Take It Off And Keep It Off

This time last year I weighed over 300 pounds. Not a lot over but over. I was having difficulty with my back and my feet. Even climbing the three flights of stairs into our apartment would wind me. Want some photographic evidence? Okay, here's me on NYE last year.



Now compare to this picture taken at my sister's wedding in September. Much better right?



When I stepped on the scale today I weighed 260 pounds and I've been as low as 252. That means in the last year I've lost 40-some pounds and more importantly have been able to keep it off. My back and feet are feeling better, I can feel the additional muscle I've picked up (the key to weight loss) and I don't get winded anymore. Even when I'm on the treadmill at the gym I'm chugging along breathing naturally.

The key to my plan is pretty simple. I plan to do much more than I need to do. Then when I do it is in excess and does even more good than I need it to and when I don't do as much as I planned I still have done enough to do what I need to do. If I plan to go five times a week and I only go three times, it isn't the end of the world nor do I lose ground.

The most important element though is getting to brag about losing a lot of weight. Listen, I'm probably never going to summit Everest or hit a major league curveball and chances are neither are you. That's just life. It's the little challenges you take upon yourself to complete which end up defining your life. Being able to tell people you took on something like this and triumphed makes its own gravy. It becomes a loop of success and praise which reinforces itself over and over.

The easy way out on my personal health would be to do what I did for most of my twenties and just act like it didn't matter. What did I give a fuck for? It's the little challenges though and succeeding on something like this can only pay off in other situations down the line. All in all, it's about changing your ethic. Once you do that you can make bigger changes in your life, changes that will make losing 40 pounds into no big deal.

Changing Body Math III: The Return of the Update

A little less than three months has passed since I made my last post about the weight I've lost and that means I'm due for another post containing the math of it all.

In the past nine months I've lost 53 pounds dropping my weight from 305 to 252. I've also reduced my body fat composition from 30% to 24%. As I mentioned in the last post about my weight loss, the goals for no longer being obese are 263 pounds and 25% body fat. So you can see that I am healthily under the bar for both metrics.

Multiply those numbers together and I've lost 31 pounds of body fat and 22 pounds of water weight. If 4.5% of the 6% of body mass change is new muscle then I've also added about 11 pound of muscle too. So add 505 calories burned each day just for that new muscle existing meaning I can netting out a pound of fat less every 6.4 days without lifting a weight or spending any time on the elliptical.

Having lost 50 pounds and no longer being obese, I've basically achieved my goals in wanting to lose weight. Now the goal is to maintain my weight, lower my body fat even further and not have to think about the numbers anymore. I'll keep going to the gym three to five times a week and I'm sure I'll keep losing weight for a while. It just won't be as necessary to quantify it which is a good feeling to have.

Changing Body Math Update

It's been about four months since I made my first post (I realize I made a math error which I'll point out below but I didn't feel like going back to change.) about working out and losing weight so I figured I was due for an update.

In the last six months, I've dropped my weight from 305 lbs. to 270 lbs for a gross loss of 35 lbs. When I started working out I had 30% body fat and have trimmed that number down to 26%. Multiply all those respective numbers together and I've gone from carrying 91.5 lbs. of fat down to 70.2 lbs. There are 21.3 lbs. of fat (the weight of this 1 year old dog) which *poof* no longer exist.

The other 14 lbs is water weight. Last time I accounted this weight as gaining muscle which is simply not the case. Unless I were losing bone density or giving away internal organs, this is just my body adjusting the amount of water it holds. Think about the blood maintaining the fat which is no longer needed and reabsorbed by the body and it makes sense.

The correct way of figuring out the muscle I've added goes back to the body fat percentage. I've lost 4% of fat which means that a greater proportion is made up of something else now. There are factors like my bones becoming more dense but for the most part it's muscle taking up a greater proportion of my overall weight. Conservatively saying 3% is new muscle growth and 1% other factors that means I've gained 8.1 lbs of muscle in the last six months or about as much as one gallon of water weighs.

1 pound of muscle burns 50 calories at day which means that I'm burning an additional 405 calories per day simply by changing my body makeup. Out of the Bs, that's the same as 2 plain bagels, 4 bananas or light beers, 5.4 oz of blue cheese dressing, about 10 spears of brocolli or 40.5 tbsp. of BBQ sauce. To put it another way, at rate of 405 calories a day, a pound of fat would burn away in about eight and a half days. And that's just existing at rest, not taking into account that muscle actually getting used when I work out.

The thing which I have a greater understanding of since I wrote my last post is that I shouldn't be as concerned with my weight as much as I should be focused on my body fat percentage. According to the BMI scale, I'm obese and will be until I can slide under 263 lbs with a goal of 218 to be on the high end of normal.

Well, if we go back to the top, my baseline weight which includes bones, organs, muscle and water weight but not fat is about 200 lbs. To be 218 pounds, assuming my bones growing more dense and my muscles getting stronger equals my water weight loss, I could carry only 18 lbs. of fat. for a very athletic 8% body fat. For some perspective, Michael Jordan (a world-class athelete) weighed 216 lbs. during his last year in the NBA. And that's the top end of what they consider "normal."

If you focus on body fat percentage instead a different picture emerges. By this metric being over 25% body fat for a male is obese. So let's say I maintain my present weight but lose that 1% body fat. That's only 2.7 lbs. of fat I need to lose. Even if I drop my another 10 pounds to 260, the north end of what I weighed during college and consider a good guideline, I'll need to shed 5.2 lbs of body fat to get to 25%.

There is work yet to be done. Still results are happening and there's no reason why I can't achieve my goals over the next few months. I knew this was going to be at least a year-long process when I started six months ago. With the progress I've made, it looks like I can start setting some goals further out than I expected.

Changing Body Math

Was it six or seven weeks ago that I started working out? I don't recall. Let's call it seven.

In those seven weeks, I've dropped my weight from 305 lbs to 285. That's a loss of twenty pounds. Average it out and that's a little under three pounds a week. I pay $140 a month for once a week training sessions and over two months that averages out to $3.50 a pound. One pound of almonds costs $3.50.

When I started I had 30% body fat. That means I was carrying 91.5 pounds of body fat on my frame. I've dropped to 27% body fat meaning I'm carrying 76.95 pounds of body fat. There are 14.55 pounds of fat which used to exist which *poof* don't anymore.

Which means that, not only have I lost 20 pounds, I've gained 5.45 pounds of muscle. An extra pound of muscle burns an extra 50 calories a day. So I've been burning 272.5 extra calories a day.

It would take 21 minutes of chopping wood, 28 minutes of jogging, 36 minutes of caring for a child, 42 minutes of weight-lifting or 97 minutes of taking the lead while doing the deed to burn 272 calories.

I'd need to eat half a Big Mac, a whole croissant, 8.24 tossed salads w/o dressing or drink 272 Diet Cokes extra in order to match the calorie intake - calorie burn ratio I was at before I started working out. Or I can just bank it and every 13 days burn another pound of fat.

If someone had come to 17, 19, 23 or even 26 year-old Mike and explained the math to me, I never would've made it to 305. But, since I did see 305 and someone set me down and ran the math, it's on 28 year-old Mike to pick up the pieces.

It's a long way to go. But the number don't lie. If I keep at it, I will lose the weight my body has been desperately been hoping to shed. Sounds like a fair deal to me.