My 5-step program for losing weight
I can’t claim to be an expert on the subject of weight loss but wanted to share the steps I’ve followed to get from ~81 kg (178 pounds) to ~70 kg (154 pounds) over a period of 8 months. Several people have asked me for tips, so I’ve figured I might as well write it all down for future reference.
Axiom: CICO (Calories In - Calories Out = Weight loss/gain) works. If you’re a ~healthy individual and need to lose weight, it makes sense to just accept CICO as a given and use it as a mental shorthand. Of course there’s always exceptions: my own dad would eat at least 4,000 calories daily and never gained any weight. But if you’re reading this text, you’re probably not an exception.
Step 0: accept that you lack willpower
I’m not a fan of Nike’s Just Do It™ because it overlooks the fact that people’s willpower is finite and if you aren’t “just doing X” already, you probably won’t do it tomorrow without a change in circumstances. Hence the diet steps are all very gradual and try to get you to a plateau of discomfort before requiring the next sacrifice. Feel free to slow the progression down even further if that works better for you.
Step 1: start measuring your weight and food intake (30 days)
Buy these two products:
A Wifi-enabled scale. I recommend this model but any option with phone synchronization works fine. The linked scales have an app which can export its data into Apple Health or Google Fit.
Paid subscription for the Macrofactor app, which is currently the best app for tracking your calories. The app supports importing your weight data from Apple Health or Google Fit, which it can then use to track your daily energy expenditure and calculate your “true” weight by averaging out your weight measurements over a 7-day period.
Every single morning you’ll get up, remove heavy items of clothing, step on the scale and ensure the weight is recorded. I specifically recommend getting a Wifi-enabled scale because it removes the extra friction of having to pull out your phone every morning to write down your weight. Then during the day you’ll want to track everything you eat or drink with as much precision as reasonably possible.
Do not try to change your diet just yet! The goal is to build up an intuition for how many calories each food has, as well as how these calories affect your weight. I’ve been eating around 3,500 calories/day pre-diet, which was a shocking revelation as I didn’t realize just how much food I was consuming on a daily basis.
Do this for 30 days in a row, counting from the first day when you’ve both weighed yourself and entered all of your food into the app.
Step 2: stop eating added sugar (30 days)
Here we’re still not restricting our calorie intake but adding a constraint: no added sugar. This includes not just sweets but any food where added sugars are more than 30% of the contents, which you can calculate from the Nutrition Facts label. In the photo below, a standard serving (40g) of cereal contains 3g of added sugars or 7.5%, so its fine. On the other hand, Frosted Flakes contain 12g of added sugar per a serving of 37g or 32.4%, so you would avoid eating them. You can still eat whatever fruit you want, as sugar in fruit is “natural” rather than added.
The biggest issue with sugar is that its energy dense, so its easy to end up ingesting too many calories from sweet foods without feeling full. High sugar intake also causes a rapid increase in blood glucose levels, which explains why people are often sleepy after lunch.
If you’re feeling hungry you can eat extra portions of other foods to compensate. The goal here is to introduce yourself to the concept of dieting without this feeling onerous. Do this for 30 days starting from your first added-sugar-free day.
Step 3: stop eating past 7pm (30 days)
This is where we’re getting into the truly hard part. Here we’ll still allow ourselves to eat whatever we want (other than added sugars) but introduce a hard stop at 7pm. The goal here is to reduce the number of opportunities for last-moment excess calorie intake. Pre-diet I would sometimes go to the fridge for a “little” snack, only to “accidentally” end up eating an entire loaf of bread with cheese. The rule also extends to liquid calories, so you should do your best to avoid alcohol or nutritious drinks past the cut-off time.
In addition to being a frequent source of excess calories, late night food consumption can disrupt your sleep quality. I use Apple Watch to measure my sleep quality and there’s definitely a drop off on nights when I eat too close to bedtime. This can then lead to a viscious cycle where you consume lots of coffee and food in the morning to wake yourself up.
Step 4: reduce your total calorie intake (25-50 weeks)
Our next goal is to start a slow reduction in daily calories consumed until we reach a 250 calorie deficit. We will do this in increments of 5%/week to let your body adapt and reduce the risk of giving up. This is where MacroFactor will truly start to shine:
Check MacroFactor for your average calorie intake for the past 2 weeks. Lets say it was 3,500 calories/day.
Look up your daily energy expenditure in MacroFactor. Lets say its 2,100 calories.
Our goal now is to get to a deficit of 250 calories/day. In our hypothetical this would require us to reach 2,100 - 250 = 1,850 calories. You can safely go as low as 500 calories/day if you really want but its better to set a manageable goal.
At a rate of -5%/week it should take us roughly 15 weeks of slow intake reduction to get to our goal. Note that as you reduce your food consumption your body’s metabolism will slow down as well, so your daily energy expenditure will decrease. But don’t worry - as long as you keep entering your food and weight, MacroFactor will keep calculating this for you automatically.
One pound of body weight is approximately equivalent to 3500 calories, so at a deficit of 250 calories/day (or 1,750 calories/week) you can expect to lose roughly 0.25 kilos/0.5 pounds per week. You would then stay at this level until you reach whatever is your target weight. The average American is overweight by 25 pounds so with this system they’d need 50 weeks to reach a healthy BMI.
Word of warning: this part really, really sucks. You will feel hungry every single day and constantly dream of food.
Step 5: maintain your weight
Once you’ve reached your target weight you should increase your calorie intake to match your daily energy expenditure. At this point you will likely have developed a solid intuition for what foods have how many calories, as well as healthy eating habits. Personally I no longer enter my food into MacroFactor and sometimes skip weighing myself in the morning. Instead I simply adjust my food intake on a weekly basis: if I gain some weight I’ll eat a bit less, if I lose too much weight I’ll eat a bit more.
What should your target weight be? The medical answer is: in the BMI range of 18 to 25. My own answer is: whatever makes you happy when you look at yourself in the mirror. If you want a visible "six pack" you'll need to get below a BMI of 22, though the exact value will depend on your personal fat distribution and muscle volume.
Unfortunately the sense of hunger doesn’t fully go away when you’re in maintenance mode. I still crave for extra food every single day and actively have to remind myself to moderate my diet. But after about a year of dieting the sense of hunger sort of faded away and it doesn’t feel as bad as it used to.
Wait, what about exercise?!
Lots of people believe they can eat more if they just exercise more. Unfortunately our bodies are highly efficient relative to the density of modern food, so “exercising it away” is not a realistic plan. A single burrito bowl with guacamole from Chipotle contains roughly 1,000 calories, which is equivalent to:
Walking: ~13.3 miles
Running: ~8.6 miles
Cycling: ~23 miles
Swimming: ~2 hours
High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT): ~1 hour 15 minutes
Weightlifting (vigorous effort): ~2 hours 30 minutes
Rowing (moderate effort): ~1 hour 40 minutes
Playing Basketball: ~1 hour 40 minutes
Jumping Rope: ~1 hour
Will you have the time to run 8.6 miles every single day for the sake of that extra burritto bowl? Or spend 2.5 hours at the gym? Most people don’t have enough or motivation for this much exercise, so its far easier to focus on reducing calorie intake instead. Don’t get me wrong - exercise is great but its also not the solution to weightloss for most people.
Disclaimer
I am not affiliated with MacroFactor in any way. I’m not your doctor and don’t know your personal health situation. Take all of the above with some grain of salt and tweak it wherever you feel like it makes sense.