Herein I speak about the nuts and bolts of my weight loss, what I do and the tools I use. As alluded to in my previous post, I've known how to lose weight for many years, but I couldn't make the jump from knowing to doing for almost as many years. Everything I'm about to say will likely sound very straightforward and easy, but for me at least it took a fair amount of self-examination before I could make it stick (down 25 kg so far, will still be doing all of this for most of 2015 at least).
Terminology note: a proper calorie is a fairly tiny unit of energy (specifically the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 cm^3 of water by 1 degree celsius at a pressure of 1 atmosphere). Energy from food is properly measured in kilocalories or kcal, units of 1000 calories. For reasons I've never really understood, in North America when we describe the amount of energy in food, we very often use the word "calories" when we actually mean kcal. As most of the sources and tools I'm going to link to are from North America, they generally follow that pattern. Any time I use the word calories in the rest of this point, assume I'm talking about kcal.
First principle: to lose weight, calories out must exceed calories in. For me, it's necessary to count calories with some precision and be aware of my caloric budget. I've read accounts by various people who lost weight without doing this explicitly (usually via heavily restricting carbohydrates), and that's great for people who can operate that way, but I can't. I use a variety of tools to do this:
1) Figure out TDEE, or Total Daily Energy Expenditure. This is the number of calories you burn in a day. It can basically be thought of as being made up of two quantities:
BMR - your basal metabolic rate. This is the amount of energy your body burns simply to keep you alive - pumping your heart, inflating and deflating your lungs, your various metabolic processes, etc. You burn this amount even if you spend all day in bed.
Activity level - Moving around burns additional calories. Standing burns more than sitting, walking burns more than standing, etc. Exercise fits in here.
There are lots of TDEE calculators online. I use this one, at a site called iifym.com, with iifym standing for "if it fits your macros." I'll talk a bit more about macronutrients in a later post.
IIFYM's calculator suggests that overweight/obese people use a formula that includes body fat percentage. This isn't critical - the difference in calculated TDEE for me between the two formulae is about 150 kcal - but body fat percentage can be a useful metric to track in its own right. Getting a reasonably exact measurement is inconvenient and expensive (it requires fairly sophisticated equipment usually found at medical centres or sometimes high end health clubs), but there are a variety of much cheaper and more convenient estimation methods. I use a circumference formula developed by the US Navy, which requires only a tape measure. It's an estimate with a fairly large error rate, but good enough for my purposes. I will talk more about metrics I use (scale, bodyfat, measurements) in a future post.
Once you've got your TDEE, your eating strategy becomes pretty clear. If you eat fewer kcal than your TDEE, you lose weight. Higher than your TDEE, you gain weight. And to maintain your current weight, you eat the same as your TDEE.
An important thing to remember is that any calculator can only estimate your TDEE, it will get you into the ballpark but both your metabolism and your activity level are unique to you. You will probably have to adjust the calculated TDEE somewhat.
So for example: I am a 47 year old male, 181 cm tall, weighing 125 kg with a bodyfat of 30%. I set my exercise level at 3/week. That gives me a TDEE of 3108 kcal/day, with a BMR of 2260 kcal/day.
IIFYM helpfully provides me with suggested calorie levels based on the level of deficit I want to run - suggested, aggressive, or reckless. You could also calculate on desired weight loss - a pound of fat represents about 3500 kcal, so if you want to lose that amount in a week you should run a deficit of about 500 kcal below your TDEE each day. Two pounds would be 1000 kcal below TDEE each day.
Through past experimentation, I'm aware that the TDEE calculator is high by about 100 kcal. I run a deficit of about 700 kcal/day, which means that I aim to eat about 2300 kcal/day and lose a little over a pound and a half/week.
2) Record food intake. Or count calories. Nowadays, the best way to do this is any of a variety of websites, preferably with an associated app. I use MyFitnessPal (MFP), but there's any number of good ones out there (Loseit, SparkPeople, etc). The important thing for me is that it have an accurate and large food database, so I don't have to spend a lot of time entering nutritional data - I can just enter my foods for each meal and be done tracking in under a minute.
MFP includes a built-in calorie budget calculator, but I prefer IIFYM's.
MFP also tracks the three macronutrients (protein, fat, carbohydrates) and many micronutrients. The only macronutrient I track closely is protein, due to its importance in exercise; fat is also important for a variety of metabolic processes, so I try to be aware of getting enough but don't sweat over it the way I do protein. Carbs are the "whatever's left over" macro for me.
3) Exercise. A little fiddling with the IIFYM calculator will show that it's hard to out-exercise your diet. Based on my slow but steady weight gain over the last five years or so, I'd estimate that before I started tracking calories I was eating around 3200 to 3300 kcal/day. That means that if I tried to create a 700 kcal deficit strictly through exercise, I'd have to up my TDEE to around 3900 to 4000 kcal/day. The calculator tells me that to do that, I'd have to exercise intensely every day, or have regular workouts twice a day. That would be something like a 90 minute high intensity strength training session plus 30 minutes of HIIT cardio per day, which is not something I'd be wild about doing now (and probably not something I was physically capable of doing when I started).
That said, exercise is important for other reasons. If you eat at a calorie deficit and don't exercise, your body will decide that muscle mass is an unnecessary luxury and you lose muscle along with fat. As muscle is metabolically active while fat isn't, this means your BMR will actually go down slightly, and you'll burn fewer calories making it harder to lose weight. Exercise also contributes to joint health and bone density, both quite important as we age. And for a lot of us - and certainly for me - losing weight is in part an aesthetic pursuit, I'd like to look better, exercise helps.
I've tried both cardio exercise and strength training, and much prefer the latter. I'll go into the details of my routine in my next post.
4) Tracking weight and other metrics. I could write a long post on why scales suck, but somebody already has so I'll just link to that one. I still think it's important to weigh myself in order to track progress, and I weigh myself every morning after my shower. As recommended in that linked article, I never worry about the individual number on any given day, I only use it to make an entry in a spreadsheet that calculates a 7-day rolling average, which is the number I actually care about. I keep track of which direction that average is heading in and the rate at which it's changing.
I track bodyfat percentage in a similar way - I use the tape measure method I linked earlier, and keep a seven day rolling average. Again, I want to see it decreasing over time, the exact number isn't that important to me and won't be until I get well below 20%.
Because of my bodyfat tracking method, I also track my waist and neck size pretty closely. Seeing myself shrinking is a good motivator, particularly since I don't notice day-to-day changes in the mirror.
I've also started (as of Jan 2015) taking progress pics on the 1st of each month. A 1 month period is enough for me to see some accumulated changes. I may someday decide to post some of them, but probably not unless/until I have a fairly dramatic transformation to showcase.
And that's more or less the nuts and bolts of how I do things. It certainly isn't the only way to lose weight, merely one that's worked for me.
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