Now that I’ve explained why I wanted to lose weight, let’s get into the nitty gritty of it. The first two weeks of my weight loss consisted of simply writing down what I had eaten during the day. I didn’t change anything, I didn’t work out more or eat less. This was both out of laziness and out of curiosity. It was out of laziness in the sense that I didn’t want to change right away, I was scared of it. As anyone would be when making a moderately large life change, I was simply stuck in my ways. It was out of curiosity in the sense that I genuinely wanted to know what the problem was. After the two weeks I was shocked at just how much I was eating. I was eating upwards of 2500 calories a day!
To put that into perspective, a person of my stature at that point needed an average of 1700 calories a day to maintain their weight. It was at this point that I knew I had to double down on losing weight. Starting the next week, I brought my calorie count down to 2000 a day with Sunday as a cheat day along with adding 45 minutes of exercise a day, five days a week. This exercise consisted of 15 minutes of cardio and half an hour of weightlifting. I landed on this number as 45 minutes of working out only took about an hour out of my day. So, instead of watching Netflix or goofing off, I dedicated this time to go to gym every weekday. I decided to take two rest days as I assumed that I would get burnt out if I tried to go every day. In addition, I had read somewhere that exercising vigorously everyday could end up being detrimental. In order to prevent injury, I settled on the regimen listed above.
Being as big as I was, my weight prevented me from running for that long and the elliptical was a stretch. I tried biking initially but I noticed that my legs were consistently tired so I moved on to rowing. This form of cardio was perfect as it was a no impact, full body workout. No one body part was working too hard which allowed me to do it nearly every day. At the beginning, I wasn’t able to do 15 minutes all at once, so I did 5 minutes of cardio, 10 minutes of lifting, and repeated this three times until I hit 45 minutes..
You may be wondering why I decided to weight lift considering my goal was to lose weight. I will go more in-depth about this in the weightlifting section of this blog. Simply put, building muscle increases metabolism which leads to an increased passive weight loss (metabolism) in the long-run. In regards to weightlifting, I was too weak to use free weights effectively (bench press and dumbbells). This was due to a mixture of having excess weight and never having lifted much before. I quickly realized I would have to use machines in order to build muscle. I started with just a few machines; the pectoral fly, leg press, and chest press machines. I distinctly remember the first time I sat down to use the pectoral fly and I was only able to put 70 pounds on it for 5 sets of 5 reps. The leg press wasn’t too much better at 150 pounds for 5 sets of 5 reps. The chest press was equally disappointing at 45 pounds for 5 sets of 5 reps.
As a recap, during the first half of the month, I simply monitored my current intake without changing it. During the second half of the month, I brought my calorie intake from 2500 to 2000 a day with Sunday as a cheat day along with 15 minutes of rowing and 30 minutes weightlifting everyday, five days a week. By the end of this month, I had gone from 209.5 pounds to 203.2 pounds which adds up to a monthly (and total) weight loss of 6.3 pounds.
Right: I attacked weight loss from multiple angles. Instead of just dieting or working out, I did both and made a pretty massive change/improvement because of it.
Wrong: I could have reduced my calories a bit more and probably added Saturdays into my routine without too much trouble. This would have led to even more weight loss without any additional burnout.
