Journey Updates

Weight Loss Is A Numbers Game

April 13, 2010 @ 10:26 am

A number of the bloggers I follow don't weight themselves with any regularity ... or at all. The idea is that one shouldn't let their lives and weight loss efforts be ruled by a number on a scale; it emphasizes that this journey is about overall health and well being, about how clothes fit, etc. It's totally valid, and I agree with not weighing oneself daily, but I can't avoid the scale entirely.

When I avoid the scale, bad things happen. Humans tend to have a skewed perspective on themselves; we're really good at fooling ourselves that we've not eaten that much, or that we're losing weight when nothing is further from the truth. I'm the king of this - and so I need a frequent reality check to ensure my perceptions are still grounded.

The Game

Whether you use a scale or not, weight loss is a numbers game. Number of calories in, number of calories spent. Spend more than you've eaten and you start tapping your reserves, a.k.a. fat. If you tap 3,500 reserve calories you lose a pound of fat. Then repeat the process 100 times.

The key is knowing your basal metabolic rate (BMR) - this is the number of calories your body needs to fuel its daily operations. For me, it's around 2,200 - 2,300 (all equations are only estimates). That means to maintain my weight, I need to eat that many calories. If I eat less than that, I'll start burning reserve calories, which eventually whittles away at my fat stores.

You would think staying under 2,000+ calories is an easy task, that feels like a lot of food, until you start eating a lot of breads, pastas, and pints of Ben & Jerry's in a single evening. When I think about what I've been eating this week compared to what I must have been eating before, it astounds me. Especially when you consider how much exercise I was getting.

Exercise affects the numbers game by essentially giving you wiggle room. If I eat 1,500 calories a day, that's a deficit of 3,500 a week, or 1 pound. If I also exercise and burn 500 calories a day, that's a deficit of 7,000 for the week - or 2 pounds. The key is net calories - calories eaten less calories burned. Measure that against BMR and you have your deficit (or God forbid, a surplus).

The Awesomest Weight Loss Spreadsheet Ever

All this is basic weight loss that anyone on this journey comes to understand. But it's been refreshed in my head because it's become painfully clear that unless I focus on the numbers side of weight loss - and track what I'm actually doing - I will fail. So being a business & tech nerd, the obvious tool to turn to is a spreadsheet. I may have gone overboard. Click to see a full version.

This sucker takes my daily calories eaten and daily calories burned and then automatically tracks and predicts what my weight loss will be for the week and for every week thereafter. It also keeps a running calculation of my BMR according to the three major equations, so as I lose weight, my BMR automatically drops appropriately and so does my daily and weekly Net Calories targets. And the neatest part is that if I over eat at the beginning of the week, this tool will tell me automatically what my new daily caloric target should be for the rest of the week in order to stay on track.

It's pretty nifty if I do say so myself.

To calculate calories during the day I'm using www.myfitnesspal.com.

Will I be tracking this closely for the rest of my journey? I don't know. But for now I need to be retraining my brain to understand just how much food I should actually be eating in order to lose weight, and that means building a mental association between food and calorie counts, so that I can better gauge how well I'm doing (or not).

14 comments | Topics: BMR, calories, food and eating, science, weight loss tools