The best kept secret for a successful diet plan…counting calories actually works!
My weight had crept up during COVID…well, crept would be kind. It was more like a jump scare. I am a 5'6" 47-year old male who has struggled with weight since childhood. At my all time “stockiness” I was in my mid-20s in grad school and weighed around 215 pounds. Here’s a pic of me circa Y2K at a conference giving a poster presentation (the short fat one in the middle, if you hadn’t guessed):
Within a year or so I lost ~50 pounds and got down to around 160 lbs. Here I am traveling in Israel in 2001:
I don’t remember much about how I lost the weight to be honest, other than the following: I started running a shit ton (like 6 miles every day), going to the gym and lifting weights almost every day, stopped eating red meat, and cut way back on carbs. Carbs were always my downfall. At this point I wasn’t really counting calories. It wasn’t as easy to do in 2000 as it is now without having a super computer in your pocket connected to the greatest wealth of knowledge human history has ever had. I guess I was doing some combination of “intuitive eating” and “Atkins”? I didn’t have a name for it, I just figured I had to do more activity and less eating. That much was clear.
Well fast forward to 2020…twenty years later and now in my mid-40s, I had let go of a lot of my good eating habits (started eating red meat again in earnest after a trip to Korea lol). I was still very active physically, but clearly my diet had gone off the rails. Living in San Francisco it was way too easy to go from “foodie” to “GLUTTON” and I’d say that’s essentially what had happened. My weight was back up around 185 and then COVID hit…and without the gym and with my eating habits somehow getting worse (at some point I convinced myself eating a donut for breakfast almost every day along with a cocktail in the evening was fine), my weight got up at one point around 205 or maybe even 210. Towards the end of 2022 or maybe the beginning of 2023 I knew I had to get control of my health back, especially approaching the “scary” age of 50. So I added an extra gym day and cut out the donuts…I thought maybe that would be enough. Well my weight did start slowly coming down but it stagnated around 195.
At that point I was almost resigned to it. I didn’t think I could do much to my diet to change the matter. And then something small at the time but massive in retrospect would happen. I went to a Giants game with my sister and nephew. My sister had actually been losing a lot of weight this past year and she casually mentioned a calorie tracking app that she was using. I won’t name the app here, as I don’t want anyone to think this is a paid commercial. It isn’t. There are tons of calorie tracking apps. It turns out in 2023 it’s really easy to track calories. So I started tracking my calories…
It literally only took a couple of days of calorie tracking when a lightning bolt went off in my head. My diet was out of control. It was clear why I had not been able to shed more pounds even though I was burning roughly 1000 calories “actively” every day (according to my Apple Watch) in addition to my basal metabolic activity. I was eating way way way too much. Probably around 2800–3000 calories every day. BTW if you don’t believe I was active take a look at my average steps over the past year:
I got a pandemic pup in November of 2020 and since he was old enough to walk, we’ve literally done 5–6 mile walks or hikes every day for the past 2 years or so. Add that to the 3 days I go to the gym to lift or do a HIIT class, my problem was not cardio. My problem was a bad diet, that was not only high in calories but likely too low in nutritive value.
Once I got my hands on the calorie tracking app and after going down the YouTube fitness rabbit hole for a week or so, I renovated my diet. I came up with just a few guardrails that I wanted to adhere to for my self-made nutrition plan. Incredibly, all you had to do to get these tips *FOR FREE* was read this far :)
- Create a calorie deficit around 500 calories per day
- Make sure I eat protein with every meal and over the course of a day eat around 150 g protein which is roughly 1 g per pound based on my goal weight of 160 lbs.
You thought there would be more? Nope, that’s essentially it. I calculated my basal metabolic rate to be around 1800 calories per day using one of those online calculators and then add in the active calories according to my Apple Watch which is around 1000 calories per day. To create the 500 calorie deficit that means I need to eat no more than 2300 calories per day. Why 500 calories? Well, at that rate your calorie deficit in a week would be 3500 calories which is roughly one pound. “They” say a healthy rate of weight loss where you don’t risk losing too much muscle is around 0.5–1% of your body weight per week. Since I started the diet around 195 lbs that equates to 1–2 lbs per week.
Since I started the diet in earnest I have been weighing myself every morning right after I wake up and pee. It still jumps around more than I wish, but it’s way better than weighing yourself at completely random times throughout the day. Once I get my weight reading for the day I enter it into a spreadsheet and track my “performance” with the following two graphs. The first is a chart that shows my weekly median weight:
The second is the daily weight chart which shows all the fluctuations, but I actually find it useful to see the “noise”, so you learn to get used to it.
What I have found super useful in charting my weight is fitting a linear trend line to it. The slope of this trend indicates how much weight on average I am losing per day. You can see in the charts the number to the left of the “x” in the equations is roughly 0.19, which means I am losing 0.19 pounds per day. So how does that line up with my calculations? Well, 0.19 lbs per day equates to 7*0.19=1.33 lbs per week. That’s a bit higher than the 1 pound per week I was aiming for but it makes sense because, indeed, my “average” daily calorie deficit is probably closer to 700 calories than 500 calories. I could eat a bit more and slow down the weight loss, but I don’t really feel unsatiated enough to bother. I’m pretty happy with what I’m eating on a daily basis, and I figure this way, if I “cheat” a few times a month, it won’t hurt my progress. The tracking and the charting keeps me headed in the right direction. It makes me accountable for all my choices, and that’s really what you need in a diet.
You can see from the charts I’m almost back down to 180 pounds and assuming nothing crazy in my life happens I should get down to my goal weight at some point during the holiday season, at which point, I will go back to “maintenance” mode, meaning I’ll increase my calories back to where I’m taking in what I’m expending in energy on a daily basis.
You might be wondering what I eat in a typical day? Well, that’s easy for me to show you because I am staying pretty regimented. My “prototype” meal plan virtually every day looks like this:
Breakfast
- Two eggs scrambled on a whole wheat English muffin (~300 cals)
- 6 oz latte with 2% milk (~90 cals)
Mid-morning Protein Shake (~ 200 cals)
- 1 cup unsweetened almond milk
- 30 g whey protein isolate
- handful of frozen strawberries or a small frozen banana
Lunch (400–600 calories)
- On most days I’m eating a prepared meal from one of those apps (won’t name the one I use here, again so as not to make this seem like a paid commercial, but there are plenty of them to choose from). My only requirement is that the meal has 30+ g of protein.
Dinner (600–800 calories depending on my activity level that day)
- 1–2 days per week I’ll have one of the higher calorie meals from that same online service
- More typically I will have the classic “chicken, broccolli, and rice” dinner that bodybuilders swear by and for good reason. It’s high protein, low calorie, and for the most part satiating, at least, it is for me.
- Maybe once a week I’ll substitute salmon for the chicken. Or I’ll go out for dinner or there will be some other wildcard. But I try not to go crazy here. And if I go out, I try to apply the same guardrails. High protein, less carbs, etc.
Dessert (~230 calories)
- My goto is a parfait consisting of some frozen strawberries, blackberries, a couple tablespoons of nonfat Greek yogurt, and a few tablespoons of granola. It is very easy to go overboard with all the ingredients and make this dessert 500 calories. A kitchen scale is your friend here!
One of the keys to developing a meal plan for me was really tracking calories as carefully as possible in the beginning so I could really understand where I was going wrong. The main culprit was portion control, or more precisely, lack thereof. You don’t realize how much you’re really eating until you weigh it. Of course, it’s not easy to weigh everything, so my advice is to keep your meals simple and repeatable especially when you are starting down this path. What you really want to do is change your mindset and build good habits. Is it boring eating chicken, rice and broccoli every night or most every night? I mean, yeah, of course. It’s not super exciting food. But I will say that’s one of the reasons I like the idea of eating a lot of protein. Protein is way more satiating than carbs or fat. After my chicken, rice and broccoli dinners, I may not have a huge smile on my face, but I also feel perfectly satiated with just enough room left to enjoy my parfait. I don’t need to be excited by my food every night. If you want that, I’m not saying it isn’t possible. But it will require more effort on your part to craft those meals while sticking to the nutrition plan. It just will.
Now to the real reason I wrote this little diet manifesto. ALL THIS WORKS.
Calories In Minus Calories Out works.
A lot of people seem to not want you to believe that. They will tell you that it doesn’t work, because as you cut calories your metabolism will crash or something. They will tell you that you can’t track calories because it’s too hard. They will list off dozens of excuses why “calories don’t actually matter”.
I’m here to tell you it’s all bullshit they made up to sell you books or meal plans. That is the honest truth. They are literally telling you that the laws of thermodynamics don’t work because it doesn’t fit their business model.
They will tell you that you “have to do keto” or you “have to do intermittent fasting”…bullshit and more bullshit. It’s all bullshit. You literally don’t “have to do anything” except this one thing…
Make sure the calories you take in minus the calories you expend put you in a deficit. Not a huge deficit, but a real one. 500 calories. Maybe 700 calories like the mine currently. Probably not much more than that unless you don’t care about losing muscle. But that’s literally all it takes to lose weight. All this other stuff is complete bullshit pedaling from charlatans, many of whom have enough education that they should know better, and even worse, probably do know better but don’t care. They just want to take your money.
Well, I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to give anyone your money to lose weight successfully. You don’t need anything fancy. Just willpower and sweat. Go do it.
UPDATE Jan 2024
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. Here’s the updated version of the daily weight chart (still linear!).
Here’s the weekly median weigh-ins:
If all goes as planned I should hit my goal some time in March. To be continued…
