How to Lose Weight- Forest over Trees

Hi.

So here's something that drives me crazy.

Every year in January (well, year round, but especially now), everyone tries to sell you things to make you healthier. The biggest thing I see being promoted for weight loss is getting a gym membership.

There are lots of other things you can buy, too. You don't need me to list them all. But to make sure you're 100% fully outfitted, make sure to buy some protein shakes, new exercise clothes, a subscription to an app on your phone that sends you at-home workouts for the days you can't make it to the gym, and a million other things.

People on lots of different platforms, and especially in magazines, talk about weight loss like it's a very personalized thing, like it's a mystery. Most people I've heard talk about it talk like it's a challenge they aren't sure how to win, like it depends on the individual, on their age, metabolism, activity level. That there are certain foods that make you lose weight, and ones that make you gain.

The thing I find most humerous about it all are the ads. You know, a really fit, sexy person doing exercises. The implication is that the way they got hot is by exercising.

I'm not saying you shouldn't exercise. Of course we all should exercise. Based on my latest reading, a 30 minute walk a day is enough. Getting your heart rate up is extra credit. This is for minimizing bad health conditions, but in general, it will not make you lose weight.

Also, there are ways, minimal ways, in which individuals differ. It's true that the more muscle you have, the faster you burn calories. However, the effect of this for most normal people is not as big as the hype. If you're a body builder, sure.

It's also true that the older you get, the slower your metabolism moves. Breastfeeding burns calories, too.
Overall though, the way to lose weight is to eat fewer calories than you burn. There will always be subtleties- tiny individual variations, times of day that do this and that, avoiding "starvation mode," etc, etc, etc. But don't lose the forest for the trees (most of it is click-bait). The way to lose weight is to eat fewer calories than you burn.

It doesn't really matter what type of food the calories come from, as it relates to weight loss. (It does matter as it relates to nutrition, but that's something else entirely. It also matters as it relates to how you'll feel and your energy levels, but that's something else entirely. Those are trees). You can gain or lose weight eating broccoli all day, or eating cake all day.

I learned this based on my experience using MyFitness Pal, which, unlike a gym membership, is free. It is a tool that estimates how many calories you are eating (as you log foods), and estimates how many calories you are burning (as you log activities). That's it.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I gained 75 lbs (peak pregnancy, including having a baby inside). Using MyFitness Pal, I got 65 lbs down, then got pregnant again.

With my second pregancy, I gained 75 lbs again (why? Because I ate more than I was burning. I stopped logging foods because I was pregnant. I don't judge this decision).

It's now been 9 months, and I've been logging on MyFitness Pal since around August, with some months on, some months off. I'm approximately 50 lbs down from peak pregnancy weight.

There are lots of tricks out there, lots of methods- elimination diets, diets where you fit food into physical boxes, etc. The point of it all is to estimate the number of calories consumed, and making that be less you can be expected to burn.

Before I found MyFitness Pal, I had tried to lose weight (when I was younger, was a fine weight, but just wanted to look hotter). This consisted of me jumping on treadmills/ellipticals, injuring myself by overdoing it, and then giving up.

The irony of all the gym hype is that you can workout really hard for several hours, burn maybe 300-400 calories, and then eat that much extra food to "reward" yourself in about 5 minutes. Like, yeah. Unless you have a way of making sure you don't eat more calories than you burn, exercise does NOT make you lose weight.

What exercise DOES do it give you a little bit extra that you can eat WHILE you are losing weight (having already measured your food to achieve a calorie deficit).

One other note- another app, along with MyFitness Pal, that is helping me this time around is Happy Scale. You naturally have some weight fluctuations as you live, due to water intake, salt intake, and for women, the time of the month. Seeing every up and down can be discouraging. Happy Scale basically calculates a best-fit-line of all your data points so you see gradual trends, rather than a bumpy mountain range. It shows you the forest.

One other note- if you are going to do an elimination diet to lose weight, go team. Just know that it's not a sustainable method, and for many people leads to binging. Also, if you don't have another way to monitor your food intake, as soon as you're done losing, you're likely to gain it right back again, because you won't have a method of measure your caloric intake once living like a normal person. Most people who lose weight end up gaining it all back again, and then some, because of fat cells excreting hormones in an effort to re-fill themselves. So you will need an external method to monitor calories in, at least for the first year, for most people, according to my research.

One other note: I drink coffee with chocolate sauce and half and half several times a day, along with chocolate throughout the day, and am still able to lose weight due to logging calories. There are few joys greater than eating something super fatty and grinning at myself in the mirror as I know I will still weigh less the next morning. It's like a budget for your food intake. AND I know I'll be able to keep up my way of eating after losing, since I'm not eliminating anything altogether, so I don't become obsessed with what I'm missing.

Down with gyms! ;) Just kidding. Go to the gym if it makes you happy. But not to lose weight on its own.

One other note: if you try calorie counting and exercise counting and you still aren't losing, it's not because the method won't work for you- it's because the math problem's wrong. Maybe you're eating more than you'e logging, or maybe you're burning less than is estimated based on human averages. The math problem may need tweaking.

I'm not saying it's easy, because it isn't. I have often told my husband that weight loss is the hardest thing I've ever attempted- and I used to teach middle school! ;) But, it really is the hardest thing I've ever done, because of the voluntary time and effort it takes, day after day, month after month. Pregnancy is hard, but you typically aren't making a daily decision to remain pregnant, and there's a whole "creation of a baby" beautiful thing happening at the same time to get excited about amid the challenges. It's very difficult to voluntarily choose to work, and to suffer (because, let's face it, choosing not to eat when you want to isn't pleasant), day after day, with an end goal that is 100% optional and not required of me by anyone else.

That being said, it does come down to math. It's math, not magic!