I just realized today that I’ve recently hit the five-year mark since I decided to start losing weight. Here’s a blog post from five years ago today where I discuss my initial progress. (I didn’t mention my starting weight in that post, but it was 230 pounds.)
I’m still tracking all of my meals with Lose It, and I still subscribe to their premium version. I’m including a graph of my weight over the last five years here. So far this year, I’ve basically maintained my weight at 135 (+/- 2 pounds). I’m pretty comfortable at this weight, so that’s fine. (Though I’d kind of like to get down to 130, just so that I can say I lost an even 100 pounds. But that’s probably not a good idea.)
The green line on the graph is from the last time I set an actual goal weight in Lose It: 160 pounds. Once I hit that weight, I stopped actively trying to lose weight, and just kind of let things go until I bottomed out at a stable weight, which, for me, is apparently 135. I’m sticking with a goal of about 2100 calories per day, and I’m usually right around there (+/- 200).
I’ve also done well on the exercise front, at least in terms of step count. I almost always hit at least 7500 steps a day and often go over 10,000. I never really did adopt any other exercise habits though. I never joined a gym or anything like that.
I don’t really have any profound weight loss insights to share here. If you’re looking to lose weight, different things are going to work for different people. For me, I think this is the stuff that was key:
- Tracking all of my calories. Anything less than that makes it too easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re doing well, when it fact you’re still eating way too much.
- Packing my own lunch every day and not going out for lunch anymore. (I still go out occasionally, but maybe just once or twice a month.) It’s not hard to do, if you can figure out a few things you like to eat that stay within your calorie budget and aren’t hard to prepare and toss in a bag every day.
- Drinking mostly water. I’ve just about stopped drinking juice, beer, soda, and sweetened iced tea. (I still drink a lot of coffee, but there aren’t many calories in that, if you don’t load it up with milk and sugar.)
- In addition to the Lose It book I mentioned in the original post, this book on Volumetrics was pretty useful too.