Episode 2 My weight loss plan and the tools I used

Today’s episode is an outline of the weight loss plan I built for myself back in January of 2020 that ultimately resulted in a weight loss of 185 pounds in 19 months.

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Transcript

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Hi I'm Thomas welcome to the parachute advice. My life has taken a lot of twists and turns and on this podcast I will dive into those experiences the goal is to help everyone listening learn from my experiences, and hopefully avoid some of the mistakes I've made welcome to today's episode of the parachuter Vice podcast I'm your host Thomas as I mentioned in episode 1 as long as I can remember I've always been overweight at one point nearly hitting 375 pounds with a clear path to 400 if I didn't change things well on today's episode I'll get into a little more detail around the plan I built for myself in the tools I use to go from 360 pounds when I started in January of 2020 to being under 175 pounds as of today. For many of you again this is going to be repeat of information I've already shared but for anyone new to the podcast I hope you enjoy this information and find it helpful. My goal is to share all the tips and tricks and hard lessons I learned along the way so that you can be as successful as I was in your lifestyle change, all right so let's do this at the start of my plan it was very simple I would use the app MyFitnessPal to calculate how many calories I could eat each day to lose one pound a week and just do that, the Only Rule I put on myself was not lying if I eat it put it in the app own my choices and go from there. This also meant as I've mentioned many times being honest about how little exercise or activity I did in a day and by how little like I've said before. I mean literally none. At the time when I started this whole plan I had no interest or desire and doing physical activity I had mastered avoiding it. So I set the app up with a starting weight of 360 pounds and a goal of hitting 295 by the end of the year which is what I weighed my senior year of high school over 20 years earlier. I set it so that I could lose about a pound a week and put my activity level at the lowest possible one not very active in most calorie calculators this would be considered sedentary, the next piece was I want to do all of this through diet and not by adding a ton of exercise to lose weight as I mentioned earlier I hated exercise I would rather give up what I eat in a day versus doing what I would have to do to burn those calories off, something I read several times was you can't out exercise a bad diet and as I mentioned, I had a bad diet so where did this put me then when I started well the app MyFitnessPal calculated I could consume about 2,500 calories a day at the time I wondered how I would survive on that. I mean at times that was half of what I was eating in a meal now I wonder how I could eat that much in a day. Just to level set everyone the commonly accepted idea is that in order to lose one pound a week you need to reduce your calories by 3500 a week, or roughly 500 a day so you could either skip that donut you normally have for breakfast or try running for 30 to 45 minutes at a vigorous pace. As somebody who recently took up running I can tell you honestly skipping the donuts probably easier here are some hard Truth for everyone all the technology out there that tells you how many calories you burned our garbage. Many studies estimate that they over count calorie burn by 10 to 20 percent. They all overestimate calorie burn to some extent or another, if my fitness tracker was even close to Accurate I should have been losing weight or at the very least not gaining weight for all those years of terrible eating habits. Most experts will tell you that on average 70 to 80% of your daily calorie burn is base metabolic rate so just living and breathing is where most of your calories go. In an article on Vox titled most of us misunderstand metabolism here are the nine facts to clear that up. A neuroscientist in obesity researcher at the National Institute of Health was quoted as saying it's generally accepted that for most people the base metabolic rate accounts for 60 to 80 percent of total energy expenditure. So this was the principal I was going to live by, another thing I did that a lot of nutritionist will tell you as a horrible idea but one that worked for me at the time was I would push my daily calories as low as possible to both speed up the process and make the day I go to maintenance calories that much more exciting, because of the amount of extra food I could add in or the additional more calorie-dense options that would be available to me once I hit maintenance, so for example back when I could eat 2500 calories a day I was holding myself closer to 1800 each day, and near the end of my diet I was holding myself to twelve to fourteen hundred calories a day even though my daily Target was 1850.

Truth be told some days I was closer to 11: 4:42

00 not because I was forcing it but because that's just what I wanted to eat. Am I hungry at times when I was dieting I guess but one thing I really learned to this whole process was there's very different forms of hungry. There's the genuinely I'm hungry and I need to eat to survive hungry. But more importantly and more commonly there's the I'm bored and eating some chips might be entertaining form of hunger. This was the one that was hardest to deal with especially late in the evening when watching TV. The less than plan calorie consumption process I followed can be seen in my results though because I average point three pounds lost a day over the course of my diet which equals roughly a calorie deficit of 1000 a day. Now that's not to say every day I lost weight I quickly learned weight loss tends to move in waves and for me tracking a daily I was able to learn how a schedule changes and what I ate affected this. For example my lowest weight every week is usually Saturday morning and then it creeps up through the course of the week and by the middle of the week begins to fall again over Thursday Friday and Saturday. I have no idea why it works this way for me I suspect it might be time of day plus my routine but in the end I don't care why as much as just knowing so when I see the jump midweek it's not a no-shit panic moment. It's just a matter of let's see how the week plays out now comes the big one, you're going to be dieting in one form or another for the rest of your life this is a lifestyle change not a one-time thing, as I mentioned I did not gained all this weight because I good habits so to stay where I am I need to be focused for the rest of my life on my habits. That said don't let this scare you now that I'm on maintenance which I'll discuss in a future episode things feel a lot more quote. I don't have to be a strict with what I track or what I eat I can deviate from my plan from time to time without a Major Impact. I also know that it has and will continue to keep getting easier. It will be less intensive and I can be somewhat more flexible over time but I still need to keep a close eye on my diet forever. And you know what I feel so good now that I'm happy to do this to keep feeling great so don't let this keep you from starting trust me when I say this it's going to be worth it but as you go through the process make sure you have a plan for the quote day the diet ends. The other thing that I did that I think was very helpful as keeping my Ultimate Dream goal separate from the good enough goals what do I mean by this when I started I always thought it would be amazing to get down to 200 pounds but the idea was too scared to start there. That would have been over 160 pounds I had to lose thinking about doing a diet for over a year and not hitting your goal was far too overwhelming for me to even start there. And Stat I said let's start with a goal of being the weight I was my senior year of high school which was 290 pounds. That made the whole process seemed a lot less intimidating I figured I would push for that and would be just under a year to get there which seems so much easier to stomach at the time. As I went along I began Shifting the goals as I saw what was possible and got close to each one ultimately. I decided I could and would push to hit over fifty percent weight loss goal or 200 pounds for my heaviest I honestly just thought it'd be cool to say that I was less than half the person I used to be, and on top of that this will be the first time in my life I would be in the healthy category for BMI. For me that meant going from 360 pounds when I started to 170 pounds to finish, yeah I know BMI is a crappy metric but just being able to once in my life not be considered overweight according to this crappy metric, seemed like an amazing opportunity especially having always always been off the charts so to Circle back at a high-level my initial plan was simple calculate calories per day and eat that spread across three meals and before bed snack, when I was eating 1800 calories a day I would usually do a split like this breakfast 150 to 250 calories lunch was 4 to 500 calories dinner was 800 calories and then a snack would be 200 calories. As I want along the number of calories I needed to eat dropped so this got harder and harder to hit my numbers with the plan I just mentioned so I had to adjust. This is when I added in intermittent fasting I didn't do this because I necessarily bought into all of the extended health benefits of intermittent fasting. It was just an it was just a mindset that I felt help me to limit my calories what do I mean by this well,

I've honestly never been a huge fan of breakfast so I just started skipping breakfast because it wasn't quote in my 16: 9:17

8 window

meaning eating 48 hours and fasting for 16 so I would eat lunch at 11: 9:23

00 a.m. and before that I just had black coffee all morning and then I finish eating for the day by 7 p.m. After that I only drank tea or water one big help with this process was when I got the late-night snack Cravings I tell myself you can eat all the chips you want tomorrow when you're eating window reopens and surprise surprise when that window reopened, I didn't crave those chips anymore the other big perk was the amount of calories dropped significantly, lunch was still about four to five hundred and dinner was still seven 800 and even a quick snack right at seven PM would be 100 calories but my daily total dropped from 1800 of 1400 or less as I mentioned, that 400 calorie drop equals about a pound of fat lost a week one last piece of advice I'd like to share is take photos, the frequency is your call whether it's every day once a week or even just once a month but something to log the gradual change over time it's the one big thing I regret to this day when I look in the mirror I don't see a huge change, yeah I know I've changed a great deal I see it when I look at old photos and compare them to today but when I look in the mirror it's not as obvious to me. He'll as I post on Instagram my iPhone thinks that I'm too different people based on how much my face has changed over the course of the diet when I'm out and about I'll even catch glimpses of myself whether it's in a reflection or a mirror and not recognize who I am at first, but then when I look in the mirror and I think about it I don't see it as being nearly as significant as it was, plus it would honestly just be cool to have a collection of photos from different stages of the journey I've been able to put together some before and afters including the one up, the one I have on Instagram for me at my heaviest and lowest in the same clothes just different sizes. I also was able to get photos from friends over the course of the time period as well and I've been able to put together collages that I've posted on Instagram of those as well in upcoming episodes I'll get into more details on how I manage my calories in the food I consumed. But for now hopefully today's episode gave you the motivation to just start this journey. As I said it really is this simple just eat less than you need to to maintain your current weight and the weight will come off, as I keep saying is it easy no but it's not hard either. It just requires a lot of focus and personal accountability thank you for listening please join me again for future episodes. You can contact me at parachute advice podcast at gmail.com again that's all one word parachute advice podcast at gmail.com. You can also follow me on Instagram at parachute advice again thank you for listening and please like And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Music.