America has never been as fat as it is right now. And I had never been as fat as I was seven months ago.
I don’t usually discuss personal matters here on the site, but weight is a serious issue that hundreds of millions of people around the world struggle with constantly.
According to a report released earlier this month by the World Health Organization, more than 600 million adults across the globe were obese in 2014, and almost 2 billion were categorized as overweight. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statethat more than one-third of all adults in America — 78.6 million people — are obese.
In early July, I was one of those 78.6 million obese Americans. At 6 feet tall and 235 pounds, my Body Mass Index (BMI) was 31.9, just north of the CDC’s obesity threshold of 30.
Today, at 172 pounds, my BMI is 23.3, which falls within the CDC’s “normal” range of 18.5-24.9.
I worked hard to get where I am right now, and I still have work left to do. It took a lot of exercise and discipline, but technology also played a big role in my efforts, and in this post I'll explain how I did it.
First, a few preliminary notes:
I am not a doctor. I am not a nutritionist or a dietitian. I am not a personal trainer, a coach or a fitness expert of any kind. Please do not consider anything you read here to be advice from an expert. My methods are based on information gathered from dozens of different sources, and I made adjustments to suit my personal needs as I pieced things together.
I do not recommend you take the same path I took. Instead, my goals are merely to relay information about the realizations I made and to discuss the tools I used, because bits and pieces here and there might be helpful to some readers.
Please consult your physician and seek the advice of other experts before making any major changes to your diet or exercise regimen.
And now, a bit about me.
I have been at least somewhat overweight for most of my life. Even when I was an all-star athlete for years in school, I was overweight. It never really bothered me much, and not once in my life had I actively tried to lose weight until this past summer.
When I left “corporate America” six or seven years ago and began writing about the consumer electronics industry professionally, my lifestyle changed fairly dramatically.
Days that had been filled with commuting, meetings, travel and so on, were now filled with sitting. Hours and hours of sitting at a desk typing. I was also not a healthy eater by any stretch of the imagination.
At that point, I began to gain weight at a pace that was barely noticeable.
I have never been big on fast food or even junk food, but I would always skip breakfast, eat something like a sandwich and chips every day for lunch, and then order from a local restaurant or go out to eat dinner each night. I would literally go for months without cooking a single meal myself.
Couple that diet with 12 to 14-hour days at a desk in front of a computer, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
Then, on July 16th, 2010, I smoked my last cigarette. I certainly don’t regret quitting, but my weight gain accelerated a bit at that point, and it continued until I pumped the brakes this past summer.
I wasn’t sick and I thankfully didn’t get a harsh wake-up call of any kind. I just decided enough was enough. I spent a week or two researching, but ultimately a single realization proved to be the most important catalyst for me:
Weight loss is math.
This might seem painfully obvious — it is painfully obvious — but it hadn’t been to me. Never in my life had I counted calories or even paused for a moment to consider how many calories I might be consuming in a meal. I just didn’t care.
But now I had to care, because this was the simplest and most obvious way to approach weight loss.
If you regularly consume fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight.
Again, it seems so obvious. But many people don’t really think about the reality of that statement, and I had been one of them. Barring certain ailments, this is a universal truth.
And so here is the first area where technology really came into play for me. Apart from just eating healthier in general, I had to figure out how many calories were in everything I ate, I had to keep track of them, and I had to at least get a rough idea of how many calories I was burning each day.
