The full story behind my 50 pound weight loss
I hate dieting. No, that’s not right; I love to eat. I’m a foodie. When combined with high stress jobs, eating out way too much, and what my 23andMe profile states as “predisposed to weight more than average” I was destined to land at the start of my journey just shy of 230 pounds (104 kg). On top of that many members of my extended family are all 200+ and several over 300. As I write this about a year and a half later I’m right around 175 pounds (79 kg) and what I’ve learned along the way has been eye opening to say the least. This is my journey.
How I got to 230
As a kid I was one of those skinny fat people who could eat anything and everything, not exercise, and always stayed around the same weight. I’m just over 6 feet in height which helped but with age it all changed. In my 20s I put on 10 pounds. During my 30s I put on 20 pounds; accelerating in the last 2 years. After 40 I gained 30 pounds in 2 years.
In a way, weight was just numbers on a scale and didn’t really sink in. The thing that really hit me was clothes… I wore the same size pants from like age 11 until 30. Then added a size in the first half of 30s and another in the later half. Then another after 40.
I tried to stop it. I got a gym membership at 37 and religiously worked out 3 times per week even when I was on the road traveling. I thought I was eating healthy. My wife is pescatarian so I rarely ate meat and love every type of vegetable. Nothing seemed to stop the gain.
I finally had enough
Blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, enzymes… all turned bad very quickly after passing 200 pounds (and 100% returned to normal after I lost the weight). As I’ve wrote about before, my last job was literally killing me. I started a sabbatical to take a break and get healthy.
I went from working out 3 days per week to 5 days on sabbatical. I didn’t have stress any more but it still wasn’t working. Three months in I took a solo trip to Japan to spend my birthday catching with with friends. They didn’t hold back calling out how big I had gotten. My standard counter was that I felt great and was exercising all week long. But by the end of the trip and feeling ashamed with my friends, my pants were starting to get tight again.
That was my breaking point. I said there was no way in hell I was going out to buy all new, bigger, clothes. Again. Enough was enough. I didn’t know if I could actually lose the weight but I was fortunate enough to afford time off from my career. I had to try as I’d never get a chance like this again. Or die trying…
Floundering on my own
From the day I returned home from Japan I cut out all alcohol, ramped up my 5 day per week workout to 2.5 hours each time, and tried to diet. By diet, that meant not eating out much and probably starving myself. Intermittent fasting, lots of salads, and things that everyone online says are healthy. Water with lemon, avocados, oatmeal, chia, no deserts, etc. It was terrible.
But, it was having an effect. Over the next 3 months I lost 15 pounds. I was so upset. No drinking, no eat yummy food, hungry all the time, and spending my entire morning in the gym and only 15 fucking pounds! How was this sustainable?!?
Worse than that, barely anybody noticed the 15 pounds gone. I could barely notice myself. I still basically looked the same at 215 as I did at 230. Same clothes.
Seeking help
While I was floundering I tried to find folks on social media who seemed to be saying things that made sense logically and scientifically. I gotta say, there’s so much bullshit out there. And nearly everyone saying it is in their 20s when you can basically eat anything and work out for 12 weeks resulting in a great body. Plus corporate America is just out there to profit on your obesity; they don’t really want anyone to lose the weight or else they’d be out of business!
My favorite celebrities in this space are Dwayne Johnson and Chris Hemsworth. Both are very transparent that they have professional coaches and dieticians supporting them to look the way they do. Even today. Even after years they still have coaches helping them out. How the hell did I think I’d figure it out on my own, in my 40s?
So for Christmas that year when my wife asked what I wanted I said I wanted some sessions with a personal trainer. (yes, I know, the average person can’t afford to spend money on that but I’ll talk about the other accessible programs I use now later on) I had a consultation during the holidays and started my first session with my trainer, Lioni at the start of 2020 (before ensuing global pandemic).
Chasing numbers
I was chasing a number (the wrong number). I wanted to get back to under 200 pounds. But I didn’t really know what that meant and I just assumed if I could do that I’d be ‘healthy’ again. 200 was when it all seemed to go to shit.
The first thing the trainer did was hook me up to a body composition analyzer. This told me how much muscle and fat I had, body fat percentage, and what my BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) was. That was eye opening.
All my working out had built above average muscle mass under all that fat! She told me their program would have a weekly weight loss target of half a pound but the goal was a body fat percentage not a weight. Also that BMI didn’t matter for me with my height and muscle mass the BMI was never going to accurately represent healthy. I had almost 26% body fat at that point (after losing over 15 pounds) and we set a goal of under 22% with a stretch goal of under 20%.
The most useful number few seem to talk about was BMR. That was how many calories your body burns at rest for basic functions. You need to eat more than that or your starving yourself and your body will go into conservation mode. Which guess what that does? It increases your fat in many cases and that was exactly what I had been doing for the past 3 months. Mine was almost 2000 which meant I needed to eat more than the recommended daily allowance you see on nutrition labels; especially if I was working out.
Track your food damnit!
I was so opposed to tracking my food which is so embarrassing in retrospect. Lioni asked me in our first meeting if I was willing to tracking my food, to which I responded no. In our second meeting she asked me how my food tracking was going… In the third she asked to see my food log and made me download MyFitnessPal on the spot and add her as a friend so she could monitor. I thank her for her persistence.
Tracking your food is single handedly the best tool in your arsenal to lose weight. I’m a convert now.
To be clear, it’s a total pain in the ass. To do it right requires you buy a kitchen scale and measure every single ingredient in your food. Eating out is very, very difficult to track accurately. But with the pandemic eating out wasn’t really an option any more so eating all meals at home became the norm. If you’re the type of person who likes to eat the same thing all the time it’s not too bad as you can save meals and just copy and paste. But if you’re like me and you hate eating the same thing it’s extra tedious.
Tracking made it totally obvious why I was fat when I truthfully logged what I was eating.
It’s all about macros
Once I shared my food log with Lioni, she instantly zeroed in on one of my main problems. I wasn’t eating enough and I wasn’t eating the right mix of protein, carbs, and fats (macronutrients). Not even close.
I was like, “let me get this straight. to lose weight, I need to eat MORE?”
That went against everything I ever heard in a TV commercial or what I found online. So the lesson was, I needed to eat way more than I been and quadruple the amount of protein.
She kick started me at a 3000 calorie per day target = macros 299 Carbs / 88 Fat / 252 Protein. That was like 5 boneless skinless chicken breasts a day! For somebody who didn’t eat meat regularly that was a rough transition. It took several weeks to get used to eating more and that much protein.
Don’t work out too much
Second problem area was my workouts. At 5 days a week for 2.5 hours a session it was way too much. I had also been mixing up the workouts constantly because I had seen online that was a good thing, right?
She explained your body likes routine and it’s about progressively overloading it. She switched my training to strength 3 days a week and no more than 2 sessions of cardio per week.
Steps were the key more than cardio; especially in the beginning. She wanted me to get 9,000 to 11,000 steps all 7 days a week. I started walking my son to school every day instead of driving (thank California weather).
The switch from gym to at home
In the two months working with Lioni before the lockdown happened I lost 5 pounds but gained muscle mass. Doing the specific exercise in the right way, with the right form, and activating the right muscle is hard! Maybe it’s just my age but getting your brain to drive the right muscles is not easy.
Having a trainer to observe, and work with you constantly to get it right was so valuable. Even with mirrors you can’t always see what you’re doing wrong. I miss that to this day in our COVID reality. There’s lots of forums, Facebook groups, etc. out there where you can seek form advice and critiques. I recommend doing that highly.
I was really lucky that before COVID I already had some essential at home workout items. I scored a pair of Bowflex SelecTech dumbbells during the holidays at Walmart for $250 a pair! I also already had resistance bands and accessories. All I needed was a collapsable bench which I got on Amazon right away. I had a spreadsheet of all my workouts with Lioni and she had also given me a set to use when I was traveling away from home.
Trying to do all the workouts from the gym in the family room was definitely not the same. They still worked but couldn’t gain much strength without more equipment which was now impossible to buy in stock. So ended up losing about 10 pounds (including 4 pounds of muscle mass) over the subsequent 3 months.
Net result was by the middle of June I had hit both 22% body fat as well as 200 pounds and you could finally start to feel an actual difference after 30 pounds lost! Clothes were becoming loose and I could fit into some old stuff I hadn’t gotten rid of years before.
Using the Built With Science program
At this point in June, I was definitely at a plateau with my workouts and felt like I was starting to fall back into old habits. I wanted a new training program that continued in a similar spirit to what lead to the loss of 30 pounds but would give me the chance of hitting my stretch goals and maybe more.
Enter, Jeremy Ethier’s Built With Science. I had been watching Jeremy on YouTube for over a year and always loved his science based explanations on how and why a particular thing works as well as how to do it right. I figured it was time to buy the Beginner Shred program and try it out.
As I had already been tracking my food for 6 months and received training advice on macros, focused workouts, form, etc. the guidance from the program meshed well very quickly. I started using the spreadsheet and workouts within the program Jeremy had created for at home. He create 3 variants of his gym program for at home (body weight, resistance bands, and dumbbells) so it was easy to adapt.
The Beginner Shred program was split into 2 phases and he recommends you stick with Phase 1 until you plateau essentially. I managed to hit my stretch goal of 20% and 190 after a little over 3 months with the program. It also coincided with a plateau so I switched to Phase 2 after that.
It was time to set new goals. While all of this loss took work I wasn’t starving myself and I could still fit my workouts into my lifestyle. I figured as long as I can keep doing what I’m doing and losing weight I want to see how far it can take me.
Where I’m at today
After switching to Phase 2 of the program I continued to lose weight and fat. I went all in on a garage gym at the start of 2021 and switched to the gym workout program as part of the Beginner Shred once I had my equipment.
I hover around 175 pounds and 14% body fat. I feel like a different person (and I had to buy all new clothes). I had a physical exam at the end of 2020 and am happy to say all the vitals I mentioned in the beginning are in a very healthy range now.
Final thoughts
This was hard. It took 100% commitment. I have so much respect for those who’ve done it before me and continue to do it and much more empathy for those who struggle with it daily.
It truly is all about diet. You have to eat less than you burn. Period. Nobody makes it easy to figure out how much and what to eat to lose weight and what works for somebody else doesn’t necessarily work for you.
One of the hardest things to learn over this journey was how to choose foods that taste good, have the right macros, and make you feel full. I’m hungry most of the time. I don’t know about you, but eating a tiny protein bar doesn’t make me feel full at all and is loaded with fat and calories. Eating 4 cups of air popped popcorn for 110 calories or an entire head of steamed broccoli with some sambal olek will fill me up! I found not everyone around me supported the changes I was trying to make. I save cheat meals for the weekends and put in the hard work Monday to Friday.
I’m a little anxious about my life returning to normal, going back to the office, eating out, etc. Some of the changes I did were made easier during the pandemic because life was so disrupted. I’m also so fortunate I could spend this sabbatical time to get healthy. I don’t think I would have been as successful if I hadn’t been on sabbatical and for that I’m eternally thankful to my wife for her constant support.
I don’t ever want to go back to being overweight but it will remain a constant struggle I think…
