When at the age of 25 I moved to Holland in August 1999, I weighed about 72 kilo. It was a perfect weight for my height of 178 cm, and I was quite fit and healthy!
8.5 years later, at the start of 2008, my weight was over 86 kilo :( , and I didn't feel good about it at all. So what happened in those years that made me gain almost 15 kilo, almost 2 kilo per year? I guess it was the usual combination of much less movement than before, too much car driving, too much tasty food, work stress, etc.
Think about it this way: According to John Walker in his most entertaining and insightful free book The Hacker's Diet, there are about 3500 kcal in a pound of fat. For the sake of simplicity, let's say that 1 pound = 1/2 kilo. Then we can say that to gain 1 kilo of extra weight we need an excess of 7000 kcal, and for 2 kilo's this amounts to 14000 kcal. Now let's divide this amount by the number of days in a year (365 days), and we can conclude that to gain 2 kilo of extra weight in one year, we just need 40 extra kcal per day. And what's 40 kcal? It's almost nothing. Even an apple contains more energy than that, not to mention cola, meat, cookies, sweets, etc.
Well the good news is that to lose 2 kilo of fat in one year, we just need a deficit of 40 kcal a day! Well, first off course you need to reach the ballance between your intake of energy and expenditure thereof. If you consume exactly the same amount of calories as you spend, your weight will be stable. This point is often hard to reach, but if you do, then to lose weight you just need to lessen your intake of food by a relatively small amount of calories.
Well, that was the theory and you can read about it in the above mentioned book. So did I in the spring of this year. I found it a great read, full of insight and inspiration. My first step after reading the book was to start monitor my daily weight. I log my weight every morning, using this online tool from the same author: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html. The tool calculates weighed average of my weight over the last 20 days or so and presents many useful graphs. This is my weight history graph over the last few month, starting from the end of july when I just returned from my trip to India:
The red curve is my average weight. (The sharp fall at the beginning of this curve is due to the fact that I lost some 3 kilo during my trip to India.) The little diamonds are my actual daily weight measurements, and the green vertical lines show the difference between the actual and the average. As long as your actual is under the average (red curve), you will be loosing weight. You can see that the actuals can fluctuate a lot. This can be due to all kinds of things: how much you ate the day before, the amount of water in your body at that moment, etc. The important thing is the red curve, because it averages out all those fluctuations and tell you the real truth about your weight.
Now, this tool is really easy to use: you just log your weight daily and the tool does the rest!
As you can see, I've been losing weight for a couple of months, but in the last couple of weeks I've gained some weight and gone from the average of 80.5 kilo to 80.9 kilo.
By the way, you can always see my latest average weith in the right side bar of this blog, under my profile.
So, how did I lose more than 5 kilo since the start of the year? Well, firstly just monitoring your weight as above makes you aware of your weight and of how it is affected by the things you eat and exercise you do. And because I watch my progress daily, I am inspired and encouraged to manage my weight so that that red curve goes down.
Secondly, I lost 3 kilo in India, mostly due to the very streneous mountain hikes we did in the Himalaya. And even though we ate quite a lot of food, if you walk up and down in the mountains for 6 hours a day, you will lose weight I assure you!
Thirdly, I decided to bike to work and back every day, unless I have a meeting with a customer. I wrote about this in more detail in this post: http://lublenok.blogspot.com/2008/09/keeping-fit-and-alpe-dhuez.html. This gives me 20 km (some 50 minutes) of biking hard almost every weekday, which is a great exercise. I log my bike times at http://www.logyourrun.com/. This is for example the graph of my daily bike distances for the last 3 months:
Also I do a daily 10-15 minutes exercise program from the same book by John Walker: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/exercise.html. It is a program of five simple exercises: bends, sit ups, leg lifts, push ups, run & jump. You can start at a level you are comfortable with and work your way up the ladder. The blue marks on the graph above indicate what level I did that day. I am currently at level 26 out of 48.
Additionally, I walk and bike regularly together with Anne Sophie, which is also a good and very pleasurable exercise!
But lately I've again gained some weight, so I decided to try out something new! Read about it in my next post!
8.5 years later, at the start of 2008, my weight was over 86 kilo :( , and I didn't feel good about it at all. So what happened in those years that made me gain almost 15 kilo, almost 2 kilo per year? I guess it was the usual combination of much less movement than before, too much car driving, too much tasty food, work stress, etc.
Think about it this way: According to John Walker in his most entertaining and insightful free book The Hacker's Diet, there are about 3500 kcal in a pound of fat. For the sake of simplicity, let's say that 1 pound = 1/2 kilo. Then we can say that to gain 1 kilo of extra weight we need an excess of 7000 kcal, and for 2 kilo's this amounts to 14000 kcal. Now let's divide this amount by the number of days in a year (365 days), and we can conclude that to gain 2 kilo of extra weight in one year, we just need 40 extra kcal per day. And what's 40 kcal? It's almost nothing. Even an apple contains more energy than that, not to mention cola, meat, cookies, sweets, etc.
Well the good news is that to lose 2 kilo of fat in one year, we just need a deficit of 40 kcal a day! Well, first off course you need to reach the ballance between your intake of energy and expenditure thereof. If you consume exactly the same amount of calories as you spend, your weight will be stable. This point is often hard to reach, but if you do, then to lose weight you just need to lessen your intake of food by a relatively small amount of calories.
Well, that was the theory and you can read about it in the above mentioned book. So did I in the spring of this year. I found it a great read, full of insight and inspiration. My first step after reading the book was to start monitor my daily weight. I log my weight every morning, using this online tool from the same author: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html. The tool calculates weighed average of my weight over the last 20 days or so and presents many useful graphs. This is my weight history graph over the last few month, starting from the end of july when I just returned from my trip to India:
The red curve is my average weight. (The sharp fall at the beginning of this curve is due to the fact that I lost some 3 kilo during my trip to India.) The little diamonds are my actual daily weight measurements, and the green vertical lines show the difference between the actual and the average. As long as your actual is under the average (red curve), you will be loosing weight. You can see that the actuals can fluctuate a lot. This can be due to all kinds of things: how much you ate the day before, the amount of water in your body at that moment, etc. The important thing is the red curve, because it averages out all those fluctuations and tell you the real truth about your weight.
Now, this tool is really easy to use: you just log your weight daily and the tool does the rest!
As you can see, I've been losing weight for a couple of months, but in the last couple of weeks I've gained some weight and gone from the average of 80.5 kilo to 80.9 kilo.
By the way, you can always see my latest average weith in the right side bar of this blog, under my profile.
So, how did I lose more than 5 kilo since the start of the year? Well, firstly just monitoring your weight as above makes you aware of your weight and of how it is affected by the things you eat and exercise you do. And because I watch my progress daily, I am inspired and encouraged to manage my weight so that that red curve goes down.
Secondly, I lost 3 kilo in India, mostly due to the very streneous mountain hikes we did in the Himalaya. And even though we ate quite a lot of food, if you walk up and down in the mountains for 6 hours a day, you will lose weight I assure you!
Thirdly, I decided to bike to work and back every day, unless I have a meeting with a customer. I wrote about this in more detail in this post: http://lublenok.blogspot.com/2008/09/keeping-fit-and-alpe-dhuez.html. This gives me 20 km (some 50 minutes) of biking hard almost every weekday, which is a great exercise. I log my bike times at http://www.logyourrun.com/. This is for example the graph of my daily bike distances for the last 3 months:
Also I do a daily 10-15 minutes exercise program from the same book by John Walker: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/exercise.html. It is a program of five simple exercises: bends, sit ups, leg lifts, push ups, run & jump. You can start at a level you are comfortable with and work your way up the ladder. The blue marks on the graph above indicate what level I did that day. I am currently at level 26 out of 48.
Additionally, I walk and bike regularly together with Anne Sophie, which is also a good and very pleasurable exercise!
But lately I've again gained some weight, so I decided to try out something new! Read about it in my next post!
