A further few observations on losing a bunch of weight. This will be the last I write on this topic unless and until I reach some new weight milestone.
Wardrobe turnover
Say you’ve lost a bunch of weight. Your existing wardrobe is too big. The decision to get rid of all your “fat” clothes is best characterized as (select all that apply):
- Fraught
- Foolish
- Premature
- Hubris
- Necessary
- Confident
- Egotistical
- Bold
- Reinforcing
I’m going for fraught but necessary hubris.
To take those armloads of tent-sized shirts and pants to the thrift shop, I have to be able to tell myself that I’m never going to need those again. That, despite all historical evidence to the contrary.
During my most recent trip, I realized that I no longer buy clothes at the thrift shop.
I rent them.
As I turned in my last batch of 2XL clothes, and bought some XL clothes to replace them, I realize that if all goes well, in another half-a-year to a year, I’ll be returning those XLs to the thrift shop.
Now that’s hubris.
What do you say when somebody asks whether you’ve lost some weight?
“No, you just remember me as being fatter than I was.”
I stole that line from my oldest brother.
You have to say it with a completely straight face, and then move on as quickly as possible.
How does a eunuch enjoy a harem?
Seriously, strolling the boardwalk at the beach becomes less-than-pointless when you can’t eat the junk food. Restaurant meals just make your life harder. Fast food? There is no acceptable fast-food.
I can work around it, but after the first 40 pounds or so, I just stopped trying.
Finding a plausible stopping point.
At 230 pounds and six feet tall, I’m still obese by any measure you’d care to apply.
The striking thing is that, at around a pound a week, weight loss is agonizingly slow.
After 11 months of steady weight loss, I plausibly have another year to go.
The good news is, for the first time in my life, I seem to have some choice in the matter.
For me, the natural set of weight-loss stopping points boil down to:
- 220 — no longer obese, merely overweight.
- 195 — body fat percentage below 20% (estimated), upper bound on healthy.
- 185 — no longer overweight, merely normal weight.
If I’m shooting for “healthy”, I’m just over the half-way point. Arguably, I have another year to go, eating about 500 calories a day less than I burn.
A brief guide to dieting misinformation.
To understand dieting hype, you have to distinguish two very different situations under which a diet might be tested.
Option 1: You’re locked in a cage, and you eat exactly what the diet specifies.
Option 2: You’re not locked in a cage, so you must choose to eat what the diet specifies.
Under Option 1 — a rigidly controlled trial of a dieting –– the overwhelming preponderance of evidence says that the only thing that matters, to any material degree, is calories eaten versus calories burned.
You name the supposedly “easier” way to lose weight, and I’ll show you the clinical trial that showing that the only thing that matters is calories. Eating breakfast helps you lose weight? Nope. Eating only (fill-in-the-blank) or totally avoiding (fill-in-the-blank) helps you lose weight. Nope. Eating your calories early in the day helps you lose weight? Nope.
Under Option 2 — free-range dieting — the same thing is true, as a matter of physics. But there’s the added nuance that you have to be able to adhere to the diet voluntarily.
And so, in the real world — Option 2 — all of the sensible dieting literature boils down to the claim that eating a certain way will help you voluntarily eat fewer calories than you burn. None of it bypasses the basic physics of calories eaten versus calories burned.
It’s all about supposed ways to ease the pain of dieting. And secondarily, about way to avoid “slowing the metabolism”, that is, having your body react to reduced calories by becoming, in effect, more efficient.
If being in a diet is like being locked in a cage, then in the real world, the sad fact is that the key to the lock is always in your pocket. Claims about the superiority of this or that diet boil down claims that this or that approach makes it easier for you to keep yourself locked in that cage.
No carbs? No fat? High-volume/low-calorie-density foods? Many small meals? One-meal-per-day? Intermittent fasting? One day a week off the diet? Weight watchers and similar?
These have nothing to do with the immutable physics of conservation of energy. None of them changes the basic fact that to lose weight, you must eat fewer calories than you burn.
They are all about psychology. They are all attempts to minimize the pain of dieting. Nothing offers a shortcut.
And so, at first glance, even with in the sensible literature on dieting, you seem to be offered grossly conflicting advice. E.g., low-fat diet versus fat-centric keto diet. Eat many small meals versus one-meal-per-day.
But if you peel it back, nobody reasonable claims that their method shortcuts the basic physics of the situation. (Or, if they do, they’re wrong.) Instead, it’s a menu of methods, one of which might successfully ease the pain of dieting enough that you can stick with it and lose weight.
For what it’s worth, in this morass of seemingly-conflicting dieting advice, the only point of reference that everybody seems to agree on is that refined carbohydrates are a bad idea. Sugar, pasta, bread, and so on knock your metabolism off balance and stimulate hunger if consumed in large amounts.
Even the notorious “slowing of metabolism”, or worse, “permanently damaging your metabolism” appears to be mostly myth, as long as you avoid extreme levels of calorie restriction and aim for a slow rate of weight loss.
People who come close to starving to death, those with anorexia, and similar cases — those folks do, in fact, get permanently altered by that experience. Rapid weight loss a la The Biggest Loser? Yeah, maybe that can mess you up. (But maybe not — the evidence suggesting that was a post-hoc analysis of contestants — there was no analysis prior to the show, so maybe a lot of them got fat because they had an unnaturally slow metabolism to begin with.) Starting from (say) twice what your final weight needs to be? Sure, you might have some problems.
But for any situation far away from those extremes, it’s just a non-issue. For a healthy person, cutting a few hundred calories out of the diet, and so losing weight at a pound a week, “slowing my metabolism” isn’t worth thinking about.
My weight may “plateau” because I get tired of sticking to this level of calorie restriction. It may plateau because I need fewer calories as I get lighter, and I haven’t worked that into my plan. But the notion that you risk permanently damaging your metabolism through moderate calorie restriction is just not true.
Edit 9/23/2024: Hubris indeed. My weight has plateaued. I’ve been just above 225 since 9/1/2024. It’s not clear why.
Beyond that, it’s just a matter of finding something that works for you. There’s no way to violate conservation of energy.
And there really isn’t any conflicting dieting information, among all the mainstream methods for dieting.
There are only different paths to the sea.
