My Weight Loss Colophon
Last week I received an email response to my Wednesday thoughts post from a fellow blogger (Bearly Significant). In the email, they said:
I just wanted to let you know that I am too trying to do some weight loss so I would love to read more about it!
For context - in my 'thoughts' post I said I didn't want to write about my weight loss efforts because I feared they would overtake my blog and that's all it would be about. As a result I've relegated those thoughts and notes to a private .txt file that lives in my OneDrive - it's One Big Text File that dates back to last year, I think? Anyway, rather than talk about details specific to me, I thought I would share my health & fitness colophon.
Colophon: a page that describes how the site is made, with what tools, supporting what technologies -- Slash Pages
First, some basics. At it's simplest, weight loss is about consuming fewer calories than you burn1. The general rule people in the weight loss community follow is that to lose 1 pound of fat you need to burn 3500 calories. This equates to roughly 500 pounds a day. This isn't an exact number, it's an approximation. To figure out your calorie total, you need to determine your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure), which is your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate - the energy you burn by being alive) + your daily activity level (e.g. sedentary, lightly active, very active, etc.).
From there you subtract 500 calories and that's your target. More on that further down.
Software
This is probably the easiest place to start. I use apps to track my calories, but I also want to track my exercises and keep tabs on my scale weight. To do this I use a combination of the following (and this list is only up-to-date as of right now. I have used many different apps throughout the past decade+):
Cronometer: This is the foundation of my weight loss journey. It's the app (and website) I use to track what I'm eating, and set calorie goals. I recently compared several calorie targets and found that using Cronometer's target setting gave me a good middle ground between the different websites I consulted so I just set it to 'lose 1 lb per week' and I'm going from there.
Other advantages for this app - you can scan barcodes of products you're eating, and it's usually in the database. If it's not, you can add it by taking a picture of the nutrition info and the app will scan it and enter all that data for you. It's great. There are more features if you pay for a premium subscription but right now I find the free version to fit my needs.
Samsung Health: I use this - in combination with my smart watch - to track my steps, sleep, and enter my weight & measurements. SH syncs with Android's Health Connect service and sends weight data to Cronometer and Libra (info on that coming below). It also grabs calorie / food data from Cronometer but I'm not overly concerned about that particular two-way communication since I use Cronometer for that; but it's handy for having complete data.
Even though I don't "eat back my calories" for tracked exercise2, I find it useful to keep track of my activity time during the week. Sort of. I mean right now it's a simple data point, but in theory I can use this to look at my activity levels and adjust if I feel I should be doing more (or if I've exercised a lot on a particular day, maybe I need to eat a little more food so I don't die, metaphorically).
Libra: This is an Android-only app (though you can get something similar for iOS, called Happy Scale - which I've also used in the past) that takes your daily weight data points and smooths things out to give you a rolling trend weight. Your daily weight can fluctuate up and down due to a wide variety of things (most commonly, water weight) so it's helpful to see your overall trend. For example, as I write this, my scale weight says 260.4; but my trend weight is 259.8 based on a 7-day average. In other words, it filters out the noise. Libra syncs with Google Fit, which syncs with Health Connect, so in a not-so-straight line it gets that data automatically so I don't need to input it every day.
Notepad: What I use to write my private notes about my progress. Any text editor works, really.
Physical Tools
Weight Scale: Should go without saying, but you need a weight scale to weigh yourself.
Food Scale: I need a new one but what I have works for now. I measure nearly everything so that I can get as accurate as I can with calorie counts. One tip: serving sizes are almost always smaller than you think, and usually smaller than the package says it is.
Gym Membership: My wife and I signed up for a gym membership earlier this year, and we later on paid for a personal trainer. We go once a week during softball season but will get back to twice a week in the Fall.
Bicycle: This is my favourite outdoor exercise in the summer. A few weekends ago I went on two hour+ rides on the trails we have around the city.
Shoes: The absolute basics. I walk a LOT (helps to have a dog, even if those are short walks). I try to walk as much as I can when I'm visiting a city. Unfortunately - when we visited Langley, BC earlier this year that's not a very walk-able city.
Resources
These are helpful links that have helped me along the way.
LoseIt Subreddit: I don't use this as often as I used to, but usually I pop in to see what other people are saying and will sometimes post things myself. They have a good Quick Start Guide if you need some direction.
Various TDEE Calculators: I won't list specific websites but there are suggestions on /r/loseit: https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/wiki/index#wiki_calculating_your_caloric_needs
Friends & Family
The "family" part mostly comes from my wife's contributions but friends include my best friend who offered to go on a bike ride with me once he tunes up his bike; and people like Brendon and Noisy Deadlines for suggesting some back exercises to deal with my chronic back pain.
So that's it! I am almost thinking now of dropping this on my main page or navigation menu as a permalink and update it as I change things up, but we'll see about that. I hope that people find this helpful in some way, even if it's just to find out about a different tool from what they normally use for a different perspective.
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Or if you prefer, find me on Mastodon.
The opposite is also true - if you need to add weight, consume more calories than you burn.↩
Smart watches and other things like FitBit are notoriously bad for overestimating calories burned, so it's often easy to overeat if you assume that you've burned 200 calories in an exercise when maybe you burned half of that (at best).↩