my "secret" to Losing Weight

I have discovered the "secret" to losing weight and I want to share it. The funny thing about this secret is that you already know everything you need to know in order to reduce the amount of fat stored on your body. There is likely nothing that I can tell you that you either haven't already heard before or anything original. All I can do is share my experience and how I lost about 16 pounds of fat this year.

The Why:

Last Christmas, approximately 10 months ago, I got on the scale. When I looked down at the number, I had reached my new all time record weight. My current pants, which had already increased two sizes in the past decade, were now getting tight. I looked in the mirror and had no idea really how I had gotten there. I mean, I knew what I did that got me there, but not really how.

I knew that I likely drank too much alcohol (each of those delicious beers couldn't be the problem, could they?). What started out as drinks on the weekend when out with friends had progressed during covid into at least a beer a night. I knew that when I was sitting watching Netflix with my wife in the evening that I would often feel the need to have just a little something (after I had eaten a reasonably sized meal 2 hours before). The gyms were closed because of the 'vid, but who am I kidding, I was one of those guys that bought a gym membership in January and was done working out by March.

Looking in that Mirror, I could suddenly see where I was now but I could also see where I was headed. So I made a decision that was the last day I was going to live like this (at least for a while). Somehow I would make some changes that would improve things.

The How: I reached my current weight (16 pounds of fat loss) by changing three things.

Experiment 1: I stopped drinking (almost) any calories.

Alcohol: As I mentioned above, during Covid I went from a casual drinker to a habitual drinker. I realized that I was consuming at least 300 calories (2 regular beers) a day not counting more if we were having a dinner party or out at a restaurant. I think that I will spend another post talking about Alcohol (the keep this shorter) but I committed to not drink any alcohol for 30 days. A straight detox to see how strong the habit was. This experiment was completed in February and after February, I didn't crave alcohol anymore. No longer craving Alcohol made reducing calories from drinking soooo much easier.

As well as the booze, I reduced my consumption of Milk and removed almost all cream from my daily coffee(s). I started drinking 1 full glass of water during the day. I still drank diet sodas (I still had a craving for sweetness).

As well as stopping drinking my calories, I also experimented with two other approaches to re-adjust my relationship with my food(my bodies fuel).

Experiment 2: I changed what I ate

When I looked at what people were doing to lose weight, the scientific studies seems to indicate that there are many approaches that work but that the basic idea is always the same.

In order to get the body to use the fat that you have stored as fuel, you need to stop putting more fuel into the tank. This is the basic idea of every diet.

Reducing the amount of food that you eat seems to work in every study but can be VERY difficult to do. Ultimately we are tying to reducing how much we are eating by changing the portion sizes or meal frequency or meal types.

So, I looked at what I was eating and more importantly why I was eating. What was I craving and when and why?

For me, I realized that since I was a young kid, I craved sweets. I enjoyed all of the baking that my mother did, especially cookies. I loved Candy. I drank Slurpee's as a kid. As an adult, my "sweet tooth", had continued (thinking about booze, scotch tastes sweet to me). Just before I decided to lose weight, I remember eating bread with Jam or honey in the evening as a snack. Having craving for "something" but not being satisfied for long after the craving was fulfilled.

Of the many different diet choices, I started reading about the low carb (aka keto or at its extreme carnivore) diets. I wondered (in the same way that I was craving alcohol), if I craved carbohydrates.

What made me want to eat these foods when I wasn't really hungry? What was it giving me beyond the simple nutrition of the food?

So, I decided that I would stop eating most simple carbs and see how that went. I simply stopped eating breads, pastries, noodles and rice. What I started eating was Eggs cooked in butter for breakfast (mixed with bacon bits and some cheese for flavor and variety), and for lunches and dinner a mixture of some kind of meat and vegetables.

In the evening, when I would get "snacky", I started eating a handful of nuts (and during the start of this experiment, a handful actually mean a small bowlful of nuts, like two handfuls).

This started me losing weight.

Each week about a pound a week of fat disappeared until about five weeks in a stall occurred - a few weeks followed where I did not lose a single pound.

After wondering what I was doing "wrong", I realized that my "handful of nuts", my snack that I had introduced at nighttime, that I had started using in other times of the day. Heck, if nuts are ok to snack with at night, they are ok to snack with during the day, right?

So, I did my best to stop eating them during the day and to restrict them to a small handful when I was the snackiest.

And, I continued to slowly lose weight. About a pound a week.

When I got down about 10 pounds, or 1 full pant size, I noticed that my weight loss seemed to stabilize (aka the weight loss slowed). Since it was summer time, I loosened up on my plan a bit and reintroduced the occasional drink of alcohol and carb foods.

Experiment 3: I changed when I ate

One other thing that I noticed when reading about weight loss was that WHEN you ate also had a considerable impact on how people lost weight.

The basic idea behind low-carb eating is that by reducing the amount of simple carbohydrates reduces the insulin spike caused while eating. It is when insulin levels are high (and there are more calories consumed than can be utilized) that fat storage occurs. Intermittent fasting has a similar mechanism in that we don't reduce the height of the rise in insulin spikes but rather the frequency of those rises in insulin levels.

There are many ways to describe this pattern of eating like "Time restricted eating or "16-8" or 'intermittent fasting" but the simple idea is that you reduce the number of times that you eat (either to frequency like "two meals a day" or to a time window like "4 hours"). The result of the activity is the same.

a. you likely eat less food at that one sitting than you would during the day.b. the body has time during the day when it is not consuming calories and must use fat stores for energy.c. by regulating the act of eating (restricting it to a time window, lets say), you suddenly become more aware of the impulsive nature of your eating. This is the psychology that is interesting.

Anyways, what I did was I choose not eat breakfast. By not eating breakfast, I did two things. I increased the amount of time spent Fasting (encouraging my body to use the body fat that I had already stored as fuel) and I reduced my caloric consumption by 25%. Trying out this timing for eating seemed to have no dramatic impact on my hunger levels throughout the day.

As a result of this experiment, I have found a way to eat that I can easily maintain. I have few cravings for food before 10am and generally don't often feel hungry until lunch.

I eat an average sized lunch and dinner and occasionally (once a week) enjoy wine or beer. If I am feeling like I want a snack of some sort in the evening, I still allow myself a handful of nuts (but man, I am careful. It is easy for me to eat handfuls of them).

To me this way of eating seems sustainable and I continue to maintain a healthy weight and can choose to lose weight with small tweaks in portion size if I need to).

So, Whats next?

Experiment 4: I have now started intentionally moving more.

During the weight loss, I did not go to the gym. I have always walked a bit each day but I didn't lift a weight or go to a class. That is not me bragging, rather just emphasizing that my weight loss had VERY little to do with doing any exercise. This is simply because our bodies seem to like to stay in homeostasis. If we increase our caloric burn through exercise or exertion, our bodies seem to tell our brain to eat a little more, or at least that is my experience and that of my friends.

Now that I am down 15 pounds, I have started intentionally moving more. I had an old backpack kicking around and some dumbbells' from a previous fitness attempt so I decided to put some weights into the backpack and to go for a walk.

It is hard to say what impact my "urban trekking" is having on my weight loss, but with my strategy of "Two meals a day", I know that am not dramatically increasing my food consumption while adding a bit of exercise. The fun of this activity for me is that I can gradually add 5 pounds a week to the pack and slowly increase my lean body mass (at least in my legs :).

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So, if you read all the way to here, I want to encourage you. If I can do it, you can to.

Why not make one small change today to make your life better and if that means losing some of your stored body fat, it is simple (but not easy).

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after thought:

Remember that "losing weight" is not like "losing your glasses". You don't just put your extra weight down somewhere and its gone.

Losing weight is more like dealing with credit card debt. You (probably) didn't max out your credit card in one drunken night in Vegas. More likely you spent a little bit more each month than you could afford to pay off. One extra latte a day. One more dinner out a month. One more small purchase more than you could pay for in that month. Over time, that debt slowly builds up and it is that accumulation over time that makes it more difficult to deal with.

This is like your weight gain has been. One extra snack at night just before bed. Just one drink (or two) with dinner. An extra lunch out a week with colleagues. I doubt you can remember MOST of the the extra 3500 calories you ate for each extra pound that you have on your body right now. But, like booze, even if you cant remember how much you drank last night, the hangover is a grim reminder it might have been too much. For eating, it is that fat on your gut that is the reminder.

Pause for a moment. Grab your gut with your hand. What you are holding is simply stored excess food that you consumed. There is nothing sinister about body fat, nothing inherently bad about it. Our bodies evolved to allow us to survive famine and scarcity using our fat stores to keep us alive. It is like the gas tank for the body. But just like you wouldn't normally drive your car around with 20 gallons of fuel in the backseat of the car (just in case you might need it), you don't need to store 20 extra pounds of fat (fuel) unless you are living somewhere with food scarcity.

So, why not start?

You can email me at loosingweight at g000gle dot dev