Losing weight is not fun. At some level, you're forced to remove parts of your diet and lifestyle that are familiar and comfortable. In their place, you adopt things that are boring and difficult. People who are successful at losing weight tend to find different ways to make the process interesting by finding a sport they like to play as part of their exercise or healthy foods they like to eat.

For a while, I played basketball with friends and switched to some diet versions of foods I normally ate. This was enough to help me drop from my all-time high of 235 lbs. to 195 lbs. Then, my weight loss flat-lined. The problem was that I was still intaking enough calories that, even with the burn of exercise, I'd reached equilibrium with my metabolism. I needed to cut calories to get any further, and that seemed like a great way to annoy me and ultimately derail from my plan.

I needed a way to get over this hump while making this next phase of my weight loss interesting enough to pursue.

Research

I started my venture by finding answers to the following questions:

How many calories equal 1 pound of fat?

1 pound of fat represents 3,500 calories^[1]. To lose a pound of fat, your body has to have a net loss of 3,500 calories over the course of a period of time. Spoken differently, you have to use 3,500 more calories than you ingested.

How many calories do I burn a day?

This question consists of two parts.

How many calories do I burn at rest?

Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is the rate at which you burn calories at rest. This differs from person-to-person, but fortunately you can use a BMR calculator to figure out how many calories you burn in a day.

At 198 pounds, I burned 1922 calories while at rest.

How many calories do I burn doing my normal daily activities?

The Harris Benedict Principle is a rough guideline for figuring out how many calories you burn performing your daily activities. While not an exact number, it will give you enough actionable information:

I burned 2306 calories in a day at 198 pounds while working a desk job.

At what point does weight loss become unhealthy?

If you intake a low amount of calories, you can trigger your body's starvation response. This puts your body in a state where it breaks down non-fatty tissue. This not only makes it harder to lose weight, but it decreases your overall health.

To avoid the starvation response, you should end up with a net caloric intake of around 20% lower than the number of the calories you normally burn in a day. For those with a higher percentage of body fat, this can go up to 30%^[2].

I ended up creating a profile at My Fitness Pal to help calculate a healthy weight loss rate. As part of the process, the site had me enter my current and goal weights, and then gave me a per-day calorie goal. That number started out at 1640 calories per day, which is about 29% lower than may daily calorie burn. This equates to losing about 1.3 pounds a week.

How much should I weigh to be healthy?

Your Body Mass Index is a measure of the amount of fat in your body. You can use a BMI calculator to determine your BMI and see the normal range for a person of your height.

For a 6'1" male, a healthy weight is between 140 and 190 pounds. I decided to split the difference and make 165 pounds my goal.

Execution

Having a set of rules and numbers to work against suddenly made the concept a little more interesting to me. It was beginning to turn weight loss into a game. By using My Fitness Pal (MFP) to track my caloric intake each day, I could see my daily progress toward my goal.

MFP has a large database of foods already entered by site administrators and users, so tracking most of what I ate at home and restaurants turned out to be pretty easy. Anything that was not in the database was easy to add through their interface. I ran into a few circumstances where I had to enter nutritional information into the site by copying values over from restaurant nutrition guides or healthy recipe sites, but even that was pretty easy. MFP also allows users to group foods together as "meals", so I could easily take the bread, mayo, cheese, and meat for my sandwiches and combine it into one "meal". Then, I merely had to add a serving of that meal when I wanted to use it.

When I fell into the practice of eating the same healthy breakfast over and over, it became even easier. All I had to do was copy my "breakfast" menu from the previous day.

In one case, my wife had a good recipe for a healthy mexican lasagna, but no nutrition information for it. After entering the ingredients into a spreadsheet, however, I was able to calculate the nutrition content per serving. I entered that as a meal. Shortly thereafter, MFP released a custom recipe feature that facilitated doing this without having to use separate spreadsheets.

As I started tracking my caloric intake, I became fixated on other numbers. The Andriod application for MFP allowed me to see how much of the various nutrients (fiber, potassium, sodium, various vitamins) I was intaking on a normal basis as well. I started structuring my diet to intake the proper amount of calories while ensuring I reached my good nutrient goals as well (ideally via food, but also via dietary supplements if I was under a vitamin goal for the day). Tracking the various numbers during this process was the final step in turning my weight loss goal into a game for me, and before I knew it I was well on my way to my goal.

Tracking my protein and fiber intake proved to have an additional benefit: protien and fiber are great ways to make food "stick with you" (basically, keeping you feeling full for longer without artificial appetite suppressants).

Takeaways

Turning weight loss into a game was ultimately the change I needed in my diet plan to get me to reach my goal weight. The game became the core focus, and everything else I did (which normally would have felt like sacrifice) was a way of min-maxing my nutrient stats to win the game.

I still ate out but I was able to find healthy alternatives that were pleasing without feeling like I was forcing myself to eat something I didn't really like for the sake of health. The only time it got annoying was when I had to enter my chosen meal as a custom food in MFP because it wasn't already there, but that only happened occasionally, and even then it was only early-on, before I had entered all the foods I eat regularly when I eat out.

I did exercise a bit throughout this process, but it wasn't the main factor in my weight loss. In fact, if I worked out during one day, it just meant that I had to eat more that day to make sure I kept above the level via which the starvation response was triggered. In the end, exercise was a great way to treat myself to a dessert or a less-healthy meal. Of course, working out is a very good addition to a weight loss plan for the other health benefits as well.

Obviously, different methods will work for different people with regard to losing weight. Physicians and personal trainers can offer better advice than most people (including myself) with regard to tailoring a healthy weight loss plan to your needs. If you can, though, find a way to merge it with one of your passions.

References

1. Weight Gain - Wikipedia
2. 5 Tips to Avoid Plateaus and Metabolic Slowdown - Fit Watch