Losing Weight - An Example of the Journey

Last March I quit my job and studied German intensively at a school near to where I live. I also found myself a nice girlfriend there. With the change in routine my eating and exercising habits changed and after four months I could no longer deny that the bulge that I saw in the mirror and that made putting my jeans on a tight squeeze was temporary. I knew that I would have to change my routine now, whilst the problems was easy to handle, or else I would just get bigger and bigger.

I’m not big on exercise. It’s fine if it’s enjoyable but doing it just as a means to an end has never held much appeal to me. I remember going to a gym once and my trainer showed me the calorific counter on the readout of the treadmill. After what seemed like fifteen minutes of jogging he said to me “Well done! You’ve just burnt off a banana!” At that point I marveled at how energy efficient the human body is and I also said to myself “I’m going to eat fewer bananas and cut out this ridiculous middleman treadmill.” In order to lose weight I wanted to come up with a process that would do that without the need for additional exercise.

Getting to the Root Cause

I also knew that setting ambitious goals with detailed end points of exactly how many pounds after a certain number of weeks I must lose would not work for me either. Setting an endpoint with no real clue or guarantee of how to get there would practically ensure failure through committing to a structure of doing things that proves improbably hard to do (normal goal-setting).

Any solution that I came up with had to understand the root cause of what causes weight gain the first place. I know that weight gain doesn’t come about by accident or by ‘fat genes.’ Calories are a measurement of energy and sometimes it’s hard to picture a doughnut in the same league as a cupful of petroleum but food does contain prodigious amounts of energy. A long time ago I saw a film of a man who immersed a cupcake into liquid nitrogen, which had the effect of removing all of the water content of the cupcake. Next, the flame of gas lamp was applied to the cupcake and, freed of its water content, this thing burned with a raging incandescent flame. I was very surprised at how much energy the cake had to burn. The human digestive system doesn’t work like an internal combustion engine so there’s no furnace inside of us but we do process the energy from food to carry out our bodily functions.

If we don’t burn off all of the calories and don’t excrete the excess then what remains gets stored as fat (and you can make candles out of fat so that demonstrates that it is another form of fuel). Now then, imagine that you own a car with a flexible fuel tank and everyday you fill it with ten gallons of fuel and only burn off nine gallons. Pretty soon you will have a great excess of fuel sloshing around in your tank. Because it’s a flexible tank it can hold the extra fuel but the more you continue to do this the more fuel you burn just to carry around all of that excess and eventually the tank will either burst or the engine will give out trying to shift all of that weight. That, in a nutshell, explains how we get fat. We put too much fuel into our system each day and don’t burn it off.

Staying at the same weight means balancing calorific intake per day against calorific usage per day. It’s just a question of very, very simple mathematics. If you want to lose weight then you have to burn off more than what you take in each day.

Creating a Simple Daily Process

Knowing this root cause of my problem I now needed to come up with a simple process to address the balance. I did this in the following way:

1. I went to a website www.healthninjas.com/tools/calorie.shtml with a calorific counter and found out what my calorific intake should be based upon my height, age and sedentary lifestyle (2000 kcal per day). This website also advised me that if I ate 1500 kcal per day that I should lose one pound of weight per week.
2. I set up a spreadsheet and recorded each meal, or item of food and drink that I consumed each day. Sometimes the calorific content was included on the food label and if not then I went to this website www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/ to get the content. That takes some time so it’s worth doing as a batch activity. It helped greatly with avoiding some foods. I was amazed that a big bag of potato chips contained 750 kcal - half my daily allowance! When I knew that I just quickly walked past them in the grocery store.
3. I had several columns at the end of each day.
   • Total number of calories consumed
   • The difference between my target (1500 kcal) and what I actually ate. I found this very useful as it immediately highlighted my real result against my desired result. A negative number meant a win, a positive number a loss for that particular day.
   • An average tally for the week and later for the month to get an accurate idea of the trend - this gives an allowance for some days to go over the calorific intake, e.g. a dinner party, a Christmas party, or often in my case, having a few beers with friends.
   • Daily weight - I weighed myself every day first thing in the morning.

With this system I could measure and regulate my calorific intake very easily and without emotional difficulty. If I was committed to losing weight then I had no choice but to lessen my intake and the accurate measuring showed if I was on-track or off-track. It was useful to weigh myself every day because I was surprised at how much my weight fluctuated. I didn’t have a nice, smooth linear descent as I expected. Instead I seemed to lose a fair bit and then it would go up again (but not as high as before) and then drop again. It was a bumpy descent and weighing myself every day was not only fascinating but it gave me a better oversight. If I weighed myself once every three days or every week then I might have felt that it was not working as I had the expectation that on 1500 kcal per day I would lose one pound per week. Those blips upwards might have undermined my confidence in the method.

Although at times I felt peckish I found low calorie snacks that filled me up, such as crisp bread crackers with a little bit of cheese. Also, by taking account of averages and building up a reserve I could sometimes indulge in a big meal out or beers with friends so it didn’t become a grinding and soulless discipline. It became a game each day to get a negative figure that showed that I under ate my allowance again and because it was a daily process and a daily game it was easy to do - just like putting one step in front of another. By setting no goals other than the daily deficit goal and setting no timescales I just kept on losing weight until the bulge had gone. Easy!

Related post: The Journey
Additional link on a similar theme: Hackdiet

Please note: I am not a qualified expert in nutrition and dieting and whilst this method worked for me it might not prove suitable for everyone. Please consult your doctor before carrying out a program of dieting.

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