My current monthly challenge is to eat at a 1000 kcal deficit for 30 days! :breadnommed: Posting about my challenges here has been really motivating in the past, so I'll do it again!
I started on Tuesday (Day 1), where I consumed the amount of energy required to charge my smartphone battery 92 times!
Day 11: To burn the energy I ate yesterday, I'd need to ride my bike for about 37 km! 🚴 That's approximately the circumference of Halley's comet. @piko warns me that there are no bike paths there, though.
For context, this is a graph of my body weight over the last 10 years. Whoa, I've done a lot of dieting! :O Always with a deficit of 500 kcal/day. This time, I'm trying 1000 kcal/day, and I think seeing fast results is super motivating to me!
My current motivation is papers like "Years of life lost and healthy life-years lost from diabetes and cardiovascular disease in overweight and obese people: a modelling study" (Grover et al., 2015).
They estimate that when people like me lose weight, they will live around 4 years longer, and, in addition, will have 7 more healthy life years (free from diabetes
or cardiovascular disease). That sounds pretty desirable to me! :)
Day 22: If all humans who currently live would whisper into my ear for 2000 years, my eardrums would receive acoustic energy equivalent to what I ate yesterday! 🔊
Day 23: I ate 14 micro-picard today! For more practical uses of the picard energy unit, see @JanHegenberg's book "Weltuntergang fällt aus"! :fairydust:
For tracking calories, I used https://cronometer.com, which performed flawlessly! I tried a bunch of other tracking apps (MyFitnessPal, Lose It, Yazio, FDDB Extender), but they all miss some crucial features for me. Cronometer can:
Create custom "recipes", and then log portions of it.
Visualize the macro nutrient percentages (protein/carbs/fat).
Scan the barcode of most packaged food items to log them
For drawing the weight graphs and estimating calorie requirements, I used my own little tool, https://github.com/blinry/nom, which I've been using over the past 8 years now! <3
Thanks for following along here, and cheering me on! Having your accountability here (and having fun with the energy calculations) was super motivating to get this started!
This week, I ate an average of 1242 kcal per day! That's the energy required to type 50 million characters on my Thinkpad, and enough to type out 1/5th of the current Mastodon source code!
I ate an average of 81 g of protein per day! I still want to raise this a bit more.
I ran 27 km this week. Marathon coming up at the end of April! 🏃
I think I can lower the frequency of these check-ins, so see you in a fortnight!
Two weeks over, time for another report! I ate 1206 kcal/day on average! With that energy, I could've powered a heating blanket for a full week! ♨️
Since I last checked in, I lost approximately 2 kg.
I'm now halfway to my (somewhat arbitrary) goal! \o/
During the first week, I experimented with eating more protein, and arrived at 96.6 g/day! It didn't make me very happy though – to get there within my energy limit, I had to chug a lot of protein shakes…
I want to point out that what I'm doing here is probably a bit extreme. ⚠️
I'm approximately on a deficit of 1000 kcal per day, meaning that I eat a little over half of what my body needs. I have 400 kcal per meal, and that's… not a lot. :/
I have to be strategic, and pick food that's high on protein and not too energy-dense. On some days, I'm really hungry. In social situations, I envy people who just eat what they want.
I got the idea that it's an option to lose weight that fast from the book "Fettlogik Überwinden" by Nadja Hermann (of @erzaehlmirnix fame), which is a science-based look at weight loss and the risks of overweight.
Like her, I find that fast weight loss motivates me a lot! Instead of doing this for a year, it only takes 5 months…
One precaution I take is to take a comprehensive vegan multivitamin, so I don't run into deficiencies while I'm eating this little.
Over the past two weeks, I ate 1224 kcal/day, on average! :breadnommed:
My tool https://github.com/blinry/nom estimates that I burn 2300 kcal/day. To make up for the difference of 15000 kcal, my body had to burn about 1.6 kg of body fat!
Every time I got sad that I couldn't eat all the delicious things other people ate, I just asked to try a tiny bite of it. Which mostly made me happy again!
My weight is now the lowest it has been in the last 9 years! 😮
I decided that after 3 months of eating a deficit of ~1000 kcal, it's time for a break. 😌 I'm aiming at keeping my weight where it is for the next month or so!
So last week, I added 500 kcal to my daily allowance! If I still lose weight on that, I plan to add more. This is pretty exciting for me! :D
Our current host kindly provided me with a body scale!
After 2 weeks at 1700 kcal/day, I still kept losing weight, slowly. My tool nom estimated that, to stay at 70 kg, I could eat 2100 kcal/day, so that's what I'm doing since last Thursday! :D
Interestingly, I don't feel less hungry, and it doesn't seem much easier to adhere to this limit. But I definitely can be less strategic.
After aiming at 2100 kcal/day, my weight stayed exactly the same! 🎉 That's quite a change from the yo-yo effect I sometimes encountered in the past.
After three weeks, I decided that I had enough of a break, and went into a 500-kcal deficit again, according to what my tool https://github.com/blinry/nom predicted: 1800 kcal/day.
I've been staying there for two weeks, but today, there's an exciting change!!
The idea is to get ~50% of your calories from potatoes. 🥔 As I'm controlling my caloric intake anyway, I'm not expecting big changes, I'm just curious and willing to contribute data. And the idea of eating a lot of potato is just very funny to me. :D
The organizers ask participants to include two "regular" weeks as a baseline, and to track their weight, mood, sleep, and a couple of other parameters.
Those two baseline weeks are over, #halftato starts today! Get ready for daily potato fun facts. :D
Fun fact! The German word "Kartoffel" is derived from the Italian "tartufolo", which comes from Latin "terrae tuber" (earth bulb).
We cooked "Himmel und Erde" today, a dish made from potatoes and apples!
Fun fact! The potato plant was chosen as the "poisonous plant of the year 2022" by a botanical garden in Wandsbek, because all of its green parts are slightly poisonous to humans. #halftato
@zormit and I made Hasselback potatoes today! So good!
Still aiming at 1800 kcal/day, but I haven't been very consistent in the last weeks.
A big irregularity last week was my marathon on Sunday! You can see in the graph that I tried to eat as many carbs as I could the day before. Certainly an interesting feeling to be very full. Haven't experienced that in quite a while.
Interestingly, eating at a 500 kcal deficit seems harder to me, compared to a 1000 kcal deficit. :O I don't have to be super strategic, and in theory, it's okay to snack here and there, but if I'm not careful, I simply eat exactly the calories I burn.
In addition, I still try to eat 50% of my calories from potatoes, as part of the Slime Mold Time Mold community trial! 🥔
This is pretty challenging for me, and feels like it's interfering with the way I usually eat a lot. Also fun to try a lot of new recipes, though! I especially liked a veganized version of "Erdäpfelkaas" (mashed potatoes with sour cream and onions)!
Finished the half-tato diet! In one month, I ate 27.5 kg of potatoes. It didn't seem to have any special effect for me – weight loss correlated neatly to my calorie deficit. Still fun!
And in Japan, I stopped tracking what I ate entirely; I think that would've overwhelmed me. I expected to gain some weight, but it was more than I thought! :O
No hard feelings, just gotta get back to tracking. :)
That's where you come in! :D Having accountability here is extremely helpful for me. I'll re-start a 1000 kcal deficit, and aim to eat 1200 kcal/day.
Going to post fun facts about the numbers themselves this time! Yesterday, I ate 1216 kcal.
And 1216 is the serial number that the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) uses for a type of electric locomotive that set the current world record for the fastest conventional electric locomotive: 357 km/h!
I ate 1235 kcal yesterday! In the year 1235, construction started for the St. Elizabeth's Church in Marburg, the oldest Gothic church in Germany, which later became a model for the Cologne Cathedral!
I ate as many calories as the number of a UN Security Council resolution, which established an international military and civil presence in Kosovo, and marked the end of the Kosovo War. 🕊️
I ate exactly as many calories as the first "Holy Year" declared by the pope! Under certain conditions, Catholics are forgiven all sins in these years. How convenient!
This is kind of my limit of what I try to eat each day. I feel that my body needs to get used to this again. I'm doing okay, but some days are pretty exhausting…
@powl I try to avoid being hungry in the evening, as that's the most difficult situation for me. So I try to split up the hunger over the rest of the day.
My current rhythm is:
Drink a protein shake in the morning
Eat "half a meal" after 12:00
Eat the other half after 18:00
Eat a snack before going to bed
I'll be somewhat hungry inbetween, but I can always look forward to the next meal!
Also, picking foods with low calories density, like vegetables!
Feeling good! :) Over the past week, I ate 1211 kcal and 91 g of protein per day, on average.
Last week, someone commented on my weight loss in a charming way: "It feels like you've changed somehow…" I like how this formulation leaves it up to the listener to decide how to reply. Because weight loss can also happen unintentionally, or not be associated positively.
I think I can reduce the frequency of these checkins again, see you in a fortnight!
@blinry This is great! Honestly, this makes me smile so much because watching you start this journey half a year ago and rigorously pulling through is super inspiring!
I also always struggled with weight, though in the opposite direction in that I was underweight and was really uncomfortable around the topic. I gained 8kg since your first post, which isn't as impressive as your progress, but still made me feel much better :))
I'm at 63.3kg right now, so we might meet in the middle soon ^^
I set myself a challenge to eat 1200 kcal per day, on average, for two weeks (until last Monday), and as a reward, I'd get a scraper tool for my standing mixer! :D And that was indeed a good motivation, might do something like that again.
Despite me being that consistent, my weight mostly stayed the same. That's okay, there are sometimes random fluctuations…
I'll be travelling next week, and will likely not be tracking at all. So, another experiment: Try to mostly stay at the same weight, with the goal to arrive at 64 kg one week later, on or before October 24th!
@blinry i always find that i lose weight on holiday, regardless of my actual diet. the actual measurable weight gain happens about a fortnight after i return.
The good thing about weight loss is you can recover a lot of clothes which some time ago mysteriously "shrink", like my tuxedo, which a dozen of years ago fit perfectly 😄
I'll start to continuing to track calories for 5 days, but with an allowance of 2000 kcal/day, to re-learn what portion sizes should look like for me.
After that, @piko had a clever idea: I'll monitor my weight, but I'm free to eat whatever I want until I hit a threshold of, let's say, 67 kg. At that point, I have to start tracking again – so I'm motivated to avoid that! :D
Eating and cooking whatever I want feels great after so many months of restricting myself! :D
One month later, I'm now between 65 and 66 kg, which means that I ate around 50 kcal too many per day.
I'm really motivated to stay at this weight, so I'll start implementing little behavior changes. First rule, which I'll try for a month: Don't eat while focusing on something else (like TV) – with the exception of vegetables!
The "don't eat anything except vegetables while doing something else" rule felt a bit strange, so I modified it to "don't snack anything except vegetables while doing something else" (which means that reading during lunch is fine, for example).
And I added a second one: Have a protein shake as a default breakfast! Protein generally helps with weight loss, and seems a good addition to my current diet.
My calendar reminds me to do another weight check-in:
I hit my "upper barrier" weight of 67 kg on New Year's Eve, and went on a 1200 kcal/day diet again. That wasn't particularly fun, but I'm super used to it by now.
I learned that "Slime Mold, Time Mold", a group of hobby scientists on the Internet, are conducting a new Potato Community Trial! This time, you're instructed to eat mostly potatoes, but with your own "riff" added to it!
So I decided to eat nothing but potatoes, soy products, and chocolate for a month, and see what happens! Spices and oil are allowed, as well.
Note: I'm doing this because I think it's fun. So far, I don't see a helpful effect in weight maintenance.
@blinry it seems like a small band. at the lower end of my weight-scale, I oscillate like that quite easily. doc says it‘s just a sum of factors - hardly any real change. but that‘s obviously individual to some degree.
@neingeist https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/ has a very good TDEE calculator. It's usually a good idea to eat at maintenance for a week and check if you are losing or gaining weight. Then cut around 500kcal/day. But maybe @blinry has a better answer 🤗
@katzenschiff@neingeist Yeah, that seems reasonable! I also used such an calculator/estimator when I first got started. My tool https://github.com/blinry/nom also tries to estimate your TDEE from what you weight and eat, if you're interested in that! (That's the black line in the lower graph.)
Ich benutze zum Tracken FDDB.
Das errechnet mir auch automatisch die aktuelle Kalorienzahl anhand von Größe und Gewicht.
Hab es vor Jahren empfohlen bekommen, kannte damals viele, die es genutzt haben.
In der Premiumversion ist wohl auch Meal Prep möglich.
@oxytocinated@neingeist Ich mag https://cronometer.com :) Man kann dort zB auch Protein-Ziele einstellen, es hat ne große Produktdatenbank, und die Werbung in der Mobilapp ist mit Blokada 5 leicht blockierbar.
@blinry do you mind telling something about the visualisation? (Software, the name for that kind of chart, anything at all really.) I find the intuition of the points “pulling” your line up or down very compelling, wondering about applications for myself.
Also my respect for your effectiveness, that chart is impressive.
@blinry That's amazing and you can be very proud of you. How do you feel when you see those changes and how do you feel today about how you are right now?
@blinry Is your low consumption of calories healthy? I am no expert on this, not by far, but continuously fueling your body with close to 50% of the average required intake only makes me worry.
@otacke I try to be careful, and take an extensive multivitamin while on high caloric deficits.
It's probably a bit stressful, and sometimes affects my mood. Other than that, I didn't find any reasons it would unhealthy – bodies are great at using their fat reservoirs to compensate for missing energy!
I got the idea that it's possible to to high deficits like this while reading @erzaehlmirnix / Nadja Hermann's book "Fettlogik überwinden".
@katzenschiff Oh, klingt großartig, danke für den Tipp! Hast du bestimmte Episoden/Themen, die dir besonders im Kopf geblieben sind? Da richte ich mich gern nach Empfehlungen bei neuen Podcasts! :)
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