I've been working on losing weight over the last few months and I've been making some progress. Some people have asked me why I'm losing weight, or told me that they didn't think I needed to, so I thought I'd write about it here. It's also an excuse to post something because I haven't updated this blog in months.
I've never thought of myself as fat. I don't recall anyone calling me fat or making fun of my weight. If you passed me on the street, "fat" would not be a word you'd use to describe me.
But I have been carrying a little extra weight for a long time. After a certain age, if you look at photos of me with my three brothers, you can tell that I'm proportionally the heaviest. I've never been ashamed of my weight or embarrassed to be seen without a shirt, but when I look in the mirror I think I wouldn't mind losing a few pounds. No one's ever called me fat, but a couple of people whose opinions I care about and who meant well have told me that I'd be more attractive if I lost a little bit of weight. 155 pounds at five-foot-six isn't considered unhealthy, but it's a little high for someone who doesn't work on their muscle.
In other words, it's never been a health concern and has never bothered me enough to make a significant lifestyle change. Every once in a while I decide to start going to the gym in the off season when I'm not working, but boating season starts again and work eats twelve hours a day five days a week, it's hard to put any meaningful amount of time into exercise and still have hobbies and see friends. Or maybe those are excuses and I just don't like it. Over the years I've made some changes to what I eat, and those I've kept up with - I've been eating fewer processed foods and smaller amounts of sugar. But those relatively minor changes weren't having an effect.
A few months ago I read that cutting fat is 100% down to "calories in, calories out". To put it simply, if you want to lose weight, it doesn't matter how much you exercise if you're eating too much. Of course it's much more complex than that if you have specific health goals or want to build muscle mass, but if you already eat relatively healthily and just want to lose a few pounds, that's all there is to it.
At the same time the MyFitnessPal app was recommended to me. You punch in your current weight, your target weight, and when you want to get to your target, and it'll tell you how many calories you should eat each day. It also has a huge database of foods and nutrition information to make it easy to see what's in the food you eat. If you want to be really accurate you'll need a food scale, but you can get those for $20 or less.
This app is pretty much 100% responsible for my weight loss. Once I started accurately tracking my meals and snacks, I realized that what I was eating wasn't the problem - the issue was how much I was eating. All I had to do was pay attention to portion sizes and stop eating when I hit my daily limit. There's a bar code scanner, so most of the time I don't even have to search for what I'm looking for - just scan the code, punch in the weight, and that's it. And for pre-portioned foods (like a single-serving yogurt cup) I don't even have to input the weight. If I knew it could be this easy I would have done it years ago.
The best part is that I'm not dealing with any big restrictions. I can still split a pizza or go for drinks after work every once in a while as long as I make sure to stick to my limits most of the time (though it's even better if I plan ahead and work that stuff in). On the other hand, the biggest challenge was that I was really hungry for the first few days of eating less, but I got used to it. If I get hungry when it's not food time or I've already hit my limit, I drink some water.
In the last month a lot of people have told me I'm looking good and asked me if I've lost weight. I have - about ten pounds so far. But despite the compliments and the numbers I wasn't feeling like I was making any significant progress, probably because I've been seeing less progress in the mirror day-to-day than people who have gone a month without seeing me.
Today, though, I put on my belt and it felt too big. I had to tighten it a notch. Maybe I'm not seeing the progress with my eyes, but I felt it this morning.
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