Category: Uncategorized

 

My weight loss has now reached the point of being boring.  To me, I mean.  I’ve always been able to bore other people with it.

In any case, as I pass 90 pounds lost, two months after I passed 80 pounds lost, all I need do is rewrite the prior post, plugging in the current numbers.

This morning I weighed 205 195 pounds.  So I’m calling it 80 90 pounds lost, in just under a year and a half, since I embarked on this course back in September 2023.  My BMI is now just under 28 over 26.  If I can lose another 20 10 pounds, I’ll finally make it to the upper limit of “normal” weight.

Otherwise, I just seem to have settled down to a sustainable routine.

I have posted on this topic before.

This post summarizes a few more things that I didn’t expect from losing that much weight.

 

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1:  Wardrobe turnover speeds up as you get thinner.

Socks, gloves, and hats are the only clothing I retain from my obese days.  Everything else has gone to the thrift shop/rag bag.  Underwear, outerwear, and all that fits between.  And shoes, as my old shoes were both too loose and too stiff-soled for a lighter me.

At first, passing along my now-oversized clothes was kind of exciting.  It wasn’t merely the positive reinforcement.  It felt a bit risky to get rid of my 2XL stuff.  The promise being that I’d never again need it.

But it’s edging into pain-in-the-(less-voluminous)-butt territory.  It seems to me that, far from settling down as I near my target weight of 185, the pace of change has sped up.  I’m getting rid of too-large jeans that I bought new, maybe half a year ago.  Ditto for putting holes in belts that I know I’ve modified recently.

Turns out, that’s not an illusion.  A little simple (?) calculus shows that, for a constant monthly weight loss, your reduction in waist size speeds up as your waist gets smaller.

Formally, model the male torso as cylinder of fat, of radius R.  Belt size is the circumference of the cylinder, 2πR.  Your weight is proportional to πR²H, the volume of the cylinder of height H.  Calculus tells us that the derivative of weight with respect to radius (d(πR²H)/dR = 2πRH.  That is, it’s proportionate to your belt size.  So, if I lose the same amount of weight every month, I have to lose more inches off my waist at a lower belt size, than at a higher one.  Bottom line, between where I started (46″) and now (36″), if I continue to lose weight at a constant five pounds per month, I now have to re-size my clothes about 25% more often (46/36 =~ 1.25). 

It’s not a huge effect, but it’s dead opposite of what I expected.  I expected the changes to slow down as I approached my target weight.  But, in fact, if the weight loss occurs at a constant 5 pounds per month — a consequence of aiming for a roughly 500 calorie deficit each day — wardrobe changes speed up a bit as I get thinner.

That’s just a consequence of there being less of me, to contribute to the five-pounds-a-month weight loss.

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2:  I enjoyed my last gym workout.

I recognize the above as a properly constructed sentence.

But I do not recognize it as anything I was ever likely to say.  Nor, to my certain knowledge, had I ever said anything remotely like that in the past.

Until my last trip to the gym where, after doing some token weight-lifting, I did the ultimate old-guy thing.  I spent an enjoyable, low-intensity hour on the elliptical, sweating in time to the oldies.  Courtesy of:

Post #2097: Ripping thrifted CDs.

Anyway, between the weight loss, and the obvious beneficial knock-on effects on (e.g.) the bones of my feet, being in better shape, and eating adequate protein, I’m feeling pretty chipper, physically.

Post #2023: Protein supplements and building muscle mass.

I’ve never hugely disliked going to the gym.  I’ve been doing it all my adult life.

But this whole enjoying-the-workout thing is a new one on me.

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Conclusion:  Sometimes boring is good.

I have no diet secrets to offer you.  At this point, I think there are no diet secrets.

Weight loss is all about calories eaten, versus calories burned.  From that standpoint, all calories are equal, and it makes no difference what you eat.  Only how much.  There are no magic weight-loss foods.

Your new diet is forever.  If I go back to eating as I used to eat, I’ll go back to weighing what I used to weigh.  With the obvious-but-needs-to-be-stated corollary that it doesn’t matter how long it takes, as long as you get there.

Your tastes will change.  Or, more properly for me, my cravings changed. I’d heard people say that would happen, but I absolutely did not believe it until it happened to me.  I still like all the foods that I used to eat, back when I was fat.  But I don’t eat them now.  And, importantly, I don’t miss them.  I don’t crave them.

Slip into your new diet slowly, by identifying and correcting the worst dietary faults first.  For me, this started with eliminating booze.  Once I was sober, then my habit of eating “starch bomb” meals (e.g., bowl-of-pasta) was clearly next up on the had-to-go list.  So that went.  And so on.  Until I eventually got to how and what I eat now (mostly salads, fruits, whey protein, lean meat, non-starchy cooked vegetables.  And cheese.

But that’s me. A life without cheese is a life not well-lived.

But you?  You eat whatever and however you want, as long as you keep within your calorie limit.  And, eventually, you’ll get smart enough to avoid the foods that make that hard for you to do that.  You’ll figure out what works for you, over time.  You evolve your own diet.

Lose two ounces a day.  Aim for no more than a pound a week weight loss.  Use an on-line calculator to determine your daily calorie needs as a sedentary person.  (See below for accounting for exercise).  Subtract 500 from that to get your daily calorie target.  Eat that many calories, roughly.  Assess the accuracy of that estimated 500-calorie-a-day calorie deficit by crudely tracking your weight and monitoring your level of hunger.

You’ll get a lot of dieting advice on eating specific foods, and avoiding others.  Some diets want you to exclude entire food groups (e.g., no carbs, no fat, etc.).

That sort of extreme skewing of your food mix may work for you.  But what works for me is eating a balanced diet, with just three twists.

First, everyone agrees that you should avoid “starchy carbs” or “refined carbs”.  I’ll agree, to the extent that any servings of that need to be kept small.  So, I still eat bread, but only in the form of the occasional 100-calorie slider roll.  But I no longer eat pasta, even though that was a mainstay in my obese days.  In any case, large portions of simple carbs mess up your metabolism.  An hour later and you’ll be hungry again, metaphorically speaking.

Metabolism-wise, having a big portion of some high-glycemic-index food is not doing yourself any favors.  Doing that routinely, even more so.

Second, savory “ultra-processed” foods — I’d guess Doritos are the poster child there — I cannot have in the house.  Because, even after all this time, I’ll binge them if they are around.  Hilariously enough, artificially-cheese-flavored rice cakes fall into this category.  Rice cakes?  They are only 45 calories each, but I end up inhaling them if I start eating them.

Compare that to, say, a nice, savory cabbage soup.  Even though I make a fine cabbage soup, somehow I seem to have no trouble, whatsoever, stopping after one bowl of cabbage soup.  It’s tasty.  Sometimes it’s borderline delicious, in a cruciform-vegetable kind of way.  But it just doesn’t hot-wire my brain and light it up the way the artificial cheese flavor does, in those rice cakes.

So, I respect my limit and just don’t go near the stuff.

Third, as noted, I use whey protein powder as a significant source of low-calorie protein.   Otherwise, with so few calories available daily, to meet the USDA protein recommendation, I’d have to eat nothing but meat.  More-or-less.

In particular, I have found “protein pudding” (the Jello variant) over frozen berries to be a mainstay of my diet.  It tastes like sweet chocolate ice cream, but provides as much protein as a serving of meat.  I also put the flavored stuff in my coffee, in lieu of milk or other coffee creamer.

I offer no apology for resorting to these artificial products (whey powder, Jello sugar-free pudding).  Without them I’d have a hard time meeting both my daily calorie maximum (~1700 calories) and my daily protein minimum (1 gram protein per KG body weight).

Post #2021: Animal-based protein supplements, digested.

Beyond that, I just eat in small amounts.  Space those out over the day.  Absolutely standard diet advice.  So I eat three or four small (300-calorie) items (e.g., salad with salad dressing), plus three or four 100-calorie snacks (e.g., an apple).  Plus however much cheating I feel comfortable with that day.  And makeup calories for any extra burned at the gym.  All with an eye toward eating an average of about 500 calories a day less than what I need to maintain my weight.

Exercise calories are accounted for separately, as I do it.  On days when I exercise at the gym, I eat to make up for those additional calories spent.  (But note that you must net out your basal metabolic rate from whatever calorie count you get for a given exercise.  E.g., if I burn 600 calories in an hour on the elliptical exerciser, I get to eat an additional 400 calories of food that day.  The 200/hour slippage is the calories I’d have burnt in that hour merely by being up and about — calories already accounted for in the “sedentary calorie need” calculation done at the very start.

Practically speaking, this adds a whole new dimension of “bonus” to exercise.  I get to eat more, on a gym day.  Not hugely more.  Ideally, only as much more (in calories) as I burned at the gym.

And that’s it.  No secrets.  Aim for slow weight loss.  No alcohol.  Avoid large servings of anything with a high glycemic index.  Eat lots of fruits and non-starchy vegetables.  Get plenty of roughage.

Lift weights to keep up your muscle mass as you diet.  Eat a gram of protein a day per kilogram of body weight.

In hindsight, all I’ve done is follow standard, mainstream dieting advice.

But only as a last resort.

 

Snow day today.

No need to shovel it, is my guess.  Rain and above-freezing temps should take care of it in short order.  Streets are already clear, as shown.

This, in contrast to the last one, where the snow and ice hung around owing to the much colder weather.

It’s shaping up to be just a short-lived covering of the snow-sleet-rain-freezing rain-drizzle delight that is  “wintry mix”.

It’ll soon be gone.  Let it be.  Plus, I don’t much feel like shoveling.

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Part 1:  Fire

Wood.  Think of it as natural gas’s costlier, stinkier, noisier, whinier cousin. Just in case you were thinking how lovely it might be to heat with wood.

Sure, wood is a perfectly usable home heating fuel, if you’ve got an appliance to burn it in.  Which I do, in the form of a modern fireplace insert.

But I thought over the pros and cons, and in my situation, I decided against burning wood for home heating.  For a lot of reasons.

But now I’m back to burning firewood, to heat a part of my house.  In the burbs.

When, in theory, the same part of my house could be heated quite nicely with gas-fired hot-water baseboard heat.  Run off a 95% efficient boiler, yet.

Heating with wood, in the circumstances as described, is every bit as dumb as it sounds, from any number of perspectives, including but not limited to cost, outdoor air quality, indoor air quality, convenience, noise level, waste disposal, required routine maintenance, and so on.

In this context, wood has maybe three saving graces.  The big visible fire in a modern glass-fronted wood stove looks nice.  As a fuel, it has lower carbon footprint than natural gas or (in my area) electricity. (The wood I burn was atmospheric C02 just 10 years ago, on average, based on a typical 30-year-old tree limb or trunk in my firewood.  But due consideration must be given to the (very large, very brief) atmospheric warming effects of the resulting soot emissions.) And, third, it’s robust emergency heat. 

I’m burning wood because my gas-fired baseboard heating system is busted.  And that system, alone (no heat pumps) heats the ground-level (den) of the house.  A pipe in that hot-water baseboard heating system froze and burst, during the recent cold snap.  Not the first time this particular pipe has done so.  But until I feel like peeling the siding off that corner of the house to get to it, that system is going to stay broken.

In any case, the fire inside a modern glass-fronted wood stove is a practical thing of beauty.  Looks nice, and your toes can get toasty in front of it.  But all things considered, out here in the ‘burbs, I think it’s best to treat it as an occasional luxury.  And, rarely, use it as true emergency heat.

Or, as I’m using it now,  heat when you have no reasonable alternative.

Wood heat is both a chore and a health burden on you and others.  Burning it all day, every day, makes little sense in my circumstances.

 

 

Part 2:  Fat.  A brief essay an aerobic exercise after significant healthy weight loss, for a 66-year-old guy.

Thanks to 80 pounds of weight loss, I can now do some aerobic exercises “like a younger me”, so to speak.

This has a tinge of the surreal to it, because I still feel like an old man.  Practically speaking, the only way in which I feel lighter is when going up and down stairs.  Arguably, my joints hurt less now (than they did when I was obese).  And my feet.  But in general, the whole apparatus — my muscoloskeletal system — still creaks and cracks and groans and aches.  As does, metaphorically, the rest of me.

The upshot is that you kind of turn back the clock …

… but only on your level of fitness.

The jalopy runs faster after a tune-up.  But it remains a jalopy.

Objectively — and not exactly a high bar — for any sort of aerobic or strength-to-weight exercise, I’m a lot more fit now than I have been for decades.  But I still feel like an old man.

Never dealt with that combination before.  I can’t find any one word that quite describes the experience.

 

And I can choose an end point?

Really?

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Shouldn’t a successful end-of-diet be, at most, a once-in-a-lifetime experience?

I’ve never had a diet succeed before, so how I am supposed to know what success looks like?  Metrics.  I need some metrics.  Am I there yet?

Or, more gently, it appears I’ve never given this whole end-of-diet thing much thought.

Which, again, is entirely reasonable.  A chronically overweight individual might experience dieting” or “diets” repeatedly, but, ideally, any one such individual would only need to experience successful end-of-diet once in a lifetime.

Put another way, if the weight loss is sustainable, then, by definition, it’s not something you need to do twice in a lifetime.

But, beyond the obvious — the dietary changes must be permanent — I guess I hadn’t really thought about it much.

It, being, effectively, the dietary hereafter.

I am unprepared to state a good end point for my diet, for at least two reasons.

First, and most obviously, I never thought I’d get to this point.  That, based on a life-long history of failed diets.

Second, in the heat of battle, you’re not focused on the ensuing peace.  To be losing weight at a steady clip is enough.  Where to stop?  Beyond my planning horizon.

In any case, if you start off fat enough, as far as weight is concerned, down is good.  Subject to not trashing yourself.  So things are simple.

But the idea that I might be able to choose and keep the end point?   Pick a weight/body type, within reason?  That really hasn’t quite registered yet.

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Is big-boned a myth?

Let’s just stop right there.

Can I choose?   To what extent can I choose?

Can I actually, within some range, choose a body-type (for want of better term) at which I end up, with this diet?

Or, by contrast, aren’t some people just sort of naturally fat?

BMI aside:

To clarify, I’m not talking about the well-known discrepancy between BMI and body fat for (e.g.) body builders.  Let me just grant that some people are “big boned”, defined as low body fat despite high BMI. 

But.

But, first, that doesn’t mean that I was big-boned.  Though that was always a comforting way to dismiss some of my life-long excess weight.  But it’s the rare person that would be the significant exception. 

Body builders are well aware of the issue.  But hoi polloi rarely have the heavy musculature (or, I guess, big bones) that would put them far outside normal BMI guidelines.

 

Or maybe your fat is like an ice cube.

I always thought I was kind of naturally fat.  As a fat person, naturally.

But now I’m beginning to accept an alternative hypothesis.  Maybe my fat is like an ice cube.  It’ll melt, if I keep up the heat long enough.  In this case, if I keep up a modest calorie deficit long enough.

Maybe to a close approximation, your body fat percentage is just the long-term residual between energy intake and energy expenditure.  No more, no less.

Like a glacier.

But, I do not now wish to make the same logical mistake in reverse.  Maybe, all throughout my life, my body fat percentage could have been adjusted within a fairly wide range.  That’s no evidence that everybody’s fat works like that.

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Conclusion

 

That’s quite enough diet therapy for one day.

It was enough to discover that I really don’t have a good idea of what end-of-diet is like.  I get the fact that your eating patterns must remain permanently changed.

Beyond that, I never thought about it much.  Never had to.

For now, “down is good” is all I need to know, about my weight.  I’m under 30% body fat, by several estimates, but not by much.  I haven’t even reached the upper cutoff for healthy weight (20% body fat) per NIH.

Body fat percentage points erode slowly.  Chance of overshoot is slim.

But now that my diet may be ending of its own accord (or not, we’ll see), it’s time to get up to speed on the topic of where best to stop, if you have the luxury of choosing the end point.

 

An addendum contrary to the laws of Nature.

 

Weirdly, the only piece of diet puzzle that doesn’t fit is that, to the best of my recollection, the last time I weighed 185 was when I was in high school.

So, I can weigh no more than I weighed in high school, if I want to have a normal weight?  That’s per the NIH BMI chart.

Odder still, I might actually be able to weigh that, at age 66, while being in good health?  That should occur if I can manage to maintain a daily calorie deficit of about 500 calories, for another few months.

Something about all of that seems unreasonable.

Contrary to the laws of nature or something.  That older inexorably means fatter.

But until I come up with something better, that’s the goal.

Funny how a round number becomes a hard target.

 

After losing a total of 80 pounds, at a steady rate of five pounds a month, my weight loss has stopped.

I reached 205 in the middle of January.  I still weigh about that.  I have not yet glimpsed 200 on the scale.

 

Is this because:

A)  In some mysterious and unspecified way I have permanently slowed my metabolism by dieting, and thus am now doomed never to reach “normal” weight of 185 pounds? Do I simply now have a slow metabolism?

B) My body simply wants to be 205 pounds.  (Though, if so, I wish it had spoken up sooner.)  And so, nothing I could ever stand to do will ever get my weight below that “natural” level.  I am now doomed never to reach a “normal” weight of 185 pounds?  Am I simply “naturally fat”?

OR …

C) I’ve been eating too much.

After checking with the oracle, all indications point to C.

Edit 3/5/2025:  Weight loss resumed when I stopped eating too much. I’m now under 200 pounds and on track for a target weight of 185 sometime around the end of May. 

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Teaspoons are tablespoons, and other things that suck about dieting.

Above, that’s a 300 calorie peanut butter sandwich.  It consists of a slider roll (about 3″ in diameter) and two tablespoons of peanut butter.  I know the sandwich contains exactly two level tablespoons of peanut butter, because I took the time to measure it.

The peanut butter is the thin brown line barely visible between the two halves of the roll.

I was appalled by this sandwich.  First, by how little peanut butter that was.  But mostly, by how much peanut butter I had been routinely using, of late, when I made one of those freehand, without measuring anything.

And as goes peanut butter, so go most of the portions I’ve been eyeballing.

A common teaspoon, in the silverware drawer, is typically about a tablespoon, in terms of its capacity.  My coffee cup (mug) is more than two “coffee cups” worth of coffee.  My smallest soup bowl, comfortably full, holds about a bowl-and-a-half, as calorie lists typically equate “a bowl of soup” to mean an 8-ounce cup.

I knew all of that, intellectually.  But, somehow, of late, I’d been turning a blind eye to it.

Funny how your mind will play tricks on you.

Particularly if you want it to.

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Recalibrating and downshifting

I have committed that most basic sin of long-term weight loss, portion creep.  This is such a common thing that essentially all guides to long-term weight loss tell you to guard against it.  If you don’t routinely measure everything, then once in a while you need to do that, if only to remind yourself of what the portions of food should be, to match the calorie counts you’re using.

To be clear, portion creep doesn’t occur at random.  It has not, for example, inflated the amount of lettuce I eat weekly.  I have not suddenly been faced with a large weekly bill for cabbage or cucumbers.

Instead, the fact that portion creep only occurs for high-calorie, typically high-fat foods, tells me that this is not simply sloppiness.  It’s my brain, working to sabotage me.

And so, for a week or two, I’ll be measuring out “the good stuff”, meaning, energy-dense foods.  Things that are high in fat, mostly, but also starches.  Just enough to remind myself of what the actual portions are, that correspond to the calorie counts I’ve been using.

It’s also worth nothing that the problem items are energy-dense foods that don’t naturally come in fixed quantities.  Of which peanut butter and salad dressing are the poster children.  But also including cheese, meat, and some soups.

In the end, this is just the flip side of the volumetrics approach to dieting.  With volumetrics, you eat lots of items with low calorie density (calories per ounce).  Which boils down to non-starchy vegetables, fruits, and a smattering of other items.

More lettuce.  Less salad dressing.

It’s not rocket science.

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Conclusion:  We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Source:  Amazon.

After more than a year, and 80 pounds of weight loss, my diet has ground to a halt.

I’d love to blame my metabolism.  Or my genes.  Bad luck.  Astrological sign.  Tariffs.  Republicans.

Anything but point the finger at myself.

But the fact is, weight loss at this pace is based on just a 500-calorie-per-day energy deficit.  And it doesn’t take much screw that up.  A heavy hand with a few high-calorie foods will do it.

So, maybe this is the end of my weight loss.  Maybe not.  Maybe these excess calories are merely the symptom of my body finally getting tired of losing weight.  Maybe I won’t be able to stand going back to a true 1500 calories a day or so.

There’s only one way to find out.  And that’s to be strict about everything I eat, for a while, and see if the weight loss picks back up.  Or see if I’ve reached the end of my diet.