I’m currently writing this post in Singapore, at the beginning of a vacation in Southeast Asia to attend my close friends’ wedding, and also to enjoy lots and lots of yummy food (Hainanese chicken rice, curry chicken noodles, kaya toast, nasi lemak, mee goreng, roti canai, chili crab, etc.).

Prior to the trip I’d finally started making consistent progress on losing some weight. I reached a low of 180 lbs, a milestone I’d only been able to hit a few times in the last 10 years. Woo!

Alas, I know I’ll be eating much more on this trip than in my usual day-to-day in SF. I’ll definitely, absolutely gain a few pounds (Narrator: it was more like 5-6). And I’m OK with that; I want to eat a lot on this trip and enjoy all the delicious local food, and I also know I’ll be able to work my weight back down once I’m home and on my normal routine again.

But this post isn’t about how to lose weight. Or at least not like in a “5 Weight Loss Hacks You Need To Try” kind of way. No, this post is about all the thoughts and feelings and history so many of us have surrounding the topic of weight and weight loss. For me it’s my messy entangled web of my relationships with: food, my physical body, my body image, how I view myself, how I think I’m viewed, goal-setting, failure, habits, cultural and societal bloatware, and more.

(e.g. even at 180 lbs, I fall into the BMI category of ‘Overweight’. Not a particularly useful measure IMO, but it’s one that I’ve had applied to me since I was a kid. I also happen to weigh more than *I* would like to, and I’ve been working to change that, also roughly since I was a kid.)

Trying to make change within this context has been quite hairy! I cycled through the typical New Year’s Resolution type of process of trying to change something (e.g. diet, exercise), failing due to emotional reasons or logistical reasons or both, beating myself up about failing, avoidance, processing, then trying again / trying a different tactic. And nothing seemed to really work. But then all of a sudden, it did.

I realize now that in the years (years!) I’ve been trying, I’ve come to understand myself better and I have slowly been changing my relationships with food, body image, how I view myself, and change management. And I’ve started carving out a path of less and less resistance to continue losing weight–I found some combination of things that work for me, and that I can keep up.

What didn’t work for me

Lifting to lose weight

• My theory was if I got bigger muscles, but ate the same amount, then the muscles would consume more energy = weight loss
• In reality, working out increased my appetite so I ended up just bulking. I got stronger, but gained weight/muscle

Cutting / eating clean

• The stereotype of just eating brown rice, boiled chicken breast, and blanched veg is real and it works, but there’s too little joy and variety in it for me

Counting calories / macros

• I lost count of the number of times I started trying to count calories and gave up after ~1 week. It’s so tedious, with not a high-enough sense of payoff for me

What has worked for me (all in conjunction, I think)

Lifting to gain muscle to look and feel good

• Putting on some muscle got me to like my body more, like “Oh I’m kinda hot. I can look like this?”

Learning tidbits about food science, diet, satiety

• Caloric deficit is king, truly
• Having a reference for the size of the deficit: there is a sort-of-accurate measure of 1 lb of body fat = 3,500 calories, meaning that’s how many calories you need to be in deficit over time to lose 1 lb of body fat
  • It may not be 100% accurate but it’s probably in the ballpark, and even just knowing the ballpark is useful
• Satiety, and how eating protein makes you feel more full, for longer, than eating carbs does, and when you’re hungry at midnight it’s often cus your body wants more protein

Intermittent Fasting (IF)

• I do 16/8 - fasting for 16 hours in the day, and only eating during an 8-hour window
• This works well for me as an implicit way to limit my calorie intake - I can only eat so much within my eating window and I’ll usually end up in a slight calorie deficit
• Being able to reliably keep this contract with myself of eating and fasting at certain times
  • Not being too strict about it - sometimes I’ll eat between 9am-5pm, sometimes between 12pm-8pm
  • Provided some reframing / reward structure of “if I stick through fasting today, I can enjoy all the junk food that I’m craving now in the morning” and sometimes I eat chips for breakfast then next day and sometimes I don’t
  • OTOH my roommate says he would absolutely not be able to do IF for sustained periods of time, he’d get too hungry
• I learned how to sort of “turn off my sense of hunger” after reading Sasha Chapin’s fasting post and trying a few multi-day fasts. Among other benefits, this makes doing IF easier

Exercise

• 2x lifting, 2x volleyball, and 1x running per week, and biking around the city
• Most of this is from having a roommate to cocreate a supportive context with

Cooking at home

• I cook most of my meals, and I don’t eat out very much (where it’s easy for me to overeat, get dessert, etc.)
• Nothing too extreme. Here are some low- to medium-effort dinners I’ve cooked
• I try to get in a reasonable amount of protein if possible (callback to the section on satiety)
• I have decided to cut down on pasta because while it’s delicious, it’s not enough protein to be filling nor conducive to my goals
  • Shrimp scampi is still OK because I can put in a lot of shrimp and reduce the amount of pasta
  • Carbonara is less OK but still not terrible (and also entirely too delicious)
  • But no more eating 1 meal of pasta each day like aglio e olio, cacio e pepe, garlic + cherry tomato + olive oil. Though I still make some from time to time

Mentality

• This BBC video (cw: graphic) of them autopsying an obese person and showing what the belly fat and visceral fat (surrounding the organs) looked like
• Not having family around as much to tell me “you know you should lose some weight” all the time
• Reframing and viewing this whole process as a “10+ year journey” because it has been, and being kinder to myself and giving myself credit for the amount of time and effort I’ve put in
• Knowing that I can keep making progress, now that I have indeed made some progress

This is a surprising amount of factors! But I do think each piece has its role to play in getting me to where I am today with something that works for me.

Onto 180 lbs again, and then onto my ultimate dream of being under 15% body fat :). Meanwhile, who knows how this all might break out into more chaos along the way.