This last year I lost a total of 70 pounds.
Weight has always been something I struggled with physically and more importantly mentally, ever since I stopped playing hockey in 3rd grade.
I gain weight easily. And fat goes to my chest first, making for some awkward moments in my youth as a boy.
My issues with my body have been ongoing and while I have had moments of weight loss – like when I ran a half marathon in high school or the summer I picked up playing basketball – it hasn’t been steady.
To lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you consume. This is obvious.
But it turns into a math equation pretty quickly.
There are 3500 calories in a pound. So you gain a pound it means you consumed 3500 calories more than you lost over that period of time. You lose a pound, then you burned 3500 calories more than you consumed.
So if you want to lose weight, you have to do some math – your body burns a baseline number of calories just by being alive, your BMR. For this purpose, let’s say it’s 1500. Meaning just by living, you burn 1500 calories a day.
If you wanted to lose 2 pounds a week, you would need to take 3500 multiply by 2 for the 2 pounds.
3500*2 = 7000
So you would need be in a deficit of 7000 calories to burn two pounds.
If we divide that for the number of days a week, seven, that would get us 1000.
7000/7 = 1000
This means you would need to be in a deficit of 1000 calories daily.
So you would take your BMR + however much you moved each day to create your total number of calories. Let’s say we moved 500 calories.
1500 + 500 = 2000
This means we have burned 2000 calories. But we need to eat.
So we subtract our needed deficit from our total we moved.
2000 – 1000 = 1000
This means we can only eat 1000 calories if we want a deficit of 1000 calories.
Now burning 1000 calories is easier said than done.
If you run all out for an hour you might burn 1000 calories, maybe. Depends on your size and pace and all these other things. If you eat a Big Mac and a Large Fry you will consume more than 1000 calories, guaranteed. It comes in to about 1061.
So you can’t do this without calorie counting. It’s just impossible.
You got to move a shit ton and you have to be diligent on calorie counting.
This last month I gained weight. A good chunk. It started because I had been working out and eating clean for the last year and burnt myself out.
I was in my goal weight zone and figured ehh we can take our eye off the ball and focus on other things. Wrong.
I stopped weighing myself daily. A way to just gauge how things are going. And while I continued to work out, my food consumption increased dramatically.
I stopped calorie counting because I didn’t need it and I burnt myself.
After weeks of feeling like something was off, but attributing it to muscle, I finally weighed myself and saw I gained 10 pounds. In a month.
Cue the shame spiral. The extra long walk late at night despite being exhausted. The promises that are unrealistic. The plans to make insane changes to the diet to get back on track.
The point is I stopped paying attention.
When I did that, I gained the weight. I was no longer diligent.
These big, sweeping, emotion driven decisions are not going stick. They are not going to lead to success. If I want to get back to where I was, I need to do what I did. Count calories. Monitor my movements. Not feel like I got it figured out, only to order a pizza.
I’ll get back on track. But I was reminded a critical lesson in all of this.
Every single thing in life takes focus. If you want anything, you have to focus and stay at it. If you let up, that is a decision you have to live with because you will most likely need to work twice as hard to get back to where you were. So build routines to keep up your focus. And don’t ever think you are better than or have figured out the work.
Can’t bullshit the work. Just gotta do it.
The Beacon Beats 