The Short Trip Down from 270 to 225

This is a story that ends with a question or two. I'll write as briefly as I can.

My name is Richard, and on January 8 of this year I hit some kind of limit. My disgust at my condition had long simmered, but out of nowhere I finally felt focused. I had been 260 to 280 pounds for four years, after growing up a trim athlete. The upshot: at age 45 I'd decided to get my body back. I started on January 8 at 270 lbs. Today on July 14, I'm 225 lbs. My plan was completely of my own devising, and the results have been 1.73 pounds per week of weight loss. My goal was 225 pounds, but having reached that quickly, I've dropped my goal to 200 pounds, which I hope to reach in mid-October, then down to 190 at a slower pace in 2010.

Exercise: I started with exercise alone, daily 30 minute indoor bike rides. I did 19 rides in 23 days to little effect (lacking a diet plan) before settling on 3-days-in-4 with a diet plan. In the past two months I've thrown in speed-hiking and weight work. My usual exercise day is 430 calories of bicycling @ 205w, with what I imagine is 75-120 calories of barbell work 3 times per week. Wow, do I feel better; no back pain, and my bad left knee is now stable enough to handle light running.

Diet: About three weeks into my quest, I got an iPhone, along with an app called Lose It! That was the breakthrough, because it allowed me to track my calories more quickly than this site could ever hope. Brilliant. Easy. Information is powah!

I called my plan the 'Don't Eat Stupid ****' diet, because I simply cut out all stupid food choices. No cheese, no nachos, no pasta. My outlook was odd and new: if I was offered high-fat food, I felt my intelligence was being insulted. 'You expect me to eat that stupid ****?' I'd say internally. French fries are for other people, and may they enjoy them. I felt the same way when I quit smoking.

That was my defense. On offense, my diet was mainly about being very narrow. I built around extremely safe foods--broccoli, skinless chicken, low-sodium turkey, wheat bread, salmon, salmon lox, tuna and bananas. I added blueberries and almonds as antioxidant snacks. My diet is still very restrictive--I haven't so much as smelled a pasta dish in 7 months. The main element is the broccoli, which I eat 4 dinners per week with deli turkey and Harissa sauce and salt. Lose It! gives me the numbers for my nutrient breakdown.

Protein: 23-30%

Carbs: 40-47%

Fat: 25-33%

Now here's where it may get a raised eyebrow among experieced readers. My daily calorie intake is about 1,300 to 1,600 for a 6'1" 45 year old male. I set my daily limit to 2100 calories, and when you add in 400-550 calories of exercise, I'm often 1,000 calories below limit. Yes that's low. I've had many days of 950 calorie intake, which I know is not brainy. But the plain fact is that I'm not as hungry as before. 'That's because your stomach has shrunk,' my friends say.

My other concern is sodium. I'm a salt fanatic. I don't quite know what to do about this, other than dropping my salt habit gradually, as opposed to my cold-turkey method with 'stupid food.'

One thing I'm not concerned about is sustainability. At 6'1", if I drop my exercise to 3 times per week, I'm hoping I can maintain myself at 200 pounds with a daily average of 2,500 calories, and gradually lose the final 10 pounds at a gradual rate. 

I can't believe how much better I look. People who've seen me for the first time since May exult about how much better I look now, including a very special girl I've loved insanely for more than a year.

If anyone takes anything from this story, I hope it'd be that the mental part of the plan is everything. Don't think of it as being tough. Just think of it as something you're doing. Think of yourself as special. The light is shining through the clouds on you, and your improved diet is your sacred space. Nobody can take it from you.

So that's my story, and I'm sticking with it. Time for some blueberries.

CONGRATS!!!!  Thats an awesome story. 

Great story...Congrats...keep up the good work! I really just wanted to write and say that I am officially stealing your "Don't eat stupid ****" diet. My main reason is because I get so sick of people asking me why I dont eat the same things that they do, and what kind of diet I am on??? The truth is that I really am not on ANY diet, I just dont believe in make such awful choices in food. I usually get back at them by telling them how many calories are in the stupid **** that they are choosing to eat. Best of luck to you.....

I'm surprised that someone hasn't come in to pound you for eating under your BMR....but the scale doesn't lie, and you're eating right around the 1500 calorie lower limit cc recommends.

I found that the closer I got to normal weight the more I wanted to eat, and I haven't eaten anywhere near the 1500 minimum for months.  But if I wanted to drop another 10 lbs, I'd prefer to take 6 weeks of high deficits over 6 months of infinitesimal progress.

I like the concept of "Don't eat stupid ****".  I use a version more like "Don't eat stupid portions".  This has allowed my to maintain my weight while still eating some "****".  Pizza, pastry and ice cream have been back in the diet for over a year, and there's no weight gain as long as they're strictly accounted for.  1/8 of a small Giordano's stuffed cheese pizza is lunch.   

Okay, here's a strange thing.

It turns out that I set my calorie limit to 2,061, and it was for a reason: that was my BMR at 220 pounds, my original goal. So my usual food consumption is 400-700 calories light, or at the light end of 'safe.'

BMR (220 lbs goal weight, 45 year old male): 2,061

Activity Level: Moderate plus

Adjusted BMR: 3,195 + ~150 for extra exercise = 3,350

But that math works out to 3.7 pounds lost per week if I'm eating 1,500 calories. Bzzzt! Wrong--I haven't lost that much, and I can't imagine anyone doing so.

This is where I get lost. I see two methods in conflict:

The Adjusted BMR method places an exercise multiplier onto BMR to get to 3,350 (calculated as 1.55 times my BMR.) I should be losing 3.7 lbs / week.

The Lose It! calculator simply subtracts exercise off my caloric intake, so if I eat 1,500 calories, exercise for 500 calories, my net is 1,000 calories, and this math works out with what I've experienced... though it's clearly not as well-supported by science. That gets me to 2 lbs/week, and my actuality has been 1.73.

In sum, adjusted BMR is the science, but it doesn't reflect my reality. My Lose It! calculator is fudgier, but it does reflect my reality. I wonder why there's such a disparity.

Your math is off with the Lose It calculator.

The formula for deficit is Total Burned - Total Eaten = deficit.

Not Total Eat - Burned only through Exercise = deficit. People call that "net" but it is a meaningless number, since it completely ignores the number of calories that you burn for the other 23 hours of the day.

It's entirely possible that you are using the wrong activity multiplier for the Adjusted BMR or that the BMR formula is not accurate for you. It might not be accurate for you if you don't have as much muscle as you should, or if you've compensated for lower intake by moving less, and therefore your body burns less.

edit to add: Regardless of the numbers, congrats on your weight loss (although I do worry that you were not eating enough, given the nutritional requirements for an adult male), and best of luck with the rest.

Thanks for the confirmation. You're right that there's no support for the Lose It! method. Also, you're right in another way--I'm not using the right aBMR, technically. The Adjusted BMR is a DAILY number, but I'm exercising 5.25 days in 7. But still, that doesn't account for the huge difference. So it could be I'm not losing as much as the Adjusted BMR because I'm in starvation mode after all. Could be I'm hoarding fat.

The theory would be that by eating more and thereby losing properly I could lose the same 1.73 pounds, but in this case it'd be fat I was losing.

I'm going to start eating 1,500 to 1,800 per day and see what that does. I just have to find something to add to my diet that isn't, you know, Stupid ****.

I don't like to "diagnose" starvation mode, mainly because people over-diagnose it all the time on here. It's not like your body simply stops obeying the laws of physics. I think the idea is that by hook or by crook, your body adjusts to burn less than it would if it were getting enough food. If it does that by slowing down internally, or just making you lazier (maybe you are more tired, so you don't workout as hard, or you don't fidget as much, etc), it doesn't really matter - the result is that the estimates don't apply.

As for what to add - olive oil and nuts are easy ways to cleanly add to your calories. I add protein shakes, but I don't know where that falls in Clean vs Stupid, since protein powder is obviously processed.

I don't use the calculators.  I count with a hand-written diary using BMR, and base my deficit on food minus (BMR plus exercise).  Yesterday this was 1960 - (1610 + 770) = 420 calorie deficit.  

Some may quibble with using BMR as a base, but I've found over time that this method is consistent with what I see on the scale.  I believe this is because I'm prone to undercount my food by as much as 20%.  Whatever method you choose will work if you use it consistently and look at results in terms of months rather than days. 

You're in the same quandary then, because that's mathematically identical to the formula my Lose It! uses. And just like you I find this faulty method works better--it supports what I see on the scale, without having any good reason for doing so. 

The Adjusted BMR uses a multiplier because exercise is only one part of a day's activity, plus exercise affects metabolism in general, goes the litany so oft repeated here I'm sure.

This morning I ate a big brownie and counted it as 280 calories.  Thinking about it now there's no way that thing was less than 400 calories. Will I change my count? No. That's how I count brownies.  That's just one example of what goes on all week.  How would you count a cuban coffee cremoso from the local barista? I could see that half and half was going into it, along with a serious portion of brown sugar. 3 of those last week....

At the end of the week I'll weigh in and find out how far off I was on my aggregate count.  I trust the scale more than my counting.  It's less of a liar than I am.