This one thing created a 45lb weight loss
A visual guide to my weight loss success.
Welcome to the 102nd consecutive weekly edition of the newsletter.
I write about the habits, mindsets and systems I have created that have allowed me to transform myself from that unhappy 53 year old guy on the left to that guy on the right, who is one month away from his 57th birthday.
Consider subscribing and sharing!
Why?
Because what I teach is an operating system that flies in the face of conventional wisdom.
Here’s a quick list of what I NEVER do.
restrict calories (I consume between 2200 to 2400 per day)
sacrifice the foods I love (every meal I have sparks tremendous joy)
go to a gym
change into workout clothes
do cardio
sweat
lift weights
own expensive equipment
train more than 15 minutes a day
If you want to create something that works doing much less and living much more, then I have the perfect operating system for you.
BONUS!
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Ok, now onto the good stuff.
1/ Some context.
One of the essential habits I do is weigh myself every morning.
It’s the single greatest thing I have done on this journey.
I then manually input that data into My Fitness Pal, and in return MFP creates a scoreboard which highlights my successes and my failures over the past 1129 days.
2/ My regression.
I have talked about this before, but there are two parts to a weight loss journey.
The losing of weight — which is really HARD!
The sustaining of lost weight — which is 10X HARDER!
Most people think keeping it off is easier, but it’s not.
And the biggest reason its exponentially harder is because the reward system changes.
On the first part of the journey we get rewarded by the lower number on the scale.
That reward vanishes in step two.
The problem is no one warns us that we must devise a new reward system for the second part of the journey.
If we don’t, motivation wanes and we eventually start putting weight back on again.
For many, it means putting it ALL back on again.
In my case, I lost 45lbs and then put back on 16lbs over the next 2 years.
I had one 11-month stretch where I could not figure out how to get back down below 160lbs.
3/ The insight.
On March 12th, 2022, frustrated and embarrassed by my regression, I decided to go back and look at my eating when I was most successful.
I honed in on the last 2 months (January and February of 2020) when I really had my eating dialed in.
*****
Let me pause for a moment to build a case for The life-changing magic of logging your foods.
People roll their eyes at the thought of food logging. I get it. I did to when I first heard the idea.
But we roll our eyes because we don’t understand the magic that is captured by a food log.
When you log you create an extremely valuable historical database that you can review at any point on your journey.
The true brilliance of the database is it stores insights until you are ready to uncover them.
In my case, it took me two years before I was ready to understand what my mistake was.
And that was possible because I had my past behaviour captured in a food log.
I can tell you with absolute certainty I would not have figured this out without that data.
Ok I’m dismounting from my food log soap box.
*****
Initially, I was looking at the foods I was eating and my calorie totals and comparing them to what I was eating in March 2022.
There were slight differences, but nothing significant jumped out at me.
So I decided to look at my macro breakdowns for the first week of February 2020.
Here is what that week of eating looked like.
The profile was super consistent. It was approximately…
50% fat
25% carbs
25% protein
There were slight variations each day, but the eating profile looked pretty much the same each day.
I then went and looked at a week in January 2022, when my weight was above 160lbs, to see what that profile looked like.
I was shocked!
I had unknowingly changed the way I ate.
I was now consuming higher carbs and less healthy fats.
The breakdown was roughly…
40% fat
40% carbs
20% protein
It’s important to note I did not consciously make that change. It just happened without me even noticing.
The food log allowed me to uncover that mistake.
4/ The tweak.
The solution seemed obvious to me.
I needed to tweak my marco breakdown so it was similar to 2020 without changing my calorie sweet spot, which resides within the 2200 to 2400 range.
And the tweak?
Increase my healthy fat intake so it fell between 50 to 55%.
The macro profile I decided to test was the following…
53% fats (135g)
28% carbs (150g)
22% proteins (100g)
*****
As a quick aside, there is lots of confusion about fat, but put simply, there are good fats and bad fats.
I only eat the healthy ones.
Here’s my master list of every healthy fat I eat.
olive oil
grass fed butter
wild caught sea food
organic and grassfed beef (when possible)
pasture-raised eggs
organic 35% whipping cream
organic cheese
nuts
coconut + coconut milk (sometimes)
avocodo
olives
*****
Here is what this past week looked like with my new eating profile.
5/ The results.
Did this tweak work?
Here’s what happened to my weight from March 12th to August 21st, 2022.
I lost 12lbs of Dean that was no longer welcome.
6/ Five important takeaways.
Make sure you read this and filter them through your own ideas, philosophies and principles.
One. I’m not telling you to eat a healthy high fat diet.
Here is my philosophy on diet.
There is no one right diet for everyone. But there is one right diet for you.
I call this a Diet for One — a D41.
The goal is to create something that works for your DNA.
Some thrive on a a high fat diet. Some thrive on a high carb diet. Some thrive on a high protein or some other unique mixing and matching of those core elements.
The big lesson is to understand I designed a protocol and a macro profile that I now know works for me.
Two. Log your foods.
If you are not collecting data, then you are guessing.
Guessing is a wonderful strategy if failure and lifetime struggle is your goal.
And if you are still rolling your eyes at the thought of logging, I will tell you it takes me less that 3 minutes a day to log my foods.
There are some simple things you can do to make this very easy once you know how to think about the eating portion of your program.
Three. Your eating must spark joy.
Eating healthy can be extremely rewarding when you design it around foods you love.
I absolutely love what I eat.
Here’s the five meals I ate yesterday, in the order I ate them.
And that is not a mistake. I have my banana blueberry ice-cream to start my day and end my day.
Why? Because it’s so freaking delicious — and it works for my DNA!
Four. Eating consistency is key.
The reason my eating profile is so consistent is that every meal I have has a template. The variety comes from the fats, proteins and veggies I swap in and out.
Five. Design something for your DNA.
STOP eating according to other people’s rules.
Create something for yourself — a D41.
I don’t identify myself based on someone else’s diet.
The advantage of that is I can look at all ways of eating with curiosity and steal principles I love.
For example, my Big Ass Salad (Meal #3) is 100% raw (stolen from the raw food movement).
I stole the healthy fats from my days in Paleo, but I did not adopt their rule of not eating fruit.
I eat over 1lb and day and I LOVE IT!!!!
*****
There you have it my friend.
I hope this insight into how I eat has proved helpful.
Let me know what questions have bubbled to the surface?
That’s it for this week.
Dean
*****
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Let’s make magic happen my friend.
Thanks for breaking it down so simple!