In January 2024, I had my trigger moment. I stepped on the scale, and the number 250 stared back at me. That was my damn moment when the situation become undeniable. I was 30 lbs. overweight — gulp.
I wish decisions for personal change or breaking bad habits were more logical than this, but they're not, at least not for me. As the entrepreneur Derek Sivers said, "If more information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect six-pack abs."
I need a requisite amount of emotional energy to harness before undertaking a big change. If you're not there yet, no amount of information presented here or anywhere else will do you any good. In other words, your situation has to be un-f*cking-tenable to you, or it won't stick. If you have any inkling of 'Eh, I'm pretty good but I could do to lose a few pounds,' you're not there yet. Let me save you the time and advise you to stop reading now.
What Didn't Work
For the last 10 years, I had bought into the low carb and paleo camp thinking that calories don't matter, just eat the right foods. Unfortunately for me, I can eat a lot of whatever foods you tell me I can eat in unlimited quantities. Nothing sinks a fat loss diet faster than eating a bunch of cheese or smashing a whole bag of pistachios.
The other downside with 'diet plan thinking' for me was perfectionism. I was either on the wagon or off the wagon: eating clean or in screw-it mode let's go to Taco Bell at 11 p.m. and get a pint of Ben & Jerry's. Clearly, this paradigm was not going to work for me.
Flexible dieting means I'm always on the wagon. Even if I eat too much at one meal, I try to scale back at the next one. This way, I can try to get a win at every point of the day.
Back to Basics
As I searched for a new way forward, I revisited what had worked in the past. During my sophomore year of college, I had lost about 40 lbs. using a simple method: I wrote down what I ate, tried to keep to single plate portion sizes at meals, and didn't keep snacks in my dorm room except for diet soda which became my go-to for satisfying cravings. I didn't focus on avoiding anything in particular, just practicing mindfulness through the journaling and portion control.
I started watching educational videos about flexible dieting and, on the recommendation of a friend, began using an app called Cronometer to track my calories. At first, I was so relieved to not have to skip carbs or any specific foods anymore. I could eat anything! I just had to track the calories. I started eating pancakes for breakfast again, got some pop tarts, even Little Debbie's cosmic brownies. While I wouldn't call this healthy by any stretch, just making it fun made a huge difference in my adherence (i.e. can you actually stick to your plan whatever it is), which is the number one predictor of diet success.
If you're still here, I'm going to present a few principles followed by some strategies that have worked for me. The good news about this philosophy is that there are a lot of ways to get to 10. Pick the one that works best for you.
Principle 1: A calorie is a calorie!
The often repeated claims in certain diet influencer circles that "not all calories are equal" or a "calorie is not a calorie" are, to be polite, complete and utter horseshit. It's like saying a centimeter is not a centimeter, or an ounce is not an ounce. They are all the same because they are units of measurement. However, not all sources of calories have the same effect on satiety (i.e. how satisfied you feel after a meal). For example: If you eat 500 calories of steak, you're going to feel very differently than if you eat 500 calories of potato chips.
Principle 2: You only lose weight in a calorie deficit
It is, quite simply, the only way. If you track your calories and achieve a daily deficit on a consistent basis, you will lose weight.
Why does Ozempic or Wegovy work? It reduces hunger cravings substantially and people eat less.
An extreme example of the point is the Kansas State professor who ate nothing but convenience store food — snack cakes, Mountain Dew, Twinkies, etc. — and lost 27 lbs. and improved several health markers. The key? He limited his intake to 1800 calories per day. You can also check out this Youtuber who ate nothing but Taco Bell for 30 days and lost weight.
Principle 3: Track the key metrics
"What gets measured gets managed" as the business adage goes.
The key metrics are:
- Your estimated daily basal metabolic rate (how many calories your body burns at rest)
- How many calories you're eating each day
- Your weight
You don't have to track calories to lose weight, but it helps. It's similar to how a budget gives you freedom within the constraints. I like to take the guesswork out of it as much as I can, so that way I know if I can eat Swiss cake rolls or not.
Principle 4: You can't outrun a bad diet
Fitness trackers are generally unreliable on estimating how many calories you've burned. Make it a rule not to trust them when it comes to your caloric deficit.
Doing more (exercise) is not the answer for weight loss — it's doing less, namely eating. Exercise for the cardio and strength benefits, not for weight loss. Abs are made in the kitchen, not the gym.
Tools, Strategies, and Resources
Substitute. Once you start tracking calories, there will be some eye popping calorie counts on some of the foods you regularly eat. Rather than stop eating those foods altogether, try to find ways to make them healthier and less calorically dense. For example, sugar free syrup has a fraction of the calories as regular or maple syrup. Sure, it's not as good, but after three days you won't notice anymore. Instead of regular mayo, use Miracle Whip. Instead of regular soda or other sugary beverages, switch to diet soda or other artificially sweetened beverages. Instead of ground beef for tacos, try using ground turkey or ground chicken. Once it's seasoned and there's cheese, salsa, and sour cream on it, you won't even think about it. I would never advocate for turkey burgers — I'm not a masochist, after all.
Time Shift Eating. If you know you're going out later to a restaurant for a big meal, try practicing time restricted eating (intermittent fasting), if that works for you. I find skipping breakfast isn't that hard, so sometimes I do it if I know there's a big meal or social eating occasion later in the day.
Track Your Average Weight. When it comes to weigh-ins, here's the strategy: weigh daily but take the average weekly. The average weight is the key metric. Every person's weight goes up and down day to day depending on their digestion and hydration. No exaggeration, my weight has fluctuated up to 5-8 lbs. in a week, so if I only took a single point of data as 'the truth', that could be super discouraging.
I typically take weight first thing in the morning, write it down in a Google spreadsheet on my phone, and then once a week calculate a rolling average of the previous seven days.
If that weekly average isn't going in the right direction, take a look at your diet journal/app and try to find the problem area.
Awareness, Awareness, Awareness. What am I actually putting down my gullet throughout the day? That's what I'm really tracking. Calorie counting necessarily involves some guessing. I try to weigh and measure when I can, but there are social situations where that's not possible. I'm not pulling out a food scale at Applebees to weigh the fries I'm about to eat. After all, psychotic behaviors such as this should be confined to the home and not practiced in polite society.
Resources
- Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator
- Flexible dieting
- Layne Norton's YouTube channel
- Simple tips for lowering calorie intake and losing fat
- Cronometer
- Food scale
- The Taco Bell Diet
Conclusion
To summarize my results following this method, I lost more than 30 lbs. in six months. I was under 220 for the first time since my college days (a decade ago).
Today, I'm still using Cronometer to track calories, even though I'm in the maintenance phase (not actively trying to lose weight). There's no need to be weighing and measuring your food forever, but after a few weeks or months of doing this, you will get a good idea of how many calories are in the food you eat. That education alone is worth the effort.
Hopefully, this approach has relieved you of the compulsion to do Whole 30, Atkins, the South Beach Diet, the potato diet (actually a thing), paleo, or whatever else now exists. I'm not against those approaches, but they didn't work for me. Eat whatever you want (within reason), find some form of calorie restriction that works for you, and make it fun.