93 pounds down. 7 to go. It feels like hubris to say that.
I should hit my goal of 185 pounds on or about 5/23/2025.
At that point, I’ll eat a little more.
That’s it. That’s the end of my weight loss saga.
At least, that’s the plan.
I lost my ass over the winter, and now my glasses look funny.
Every time I think I’m done making adjustments to my weight loss, something else turns up.
First, I need new porch furniture.
To me, padding and rain exposure just don’t go together.
I used to wonder what kind of people wanted their outdoor furniture to be padded.
Well, the butt is on the other cheek now, let me tell you.
My plain un-padded outdoor chairs are no longer comfortable. With the twist that I didn’t realize my porch furniture hurt, until the weather warmed up. So arguably, that wasn’t true last Fall. Or, at least, as much.
Apparently, I lost my ass over the winter, and didn’t notice until now.
I need new glasses. My eyeglasses appear cartoonishly large, on my now-thinner face. They looked just fine on the old fat me. So, add glasses to shoes, as items I didn’t realize I’d need to replace, once I’d lost weight.
Finally, for the first time in my life, I’m developing muscle definition. Until recently, I had only known that concept in theory, but not in practice. Weightlifting, yes. Visible muscle boundaries, no.
So it never dawned on me that getting thinner would give me muscle definition. Which, I now realize, is more about lack of body fat that it is about sheer muscle mass.
And “muscle definition”, broadly defined, turns out to be by far the easiest way to gauge my level of body fat. Take a selfie and compare it, as objectively as possible, to a gallery of men with known body fat percentage. Like this one, from Athleanx.com. Ideally, these are pictures of shirtless men arrayed by measured body fat percentage (e.g., measured via DXA). Just figure out where you fit, with some allowance for natural variation.
Right now I can tell where my rib cage is, but I cannot see a rib. That puts me in the low 20 percents, per the above. That image-based assessment lines up nicely with my BMI (just above “normal”), and with the Navy-method quick estimate of body fat percentage using neck and waist measurements.
My body fat level when I started this weight loss would is off this chart. While this spectrum doesn’t go high enough to capture my watermelon-belly former self, other similar internet-based galleries do.
The whole loose-skin thing.
Yep, I have that. In all of its manifestations. It is a known and predicted consequence of significant weight loss that afterwards, you have too much skin.
It doesn’t help that I’m 66 years old.
I’ve gotten stretch marks, crepe-papering, chicken-skin, and some mid-scale wrinkling and folding. But, thankfully, nothing even approaching “apron belly”.
The whole loose-skin package would be unattractive on anyone, but but there’s a certain undeniable synergy with age. Pile fat-loss wrinkly skin on top of normal aging, and it first amps up, then exceeds, the look of oldness, pushing it all the way to oddness.
As a bonus, my veins are more prominent, owing to reduced subcutaneous fat. Because what old person doesn’t want that super-veiny-skin look?
Seriously, I’ve lost a foot off my waist, though not as pictured above. If the worst fallout from that is an ugly lower abdomen, that’s fair. I’ll wear a rash guard at the beach.
I may never take my shirt off in public again.
The world will have to suffer the loss.
My sustainable routine, or where I ended up.
Source: Verywell Health.
Weight loss via diet-and-exercise is obsolete, owing to widespread availability of effective weight-loss drugs. So I think we can file this under “nobody cares.
I’m going to document it anyway.
How have I maintained a 500-calorie-a-day deficit, for more than a year? I didn’t start out trying to lose weight. I eased into my current routine, first by correcting my worst dietary sins, e.g., after eliminating alcohol, phasing pasta and rice out of my life. Then, once I had made my mind up that moderate sustained calorie restriction is the way to go, it was just a question of whatever-works combined with any-way-to-get-through-the day.
After a few months of messing about with that, I realized that I had more-or-less re-invented some widely-accepted rules for losing weight.
But I did it my way.
Answer: I eat all the time. But never much at once. A hundred calories here, 300 calories there, as the spirit moves you. Allowing time to digest, in between. Little bowls, plates, and snacks, spaced out over the course of the day. Rarely over 350 calories at a time, never over 400. Always in the context of making it through the day on (currently) 1700 calories or fewer.
Answer: I eat almost no starch or sugar. The point of which is to avoid ping-ponging your metabolism. First the sugar rush — the big “postprandial glycemic response” — the big rise in blood sugar and insulin that a big starchy meal will produce. And then the hunger, an hour or two afterward, as your metabolism unwinds all that.
So, no pasta, rice, ramen, or noodles at all. No candy or cakes. Bread, only in the form of the occasional 100-calorie slider roll. I still like all that stuff, mind you. But I don’t crave it now that I don’t eat it. And I don’t eat it, because I can’t stick to my modest daily calorie restriction if I do.
I still eat a lot of carbs. But my carbs have slid down the glycemic index spectrum now. I eat fruit. And beans. I eat carbs that are more slowly absorbed, and even then, never more than about 100 calories of carbs at one sitting.
Answer: I do not buy foods that have been clearly engineered for extreme tastiness (e.g., Doritos). None. Even now, after all this weight loss, there are certain foods that I cannot have in the house, else I’ll binge on them. Just in case anything breaks through my general avoidance of grains and potatoes, due to the high fraction of calories delivered as starch.
The most recent example was artificially-cheese-flavored rice cakes. Which are really popcorn cakes, per the ingredients. Harmless, low-calorie snacks. Sounds like a joke, but was not. If I have them in the house, I eat them, and not in a leisurely fashion.
Answer: I satisfy half my daily protein requirements with whey protein powder. Not because I’m fond of it, but because it’s low-calorie and (in some formulations, cholesterol-free) quality dairy-derived protein.
If I didn’t do that, with as few calories as I can eat, to hit my daily protein target, I’d be eating meat all day long. I’d end up with a diet consisting of things-that-contain-lots-of-protein, and little else.
I use it as coffee creamer and in chocolate pudding. I use the sweetened-flavored whey protein powder as one would coffee creamer, and so get a full serving of protein every morning with my coffee, taking care not to curdle the protein slurry in my coffee cup, as I slowly add the hot coffee. And I use the un-flavored whey powder to make (the chocolate sugar-free Jello version of) “protein pudding”. Served over frozen fruit, this makes an ice-cream-like dessert that gives you as much protein as a serving of meat.
The resulting menus look a bit odd, as we do not think of a sweet drink or sweet dessert as a protein source. But, nutritionally, each serving of whey powder provides as much protein as a quarter-pound of hamburger.
I have only one serious concern about whey powder: Emulsifiers. Of the three I’ve tried so far, all have emulsifiers, so I’m betting this stuff is un-mixable without added emulsifiers. Without getting into the details, I think that eating emulsifiers is bad for your health, owing to the resulting thinning of the protective mucous lining of the GI tract. Not that any small amount means trouble, but surely that less is better, and plausibly, that lots is bad.
The rest of the crap that comes with consuming whey protein powder — the sweetening and flavoring of it — either packed with the whey, or provided by Jello — none of that is anything I’m proud to be eating. But neither is it anything I’m particularly worried about. Nor do I stress about the cornstarch in the Jello pudding mix.
The resulting daily menus look odd. It’s a meal-less menu. Instead, little portions of food are consumed, every couple of hours, over the course of the day. Not a “full meal” in sight. The only planned elements are the protein in the coffee in the morning, and a good-night snack of nice, high-fat cheese. (Otherwise, the diet is quite fat-deficient.)
Lurking in the background are some zero-calorie items (coffee, diet soda), a multi-vitamin every day, sometimes some patent medicines for my joints, and a daily dose of Metamucil (accept no substitutes).
Otherwise, I try to eat a balanced diet, heavy on fruits and vegetables. Get enough protein. Get regular exercise.
And that’s it. That’s the secret to my weight loss.
This snack-your-way-through-the-day approach, plus regular exercise, is how I managed to lose 90 pounds. Going on 100.
Maybe one more point: Feedback loop.
With weight loss this slow, and methods so vague, how do you even know you’re losing weight? How do you know your calorie target is about right? And so on.
Sometimes it will be obvious, like downsizing your clothes. But that occurs at a slow (multi-month) scale. Shirts (2Xl to L over 18 months = half a year per clothing size). Pants (46 to 36 / 18 = ~four months per 2-inch waist increment).
At this slow rate of loss, my weight scale is noisy. My weight varies a lot from day to day, for reasons not terribly relevant to long-term weight loss. E.g., salt consumption the prior day, overall level of hydration, or whatnot. Even now, with as steady a diet as I can muster, my “water weight” — defined here empirically as any transient, day-to-few-days, multi-pound weight gain or loss — typically swings 2 or 3 pounds in either direction. So there’s that much “noise” masking a hoped-for underlying daily weight loss of a 2 or 3 ounces.
I won’t even talk about the real downside of the scale, because it blessedly does not apply to me now. But in a past life, if a diet had been going poorly, and the constant starvation was driving my crazy, and I was ready to quit anyways due to to the general futility of life, a senselessly bad weigh-in could shove me right off the diet, and back into my prior eating habits.
But it is what it is. All you can do is deal with it. To damp down the noise, but keep the data current, I purposefully track the lowest weight I’ve seen, and see how long it takes to beat it.
I don’t so much weigh myself as watch weight milestones pass. For example, I would sure like to see 190 this month. Lowest observed so far is 192. If I’m still losing weight, I’ll eventually catch a fleeting 190 on the scale. That’ll turn into a frequent 190. And then, next month (May), I hope to bid it goodbye, never to be seen again, as I start looking for a glimpse of 185.
It’s a different, but appropriate, reaction time-frame. But it means that if you do stop losing weight, it’ll be a couple of weeks before you know it, at least. And ditto, if you do start losing weight again. It’s slow, but the way things are. The signal of weight loss only emerges after some time.
At any rate, if your weight plateaus, figure out why, and adjust. Again, standard diet advice. (Subject to not going to below accepted minimum daily calorie thresholds, which seem to be in the 1500 down to perhaps 1200 for guys.)
Quality of sleep provides one final feedback on adequacy of calorie intake. If I eat too little, I get a restless night’s sleep, and wake early and hungry. By contrast, if I’m not somewhat hungry when I get up, I know I over-ate the day before. For me, paying attention to that helps me know that 1700 calories a day is about right, right now, for me.
The point is that none of this is a lucky shot in the dark. Seek feedback, and adjust accordingly.
Nothing but classic mainstream diet advice.
Conclusion
Dieting is supposed to get harder as you go along. At least, I thought that was the conventional wisdom.
But this one has settled into an easy marathon. I feel like I could continue this until I starve myself to death. Albeit at the rate of 2 ounces a day.
Left to my own devices, all I managed to do was to discover that mainstream, conventional diet wisdom is more-or-less correct. As long as I restrict my calories just a bit, and so burn just a little more energy than is in the food I eat, my body will play nice, and make up the difference more-or-less painlessly. At a glacial pace of loss, for sure. But that’s another way of saying that weight loss occurs at a nice, slow, steady rate. With little enough in the way of unsatisfied hunger that I can do this as a matter of routine, for months on end.
I’ve been burning an average of maybe two ounces of fat, a day. For a year and a half. Beyond having the patience to do this (and the freedom to eat any way you please), all the art was in finding some way that I could stand to do that, day after day, month after month.
Any way you can do that is fine. This is what worked for me.
My only regret is that I didn’t do this 40 years ago.
