Recently I have been losing weight. After some time of being over weight, and ignorant to just how overweight I was, I decided it was time to get my eating in order. At the time of writing this, I’m down about 7lbs, and have about 30 more to go. It’s been going pretty well actually, and I haven’t felt physically better than I do now in quite some time.

I have done this whole weight loss thing once before, back in 2019, I went from 215lbs to 175lbs in about 3.5 months. That’s an astonishing rate of ~4lbs/week of weight loss. During that time, I pretty much always felt pretty tired, as I was a full-time college student who was working out every day on top of preseason baseball practices. My diet of choice was a ketogenic diet, which worked really well (in terms of total weight lost), but didn’t feel the best. I had a calorie limit of 1854 kCal / day, with a protein goal of 116g and a fat goal of 144g. Carbs had a hard limit of 23g / day. I also was clocking in around ~20k steps / day if I had to guess, since I had to walk to all of my classes throughout the day, walk back to the dorm, walk to the gym, dining hall, etc. To get me through my workouts, I’d walk to the gym and dry scoop some Mesomorph pre-workout AKA straight rocket fuel. A scoop of this could get me through tough workouts even in a ~2000 cal deficit | 400x400

Years later I got some sharp pains in the left side of my chest, and I think said rocket fuel is to blame. I digress. The weight loss was quick and unmaintainable, but that didn’t matter because it happened so fast that I didn’t have to maintain it in the long run. All was good! I maintained this approximate size for about a year and a half.

Then covid happened! I was sent home to finish the last 2 years of school at a desk in my bedroom, 1200 miles away from the school I attended. My steps basically went to 0, I started playing a ton of video games, and people in my area were getting really upset about masks. But that wasn’t the root of my subsequent weight gain (spoiler). What really got me was my slow descent into mental illness through an addiction to League of Legends. My friends and I had started playing after classes almost every day, and I subsequently started watching Twitch streams to see how higher-level players would play in the hopes I would get better at the game (I didn’t. Here’s my op.gg). After some time, I stumbled across loltyler1, a jocky and absolutely ripped LoL streamer who’s apparently good at everything he does. He was ranting on stream about how to “get big”, and he basically said you have to go to the gym and eat a bunch of food AKA “eat big, get big”.

I took that stranger’s advice straight to heart, and started lifting 6 days / week (basic PPL split) for after checking notes writing this post 6ish months (? felt longer to be honest) and got up to a 405 deadlift, took some time off, and then lifted for another year in the gym consistently, mostly doing bodybuilding and powerlifting lifts. During this time, I’d went from about ~180lbs to about 210lbs. How, you might ask? First thing is that I wasn’t super lean to begin with, having another ~20lbs to lose during the first bout of weight loss. Secondly, I would come home and eat 1lb ground turkey, 1 cup (measured dry) of white rice, an assload of sour cream and cheese, with hotsauce pretty much every day after the gym. That was in addition to all of the other food I was eating throughout the day. And finally, I was probably getting > 5k steps per day. So these three factors basically turned me into a blimp. Granted, I was somewhat strong, with a 405 deadlift max, 315lbx4 squat max, 285lb bench max. But those numbers can (and should for that matter) be reached at a body weight far below what I was at.

Since then, I’ve pretty consistently worked out for the last 4 years. Having moved across the country, I found a new gym and went until it closed down unexpectedly. After that I bought myself some kettlebells and have been pretty consistent with them for the last few years. I find kettlebells to have many upsides, and very few downsides, but the kettlebell training modality deserves its own blog post. I’ve also dabbled in running, having ran the Philly 8k in Nov 2022 and Philly 1/2 Marathon in 2023. I also picked up a very good walking habit in 2023, having walked (with my dog) around Fresh Pond in Cambridge, MA close to 330 times I’d estimate.

2024 I moved and got married, and didn’t have anything physically challenging planned. I had lost the walking habit, because we are in a new place with fewer walking paths (you’re never going to find anything better than Fresh Pond) and because I didn’t prioritize finding a new place to walk. I got bigger, bulging up to 225lbs while running and lifting pretty consistently. It’s a weird thing, being functional but big. I feel capable and strong, but I look in the mirror and I am a blimp. Think Stay Puff Marshmallow Man, but with OK physical performance capabilities. Throughout the entire time I felt strong and had a sense I was much stronger than I was, and that the cost of being this strong was size. Turns out I am not really that strong, and am just kinda tubby lol. What really sent it home was seeing my wedding photos. I didn’t like the way that I looked, and seeing myself as big as I was made me want to lose some weight and keep it off this time.

That brings me to now, and what this blog post is all about. I could write so much (and might) about how I feel and my mindset through this new weight loss thing. I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of different fitness podcasts, from bro-sciencey stuff to evidence based science lectures about many different aspects of health and fitness. It’s something that I love learning about and fiddling with. I’ve narrowed down my meal regiment and lifestyle to 3 big things that have been helping immensely with the process of losing all this weight:

  1. 1g/lb of goal body weight in protein per day
  2. 10k steps per day, minimum. The higher the better.
  3. A somewhat strict kCal ceiling of 1800 calories per day

Oh shoot bro, that’s the same number of calories that you had the first time during your keto crash diet! Indeed, it is. But this time I don’t have a carb limit, and honestly I am feeling a lot better this time around. I’m also not doing double workouts and getting 20k steps per day on average so there’s a lot less of a deficit overall. I’m projected to be down about ~1000 calories per day, which equates to a projected fat loss of about 2lbs/week, which I think is a good amount to lose without being exhausted all the time.

Right so you have some background, you have what I’m doing now, so here’s the point of this post: It’s actually really easy to eat well when you have a protein goal and a calorie limit.

Before, I found it really hard to figure out what to eat throughout the day because I had so many choices. The number of different things I could eat was monumental, and trying to figure out how to navigate that puzzle, even with a calorie limit, was very hard for me. What do I eat today? Chicken with some rice? How about adding sour cream? Or none of that and have a burger instead? It was annoying, and most days I would give up and not track calories because I would decide on something that was hard to track, which got me more discouraged, and so I’d just say “f*** it” and just binge eat.

Now, I find it really easy to find food to eat. I have to maximize protein intake while minimizing calories from other sources (carbs and fat), so I find myself eating more whole food because they tend to “specialize” in a single type of macronutrient. What do I mean by that? I mean that chicken is basically all protein, rice is basically all carbs, butter and oil is basically all fat, etc. My meals have become packages of individual ingredients measured out into the amount of respective macronutrients that I want. These single macro foods tend to be pretty high volume too, because the calories from other macronutrients are minimal. So you can literally eat 300g of chicken that has 93g of protein, while also only having 11g of fat and 0 carbs. Its great because these high protein, single macro specializing foods make me feel so full and don’t have a bunch of macros that I don’t want. I am a person who absolutely loves feeling full, which is part of the reason why I got so overweight in the first place. Prioritizing protein with fiber (which has 0 calories because the body can’t process it) has been SO USEFUL in keeping me feeling full and eating food that positively contributes to my calorie and protein goals.

Recently, my go-to has been ~340g lean (93/7) ground beef, with a head of lettuce, ~100g of fat free greek yogurt, an avocado, and hot sauce. It’s a combination that has SO MUCH VOLUME, and so few calories compared to eating that same volume of foods with a more mixed distribution of macros. Honestly, it’s been the best and has made sticking to calorie limits super easy for me.

Hopefully I don’t forget this information myself, and ideally this helps someone else out too!