HEALTH FEATURE
by B.C. Kowalski
How I lost weight and kept it off There are vegetarian and vegan options, as well as keto and some other diet types. I stuck with a standard diet. The first week was tough. It set my calories at 2,000 to start, and that first week I lost far more than the sustainable level. It adjusted up probably too far the next week and by week three seemed dialed in just right. The only other target to really hit is protein - low calories plus high protein helps lose weight while slowly lowering your body weight, generally about 1-2 pounds per week. Remarkably, beyond the first week when my calories were set too low, I never really had much hunger again. There were days when I missed my targets, say at family get-togethers. I simply got back to it the next day. It’s important to note that weight loss is not a steady lowering of a number. Weight in humans fluctuates a lot from day to day, depending on a number of factors such as water retention. I took measurements daily but only put stock in the weekly check-ins. Weeks turned into months, and before long I’d dropped from 209 pounds to 198. I took a break and switched to maintenance for a few weeks, still tracking but now eating in a higher maintenance range. It felt easier by comparison, even though dropping wasn’t too bad either. Then I went down another 6 pounds, to 190. I’ve since set my maintenance to 192 and have stuck around that range since. The coaching app has been a tool I can pull out when I need it. I weigh myself every so often, and if I start straying too much from 192, I track until I’m back in range. It’s usually a matter of a few days to a week. At this point, I probably wouldn’t need the coaching app anymore, and could suffice with a standard calorie
tracker while keeping an eye on my weight. I’ve struggled much of my life with bodyweight. Well-meaning relatives who grew up on farms kept that framework as a guide to feeding me, a child of the much less active 80s. That led to some bad habits I had to shake later in life. I’d lost a lot of weight with the keto diet a few years back. It’s hard to eat a lot (but not impossible) when you restrict an entire macronutrient. But research shows that when calories are equated, a ketogenic diet is no more or less effective than a balanced diet in weight loss.
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All of us, myself included, are susceptible to convenient fictions from time to time. But at some point I usually have a “Come to Jesus” moment where I awaken to the truth. One of those happened earlier this year when I realized I needed/wanted to lose some weight. I often told myself the fiction that, hey, I’m lifting weights so it’s fine that my body weight has been going up. That’s all part of the process! That wasn’t entirely wrong, since to gain muscle during a hypertrophy phase you do generally need to take in more calories than you consume (with high protein levels). But when I came across Dr. Layne Norton’s diet coach app, I decided to give it a try. I was shocked by the slow and steady results. Why drop bodyweight? The science is actually pretty clear: Even modest amounts of weight loss lead to improvements across many comorbidities, including cardiovascular diseases and blood pressure. While I do believe in body positivity, I also trust the scientific process and the preponderance of research. OK, with that out of the way, how did it work? Norton’s app is called the Carbon Diet Coach. There are others out now; Macrofactor, by the science geeks behind the Stronger by Science podcast I listen to, is another. Surely more will be coming on the market soon. But for the purposes of this story, I used Carbon. Carbon is more than a calorie tracker — the app, and others like it, use the data you provide from the calories you eat to give you targets to meet to lose weight. Over time, it gets a better idea of the range of where your maintenance calorie range is. It then gives you targets depending on your goal: lose weight, gain weight or maintain weight (and you can switch over time). The goal with weight loss is to lose weight very slowly, so it can be sustainable and minimize lean body mass loss (the opposite of The Biggest Loser approach, which has been shown to have disastrous results).
