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Weight Loss For Coders

Have You Gained Weight?

If you're anything like me, you're spending too much time sitting in front of a screen. Once a year you'll make some promises to watch out for your health more, but life tends to get in the middle and things remain the same.

Although at a young age I was always the thin, lanky type, one day I suddenly got a shock, stepping on the scale, seeing that I had accumulated too many kilos over the years. Well ... about 15 kg, to be precise.

I went to do my own research on the web and figured out what to do. Then I went to work and got rid of the fluff (and then some) within about eight months.

Today I want to give a quick summary of what I did in order to lose weight. I'll stick to the pure core of it. We can discuss about the details in the comments.

Disclaimer: I'm no doctor, dietitian, coach or anything - just a regular dude sharing his experience; keep that in mind, be sure to use your own brain, do your own research, and definitely ask a doctor if there are any issues!

So How Does Losing Weight Work?

What Is Body Fat?

Actually there's only one major thing you have to watch out for in order to control your weight gain or loss: Your energy balance.

Everything you eat comes with some energy content. Your body is consuming food in order to do all its work (body functions, activity etc.). Basically like a car needs fuel, your body also needs fuel.

Now your body weight depends solely (!) on the balance between how much energy you consume with your food and the amount of energy your body actually uses - calories in vs. calories out!

Every bit of energy that can not be used for anything, will be stored for later.

And that's all your bodyfat is - stored energy.

So if you carry around too much of it, all you need to do is consume less energy than you actually need over a longer time frame, and then your body will resort to the reserve to make up for the energy deficit.

How Can We Measure That?

Energy in food is measured in calories. That's just a unit, like inch, cm or whatever.

You have to figure out your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure), which you can either do using some calculator you find online (risking that it may not be terribly accurate because every body is a bit different) or just by applying what I'll explain further down below.

Anyway, you'll find out how many calories you need every day - and then you can change the amount of calories you actually consume with your food to force a gradual emptying of your stored fat.

You'll find the calories of every food either on the label at the package, or you can just search for the nutritional values online. Of course there are also apps for that.

So what you need to do now (to make absolutely sure it works): You weigh out everything you eat by the grams, calculate the calories for it and write it down. And after you reached your limit for the day, you just stop eating. That's all.

Do I Need Any Equipment?

Yes. You'll need a body scale, a food scale, a pen and some paper.

And What Am I Allowed To Eat?

Anything you want.

Yes, anything!

For your weight loss, it doesn't matter what you eat - only the energy content matters. You could eat only donuts, or gummy bears, or potato chips, anything really, and if you stop when your calory limit is reached, you will lose weight.

Obviously you'll feel like crap and it will be really hard and it's not actually healthy. I just want to get across the idea that the energy balance is the decisive factor if you want to lose weight.

To make it more healthy and maintainable, watch out to eat enough protein with every meal, also a lot of vegetables, some fruit, a bit of healthy fat (like nuts, oil, salmon etc.).

So nothing special, just a regular healthy diet. You can make exceptions and eat something "fun" once in a while, as long as it fits into your calory budget.

Additionally, it's a good idea not to drink calories. Liquid food will not fill you up for long, but it's still calories. So best would be to stick to water, tea, coffee (sugar and milk have calories, just saying), and if it has to be soda or something like that, choose the zero calory variation.

What about sports?

You don't need to do any sport in order to lose weight. Not even one minute. It's really all about the energy. If you eat less than what you need, you'll lose weight.

If you want to do sport, the best choice would be weight training. Doing that will help to prevent muscle loss.

Additionally, any activity in your life will help you burn a few extra calories. It doesn't even need to be hard, just going for a walk for an hour will burn a few hundred calories.

What Exactly Do I Have To Do?

Step 1: Establish A Tracking Regimen

The first thing you do is gain insight into your weight and calory intake as it is. This phase will take two weeks.

You can eat whatever you usually eat, no restrictions whatsoever. However, you have to calculate the calories of everything you put into your mouth, no matter how small and inconspicuous! The only thing you don't need to calculate is plain water.

First, you weigh whatever you're gonna eat. Say it's a slice of bread. You weigh that slice and note the grams. Then you look up the nutrition values of that food for 100 grams, and calculate your calories.

Also, every morning, right after your first visit to the toilet, you step on the scale and note the result. Don't obsess about the number - your body weight fluctuates wildly from day to day. This is no weight gain or loss, that's just shifts in body water.

So don't freak out and simply make a note - every weighing is just one data point.

Step 2: Determine Your Maintenance Calories

Now you will evaluate your data to figure out how much energy your body usually burns. You establish this by calculating your calory and weight averages.

Take your consumed calories from the first week and make an average. So you add the seven numbers and divide by seven. If you should have lost the data for one day, just add the six results you have and divide by six. Do the same with the calories of week two.

Do the same with your weighing results.

Now compare the two weight averages. Did you gain or lose weight? If your weight has not changed at all, you can assume that you ate about what you burned. Take your daily calories average from week two as your maintenance.

Or was the second weight average different? Then you can change your daily calories by 100 for every 100 grams you gained or lost weight. So if you for example gained 200 grams, and your second week's calory average was 2000, this means, you ate too much. Assume 1800 as your maintenance calories.

Step 3: Establish Your Calory Deficit

Now if you want to lose weight, you need to eat less than you presumably burn. Important is that you don't reduce your calories too drastically, otherwise you will be very hungry and have trouble sticking to the plan.

A soft deficit would be 15 percent. You'll slowly and steadily lose weight while there would not be too much suffering or difficulty picking foods to eat. So if you figured out that your maintenance is 1,700 calories, take 1700 * 0.85. The result is 1,445. If it feels messy, there's no problem just saying 1,400 or 1,500.

Now the actual diet starts! You try to eat about whatever you calculated for your deficit calories every day - not more, not less.

It's no problem if you waver back and forth a bit, as long as overall it averages out. If you eat too much, you won't lose weight as expected, and if you eat too little, you'll be too hungry. No need to hit it on point - just try to get it about right.

Also you continue to diligently track your daily calories and weights, make weekly averages of both and note them in a book or whatever.

Now looking at that data, you can clearly follow what's going on, and you will see your weight shrink from week to week. How much it will shrink depends on your deficit in comparison to your maintenance, 100 daily calories roughly equaling 100 grams of weekly weight loss.

If you have a larger deficit, about 500 calories, you'll likely see a decrease every week. If you have a smaller deficit, like 200 or 300 calories, it might work better to take two-week averages to filter out the water shifts.

Now you just keep going, until you've reached your target BMI within the healthy range. Depending on where you're at, this can take a rather long time, but steady wins this marathon. Just keep going, stick to the plan, and you'll definitely get there!

Step 4: Go Back To Maintenance

Now that you've reached your goal, you need to return to eat on maintenance, so that you neither gain nor lose weight anymore. For this you just take the data of the last few weeks, look at how much weight you lost on average from week to week, and then you add 100 calories for every 100 gram.

If you've lost a lot of weight, your maintenance may be a bit lower than what you started out with. Also, your activity levels may have changed. Anyway, can't hurt to make sure, right?

Over the next few weeks, there might be small changes occurring due to your body being out of 'emergency mode'. Maybe you get more active and burn a few more calories and start to lose some more weight. If that happens, you can just recalibrate your calories.

So basically all you have to do now is eat the calories of your new maintenance and stick to that. It's very simple, but actually many people fail exactly at this point.

You may get that feeling of, 'yay, I've done it!'. If you now just start to eat randomly like you did before your diet, all you'll do is climb back to your old weight.

Because this style of eating got you up there in the first place. Logical, isn't it?

But people fail here anyway. One reason is that right when you come out of a diet, you feel the deprivation of the former months all the more, and you just want to eat!

Anyway, do resist! Strictly eat your maintenance, and keep tracking everything. Just go on, don't stop yet.

After a few weeks, you will feel a lot better, since you now get to eat enough again. The whole system stabilizes, and the omg-gotta-eat-it-all craze dissipates. You feel like a regular human being again.

Step 5: Reintroduce Intuitive Eating

Now since you've managed to drop all your weight, you have learned a lot of stuff, right? How much you need to eat, what foods have a lot of calories, what foods have little calories and so on.

Before the diet, intuitive eating meant, 'eat all the cookies from the jar'. Now, however, you'll have learned some habits that will hopefully help you to make better food choices and judge the size of portions better.

So now you can practice doing this without tracking. Not all at once - keep tracking your body weight, and track the calories every other day or so. The remaining days you try to 'guess' and eat intuitively and hit your maintenance. Just go by your satiety and try to get it about right. So you don't over- or undereat.

After a few weeks, you will see if what you're doing is working or not. If you're not starting to gain weight all over again, you can now further reduce the days on which you count calories until eventually you're not tracking them at all anymore.

Try to keep eating mindfully, and weigh yourself every day and write it down. This takes 5 seconds and doesn't hurt. This way, you will see in time, if you get off track and start to gain weight again.

Shifting back and forth a few kilos is perfectly natural and no problem for you. You now have all the tools to never get into the overweight zone again.

Any Questions Or Remarks?

Let's talk in the comments! :-)