002…If all goes as planned I should hit my goal some time in March. To be continued…
Well here we are nearing the end of March and I am right at 155 lbs. If I recall correctly when I started this diet (ok, I should call it a cut by the modern social media parlance) my target weight was 175 (a nice 20 pound chunk of weight loss), and I thought that was being optimistic. I have shifted my goal downwards multiple times in the last several months because I’ve realized the cut wasn’t nearly as difficult as I had anticipated and that obtaining “shredded” status is possible for me even as I’m nearing 50 (and when I say nearing — I’m 48, there I said it). I haven’t quite got there yet. You can see from the picture that my upper abs are now quite visible but the lower abs are still hidden by fat. I think another 10 lbs of cutting down to 145 (the lightest by far I will have ever been in my adult life) might get me that mythical 6-pack right in time for summer. By my calculations (based on various internet calculators) I should be roughly 12–14% body fat at 145 lbs. I’m probably somewhere around 17–19% currently.
Of course this is purely an aesthetic pursuit the rest of the way. After recently having a physical for the first time in half a decade, all my labs came back entirely in the normal range. So I know I’m physically healthy. I don’t need to keep cutting “just to see my abs”. I could just go back to maintenance mode. Eventually I will obviously have to do that. But pushing myself physically like this has actually been a blast. So putting aside motivation for now, if you’ve read this far, I have a hunch you’re interested enough to know how I did it because you are either thinking about starting on a major cutting phase or are in the midst of one already. So let’s get into it. First, here’s a look at my journey so far via a daily chart of my weight loss:
This chart is actually super important for several reasons. First, I want to emphasize that, at least for me, it is critical that I track my weight on a daily basis. To minimize day-to-day fluctuation (which you can see is still significant and much larger than any actual weight that is gained or lost in a day), I always weigh myself first thing in the morning (nude!) after I pee. You don’t have to do this, but I would encourage it as it really is likely to be the most consistent measurement. Alternatively, you can weight yourself (nude!) right before you go to sleep. If you have never done either consistently, one fun fact I have learned is that we humans lose about 1–2 lbs during sleep. Apparently, this is mostly lost through water vapor in your breath. Or something like that. In addition to minimizing variance, or actually related to that, getting used to weighing yourself is important for maintaining a sense of control over your weight. Some people are actually afraid of weighing themselves and seeing these fluctuations. Or they feel guilty. Or whatever. Again, at least for me, I found that I need to confront my weight head on. I need to be realistic about it, and I need to be accountable for it to myself. Now having seen months and months of weight fluctuation, it doesn’t scare me. I know if my weight randomly goes up by a pound one morning, it’s not because my diet failed. It’s almost certainly just water retention, or the fact that I ate a ton of broccolli the night before. Or maybe I had a couple drinks (we’ll get back to this point later). Whatever the reason may be, I know that I haven’t actually ever gained or lost more than a pound of fat (and/or muscle) in one day. At most, you gain or lose a few ounces.
How do I know this? Well now that gets to the meat of this article. I track my calories and I control my diet — and more specifically, I control my calorie deficit to be around 500–600 calories per day. Since we know that (roughly speaking) losing a pound of fat requires burning 3500 calories, this amount of energy deficit results in roughly 1 pound of weight loss per week. There are (obviously) 16 ounces in a pound, so that’s roughly 2.3 ounces per day. Therefore, whatever day-to-day fluctuations you see in your weight will pretty much always swamp out the actual weight loss (or gain) in one day. You truly have to just trust the process. It also helps — and I would advise strongly — to track your median weekly weight loss. For me that chart looks like this:
From the weekly chart you see the week-to-week variance is much smaller than the daily chart and in the vast majority of weeks the weight is indeed decreasing by about a pound, if not slightly more. Some weeks are flat and a few times the weight goes up, but those weeks are pretty rare and by now I’m used to it. In fact I almost have come to expect it by now that after a few weeks of consistent median weight loss, I might encounter a week or two of what I would call “mini-plateaus”. These are not true plateaus because the long term trend is still highly linear. In other words, I have not seen that my rate of weight loss has slowed down much over time. The curve is not “bottoming” out. And as long as the “macro” trend is so linear, that means what I am doing is working and working really freaking well. So I keep doing it. The more I do it the more confidence I have that the process works, and the more I trust it.
So the long term strategy is to create a calorie deficit, measure your results, and stick to the plan. But to pursue this strategy requires individualized tactics. In other words, you have to figure out how the heck to actually do this and do it consistently over time (whether it’s a couple months or much longer that) to achieve your target weight. I can give you some tips along these lines, but keep in mind, what works for me may not work for you. The most important thing is that you have to figure out what works for you.
Diet plans
Use whatever diet works for you best. If it’s keto, that’s neato. If it’s intermittent fasting, then I’m not even asking. Just do it. For me it’s just tracking calories and getting 3 balanced meals per day and usually an extra mini-meal in the form of a protein shake or protein bar. My only diet constraints I place on myself is to eat roughly 1 g of protein per pound of body weight each day. Furthermore, I try to make sure every meal has a good amount of protein. I don’t even actively track or restrict my other macros (carbs and fat) although I notice they are usually roughly equal to each other over the long term.
The high protein intake — in my way of thinking — does two things for me. 1) Protein is highly satiating compared to fats and carbs. If I spread out my protein intake over 3–4 meals per day it keeps me from getting hungry. For example, having eggs for breakfast as opposed to cereal, or having a turkey sandwich for lunch as opposed to a bowl of ramen helps me from getting hungry in between meals even on my high activity days. During this entire cut, I really haven’t ever felt “hungry” except after very intense bouts of activity like taking a 4-hour hike or something along those lines where I might burn 1000 calories or more. 2) High protein helps me maintain muscle during a cutting phase, but more on this later.
Again, if keto or intermittent fasting or high carb/low fat or carnivore or whatever the heck it may be — if it works for you that’s what matters most. The diet you can stick to is the best one long term. I would humbly suggest, though, start with something similar to mine, because it’s pretty simple and it may just work fine. If it doesn’t work, then it’s time to experiment with alternative diets.
One thing you should keep in mind is that there are a lot of charlatans out there selling these diets. And most of them make money by convincing you “there is only one way”. That is just not true.
Be Rigorous and Anal (at least in the beginning)
If you’ve never tracked your calories rigorously, and you are overweight, you probably do not realize how much you’re actually eating. To become 30, 50, 100, 200 pounds overweight you have to be regularly eating well above your maintenance calories for months, years or even decades. To begin to unwind these eating habits, you have to be accountable to yourself. And that literally means counting the calories in your food, but also being strategic about it so you can be set up for success.
Before you begin the calorie deficit phase of your diet, take at least a few days, ideally more like a week, and count your calories. Eat at home and prepare your own meals to make this easier. Eating out makes it vastly harder to get an accurate calorie total for that day, let alone if you eat out multiple times per day per week. If you eat out this much, believe me, it’s no wonder you are at the size you are now (I speak from my own lived experience!).
During this pre-diet phase you want to be very careful about counting. Count literally everything you can, even the teaspoon of half-and-half you put in your coffee (and let’s be honest I bet it’s a lot more than a teaspoon!). If you don’t already have one, but a food scale that is accurate to 1 g. As much as possible don’t measure volumes, measure by weight (mass) in grams. Let me give you an example that will drive home the point. Every morning I make two eggs on English muffin. The eggs are 70 calories each. The English muffin (specifically the buttermilk version) is 130 calories. To the eggs I add one serving of egg whites, which is roughly 45 g. I weight it out. I even weigh out the “pat” of butter that I put in the pan. It’s usually about 10–12 g of butter which is like 60–70 calories. You might not think that matters, but I promise you every calorie counts. So you should count every calorie!
Whatever you *think* you have been eating in terms of calories, I guarantee you it’s a lot more than that. You are probably eating 500 or even 1000 calories more than you think every day. I certainly was! And what’s crazy is that I have successfully dieted in the past, so I should have “known better”. But I let old habits gradually creep into my diet and I had never really tracked my calories before. My “old” way of dieting was based on caloric restriction or exclusion, where I just said “I’m not going to eat red meat” or “I’m not going to eat carbs”. Those diets worked because at the end of the day I was still creating a caloric deficit. But they weren’t fun diets by any means because excluding foods you love entirely isn’t fun. You shouldn’t have to do that. If you track your calories, you can still enjoy pretty much everything you love, you just have to pick and choose when and where it’s appropriate.
Now that you’ve counted the calories in your current diet, you are ready to construct your meal plan. This will probably take you a few days to a couple weeks to see what you can live with and without. I’ll use myself as a case study here. I was eating around 2800–3000 calories per day (easily). I calculated that I needed to get down to around 2000 calories to be in a 500 calorie deficit (it turned out to be somewhat higher than this but that’s besides the point for now). So I had to figure out how to pare down roughly 1000 calories from my diet. This was a serious food audit.
Let me give you some examples of how I did it:
- A typical breakfast in my old diet might have been a bagel with two eggs and an avocado. That might sound relatively harmless — and maybe even healthy! — but it’s easily 600, if not 700 calories (depending on bagel and size of avocado). I had to cut a few hundred calories here and still be satiated. So out goes the bagel, in comes the English muffin (saving ~100–200 calories). Out goes the avocado. In comes an additional serving of egg whites. That’s a savings of 200+ calories. Is it quite as satisfying or satiating? Maybe not, but it’s good enough to keep me going until my next meal, even including the 2-hour walk I take my dog on every day.
- I added a 200 calorie protein smoothie between my breakfast and lunch meals. The smoothie is simply 30 grams of whey protein (130 cals), 145 g of frozen strawberries (45 cals), and 1 cup of unsweetened almond milk (30 cals). I actually look forward to this every day, even though it’s not the absolute sweetest thing ever, it’s very filling and the satiation lasts well into the lunchtime hours.
- For lunch, I removed the 1000-calorie sandwiches, burritos etc, and I keep my lunches in the 400–600 calorie range each and every day. Big lunches were a big no no for me in terms of calories. I just make sure to get 30-ish grams of protein in my lunch and I’m good to go.
- For dinner I was eating A LOT of steaks, beef stews, and basically didn’t realize how many calories were in those meat dishes. A grilled rib steak could easily be 1000 calories on its own. Don’t get me wrong, it’s delicious. But that can’t be an every night or really even a once a week thing for me. Those kinds of steaks have to be a special night out while I’m on the diet. Also out were huge portions pasta. The steak got mostly replaced with lean chicken (chicken breast and boneless/skinless chicken thighs) and occasionally salmon (even salmon is quite caloric and is more like a once-per-week thing for me). The carbs are almost always limited to around 200 calories for dinner, unless I have extra room in my budget that day, where I can take them up to 300 or so. To put it in perspective, 200 calories of rice is 1/3 cup raw which amounts to around 1 cup of cooked rice more or less. I also added in a fibrous vegetable to every dinner, such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts or cauliflower. These low calorie density vegetables help fill you without breaking the calorie bank. You still should track them though! I easily eat 50–100 calories in vegetables at dinner every night.
In the beginning of the diet phase — at least the first few weeks — try to make your routine as consistent as possible. This means — again, at least for a few weeks — not making big changes to your diet and avoiding going out. Try to prepare as much as you can at home so you can measure and make sure you are sticking to your plan. That way you can see if your plan actually works. If you are aiming for a 500 calorie deficit — 1 pound-per-week — and at the end of 4 weeks you haven’t lost any weight, or maybe just 1 or 2 pounds, then it means you haven’t been executing the plan correctly. Now you have to diagnose the problem. If your tracking is off, it will make troubleshooting even more difficult. Conversely, for example, in my case, as soon as I started my plan and tracking pretty much religiously, the weight just started coming off. And each week that I shed a pound I had more confidence that I knew it was simply a matter of creating that calorie deficit. This meant I could start going a little bit “off plan” and being a little bit more creative with my diet as long as I could still track it. This is when you really hit your stride in the diet, when you realize you actually do have more freedom to be creative with your diet than you thought. But that doesn’t come without earning it. You really can only earn that freedom by mastering the calorie accounting principles first. Like I said, that will hopefully just take you a few weeks, and they probably won’t be easy. But if it were easy everyone would be doing it, right?
Alcohol
There are some other things I had to mostly cut out entirely from my daily calorie budget, and one of the most notable was alcoholic beverages. I was on average drinking roughly 1 drink per day, usually in the form of a cocktail or a glass of wine. It was probably 200 calories on average. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you are constructing a budget of around 2000 calories as opposed to eating at 3000 calories, you really have to pick your battles. Instead of that drink I decided I’d rather have a “healthy” dessert every night that is roughly the same amount of calories. My dessert is usually in the form of a parfait consisting of 1 cup of strawberries, 1/3 cup of granola, and about 100 g of nonfat Greek yogurt. This is certainly healthier than whatever alcohol I was consuming, definitely more satiating, and doesn’t make me as prone to late night snacking as the alcohol tended to be. The other thing about drinking is that it was probably worse for my sleep and workouts the next day. I haven’t gone completely sober — I still will have a couple drinks from time to time when I meet up with friends or family — but I have realized I was probably drinking a bit too much, even aside from the dietary concerns. So all things considered, while I am not telling you what to do about alcohol, I am telling you it’s definitely a thing you will want to consider dealing with in your diet. If you can keep drinking and meet your weight loss goals more power to you! You’ll get no moral superiority takes from me on that decision.
Resistance Training
One “advanced” dieting concept I learned about fairly recently is the “p-ratio”. This is basically the ratio of fat mass to total weight lost in a cut or gained during a bulking phase. When we talk about losing “weight”, we all think that weight=fat, but part of the weight lost is almost certainly going to be muscle, it’s just a matter of how much. One of the most important things to prevent losing excess muscle during a “fat loss” phase is to engage in resistance training, ie weight lifting. This isn’t the article to tell you exactly how to do that, but I will say that I try to get in 3 full-body weight lifting workouts per week and I keep track of my p-ratio (using various formulas I’ve come across) and it’s somewhere between 0.8–0.85 which seems fairly reasonable. That means for every 10 pounds I am losing, it’s roughly 1–1.5 pounds of muscle. And that’s with my eating a very high amount of protein and lifting quite regularly. So that’s just something to think about. If you are obese or very overweight the p-ratio tends to be naturally higher. It’s even possible to put on muscle mass and lose fat mass simultaneously if you are new to lifting and overweight.
One “internet myth” or even meme at this point is the idea that gaining muscle will drive your metabolism so high that you become a fat burning machine and will be able to eat as much as you want. This just isn’t the case. It’s been shown that each additional pound of muscle a person adds increases their basal metabolic rate (BMR) by roughly 8–10 calories. So even if you were to add 30 pounds of lean muscle to your body, that’s 240–300 calories. Well, I guess that means you will have earned that one drink per night! But yeah, you have to add 30 pounds of muscle. Not a bad goal, but it’s not going to make you a “fat burning machine”. The reasons you should lift are simply for overall health as you age — did you know falling is one of the leading killers of people over the age of 75? — and to prevent losing what muscle you already have while you lose fat. Oh, and you want to look good too right?
It’s OK to say No
One of the things you have to get used to doing during a diet to make it successful is to avoid all the sirens out there trying to bait you into breaking your diet. I think it’s a subconscious thing, but it feels like people are testing your will power to see how strong you really are. Just know that whatever they are offering you, a piece of cake, a slice of pie, a beer, you don’t actually need it. You don’t even really want it. A lot of what we eat in excess is just based on habit. Somebody offers you something for free, you kindly take it. Well, just know that you can simply break this habit. You won’t hurt their feelings. The cake won’t go to waste. And so what if it does. It’s not your job to be a biological garbage disposal. Instead of that cake, have a cup of coffee or a bottle of sparkling water.
It’s OK to say Yes…If you earned it
Of course, sometimes you know you’re going to want to eat cake or pie or ice cream or beer or fried chicken or steak. My main suggestion here is simply to plan ahead for those times by accounting for them in your budget *ahead of time*, instead of thinking you will make up for it later, which is much harder psychologically for most people. At least, it is for me. Planning ahead makes the cake a reward, as opposed to a punishment when you have to cut calories or do more cardio further after. One of the reasons I like doing a lot of cardio on my weekends is because it allows me to raise my calorie budget. The cake that you earn will taste that much better.
The Diet Phase Does Not Last Forever
There’s this idea out there that people can’t stick to diets because they can’t do it for the rest of their lives. Well, duh. If you tried to maintain a calorie deficit indefinitely you would eventually die. That’s called starvation. It’s amazing that so many people seemingly don’t understand how this is supposed to work. A weight loss phase is implementing a calorie deficit over a finite amount of time until a desired weight target is reached. The target isn’t 0. Once you reach the target (or before that, if you can’t get quite get there), you go back to maintenance, which means neither a calorie deficit or surplus — of course, you may decide to go into a surprlus, for example, to add muscle to your now lean body *wink*. So just to be clear, if your maintenance calorie budget is 2500 and you are dieting at 2000 calories, once you reach your target weight, you simply go back to 2500 calories. Now, if you were actually eating at 3000 calories for many years, even that 2500 might feel like a diet, but if you cut to 2000 calories for several months or even a year or more, then 2500 calories will probably feel absolutely amazing to you. With the tracking pyschology in place, I think it becomes much harder to revert to those truly bad habits, but of course, it’s possible you’ll just gain the weight back. Maybe at that point you should really consider medical alternatives (ie Ozempic and friends). Just a thought.
With that I wish you good luck in your journey, and I will check back in when I get back to my maintenance phase. :)
