Those who 'only' had up to 25 lbs to lose - please share your successes!

I am 5' 7" and 52 years old. I have a small to medium bone structure, but am pretty broad through the shoulders. I have never been overweight, but had gotten up to 145 last spring and just didn't like how I looked. With very diligent tracking and weight lifting (along with lots of walking, but no other cardio) I was able to get down to 125 in 4 months. I ate around 1500 calories a day + some of my exercise calories. I followed a fairly heavy protein diet and did periodic carb refeeds when I felt my energy was waning. I have stayed between 125-130 for 9 months now. The key for me was just being honest about what I was eating, weighing and tracking everything. I have been lax in my eating lately and am at the upper end of my maintenance range, but know that by tightening things up I can get back down to the bottom of the range. I weight myself daily in order to make corrections immediately if I get outside of my happy weight zone. I am currently going to Club Pilates about 5 times a week and continuing to walking 3-6+ miles a day. Good luck!

I'm short (164cm) and was around 75kg at peak. Counting calories works to a point, but discovered I need to do cardio to lose weight at a constant rate without feeling constantly hungry. Started cycling, then transfered to running when winter came and the streets got too icy.

Dunno how it happened but I've done a half marathon, continue to cycle three times a week, and recently started lifting too. 66kg now and have a bit more to go for optimum race weight and for abs to show. (Yes I can't believe I'm thinking about that...) Although weight loss has been moderate compared to many people, I'm feeling so much more clear-headed and in control of life in general. More energy. More able to deal with stress. More incentive to challenge and to change. Feel like a much better version of myself.

I've always had very minimal to lose. I did gain 35-45lbs with my kids but after the initial baby, water weight etc, I was left with about 20lbs each time. I have gained and lost many many times and changed my body composition. I am the same height as you OP and have been all over the map in terms of weight.

Right now I am about 144lbs cutting after a bulk. I am in a good place to recomp but I am more the bulk/cut type.

I will add.. progress can be slow and frustrating. When you are down to the last few lbs it can come down to muscle base (and not having enough to have the look you desire).. so keep that in mind. Just be patient, consistent and you may have to constantly adjust your expectations and goals

TL;DR up front for the wall of text to follow:
I was chubby as a kid, over time have learned how best to do something about it.
- eat at a deficit
- strength training
- treat logging as data collection, doing so as meticulously and accurately as possible
- "measuring" exercise calories can easily become a fool's errand, measuring intake and weight to adjust accordingly is the best way to go.

I'd say I've had four significant weight loss occurrences as an adult(ish).
Current stats for context: 29y/o male, 6-1, 175lbs, ~<15% bf, lift using a modified PPL 5-6day plan, have a rowing machine for cardio (which I should use more) and will roll out of bed to run 5/10ks as long as we go to Waffle House after.

- at age 17 in July of 2006 I weighed roughly 200lbs. I wasn't terribly active, had played baseball and basketball growing up but was always mild to moderately overweight. Was always told "some people are just built differently". The fact of the matter was that I wasn't active enough, had a relatively unhealthy diet and always snacked way too much. Went to a three-week-long, college-prep program for prospective engineering students at a university about three hours from home. First time I was away from home for any real length of time, and a good dry run for going to college the following year. Living in the dorms, I didn't have a TV or laptop so I didn't just sit around snacking, I ate three squares at the dining hall, had mandatory intramural sports and played a lot of pickup ultimate frisbee in the hot/humid Indiana summer. Lost 15 lbs over those three weeks and proceeded to lose another 15 or so more in the 1-2 months after coming home with relative ease and not much effort beyond stop snacking (pre-MFP for me). For the first time I felt like I had some measure of control over my body and it was really eye-opening. I would stay at relatively the same weight until after college, even finishing my freshman year at school in better shape than when I entered.

- at 22 in December of 2011 I found that the lifestyle I'd been leading in the few months of my first 'big boy' job had taken it's toll and I was getting a but pudgy. That position entailed a lot of travel and eating out constantly with little regard for nutrition combined with long days, car rides, etc. Guessing that was about 20 lbs gained, wasn't big on weighing at that point, but it was pretty visible in the mirror. After Christmas I started generically "watching what I ate" and borrowed a copy of P90X from a friend. By spring I'd gotten back to where I wasn't in danger of needing larger pants and on May 19, 2012 I came across MyfitnessPal, my first weigh-in was 178. Of course, that was eye-opening regarding how much I was really eating and making easy adjustments I dropped to 165 by the end of July. Those changes were largely choosing mustard instead of mayo, 5 oreos instead of 10, etc.

- From that point I stayed between 159 and 171 lbs until late 2014. I'd gotten back up to 175 around Christmas and quickly lost 5lbs in the early part of 2015. However, I wasn't doing any sort of strength training, I'd half-heartedly done the first month's workouts of P90X to the point of boredom, I tried P90X3 and hated it. I wanted to cut fat but I knew how I looked at 160 and wasn't appreciably happier there than where I was at 170. I started searching for strength programs and came across BuiltLean, which incorporates more traditional weight lifting principles than something like a P90X. I immediately started losing weight and got stronger such that I felt I was beyond my Bowflex Dumbbells to progress. In July I bought a bench, rack and barbell set and I was hooked on lifting.

- Come November of 2016 I was lifting like a mad-man but doing so on a self-developed program that wasn't properly structured for rest and periodization; I was deadlifting too heavy, too often, for too many reps with poor form, and my lower back started bothering me. It turned out I had L4-L5 facet arthritis and it was around the same time my wife, having just trained for and completed a half marathon suffered a stress fracture in her femur. With the Mrs. on crutches and me staying out of the weight room we essentially hibernated through December. In the down time I found a more reasonable strength training program, got a polar chest strap heart rate monitor for Christmas and was ready to get back at it with a plan come January. I started 2017 at 178lbs with a plan to cut down below 170, reassess my body fat and either cut further or start a bulk from there. Between MFP and my new fancy HR monitor my plan was fool-proof... so I thought. I got back to lifting without issue, ate according to my heart rate monitor and watched the scale do very little. I tried to get after it harder in the gym, which bumped up my recorded calorie burn, which made me eat slightly more.. and the scale started going up. I spun my wheels like this for much of the first half of 2017, far too long before realizing something was off in my math. I felt great, my lift numbers kept improving, and I kept rationalizing it had to be gained muscle or water retention. I got as heavy as 185 lbs in late April of 2017 but fell back down to 180 for May, lost a few pounds at the beginning of June and thought "here we go, I just had to hit a tipping point", but bounced right back up to 180 for four straight weeks into July (only weighed on Mondays at this point). At 2lbs heavier than I had been in January I finally resigned to the fact something was off in my numbers. I had set things up for a 1lb/week deficit at around 1800 and ate back all my exercise calories from my HRM, which was 700-900 calories per workout, netting me 2500-2700 calories on workout days. I'm not sure what prompted it but I found myself on r/fitness one day and found a spreadsheet for back-calculating actual TDEE from daily weight and calorie intake... BINGPOT! (pardon the Brooklyn 99 reference, I've been typing for far too long now). Ok, so to use this properly I was going to need to weigh myself daily and meticulously log my calories... this was no longer just something I did for my health it was DATA COLLECTION. As a very neurotic, science-driven person (engineer by trade) this resonated with me better than anything previously regarding my approach to logging and I was all-in. Looking back at my diary, I realized I'd gotten really sloppy with my logging as I got more disenchanted with the lack of scale movement I was seeing and had to pivot to fix it. I started logging more accurately, fanatically use my food scale, and weighing myself daily on July 24th and haven't missed a day since. It took a few weeks to build enough data in the spreadsheet to accurate set TDEE, but once it settled out I started losing weight and I finished 2017 at 176 after hitting that high of 185 over the summer. Coming off a week at maintenance-ish for Christmas visiting family out of town I again got after it in January. This time, armed with the correct TDEE number I dropped 5.5 lbs by moving average and hit 170lb for the first time since 2015 by February 1. However, this time at around 170, I was far happier with what I saw in the mirror. NOTE: these weight changes may not sound like much but the "ideal range" for someone my size is 164-183 so we're not talking about having whole to fuss around with; I estimate myself in the 13-15% body fat range, picture below.

Left: 172 lbs - July 2015, right around when I bought the bench, rack, and barbell
Right: 172 lbs - January 2018


As far as my current strategy, a week at maintenance in March turned into a maintenance+ bulk since. I need to get back to cutting consistently but I've found it hard to get back on the deficit wagon. Pretty much want to cut down to as low as I reasonably can and then start a lean bulk from there.

Current TDEE: 2440
Target daily calories: 1750
50% Protein 20% Carb 30% Fat

Even still, I wish I could send 10 y/o me a binder of all I've learned since that first weight loss event at 17 and say "here kid, read/do this, you don't have to chubby your whole adolescent life and 16, 18, 25, y/o you will thank you for starting some of this crap now".