A story of CICO, Math and Scale (Month #1)

I’ve been struggling with weight since my early teen years. I went from a rather active kid to a completely inactive teen rather rapidly and this along with the increased pocket money, first signs of anxiety and some home issues quickly led me to a world of emotional eating and diet yo-yo-ing. When I was 20 I reached 230lbs and this was my first serious wake-up call. I spent the next year working on losing all that extra weight, but I did it mainly through the very fad diet at the time – the Dukan diet. It worked (but I grew to seriously hate a lot of protein foods – pork, eggs, I can’t stand them). I reached my lowest weight ever of 145lbs. But to be honest, I still felt fat and soft and wasn’t overly happy. Now looking at my pictures from that period I know that I was simply “skinny-fat”. I managed to maintain for a few years, but slowly the weight started creeping back up. Work, stress and real-life disappointments kept me in a bad relationship with food where it was my only comfort…

For a while, I stayed at about 165lbs, but then I injured my knee and had to undergo surgery. This was both the best and the worst that could have happened to me. The worst because it took away the little level of activity that I had at the time, bound me to my bed for 3+ months and was an easy excuse about my weight gain. Yet, at the same time, it was the best because just after my surgery I weighed at a little over 177lbs – over 10 pounds of gain for less than a month and a half (injury to surgery). That was when I found MFP and started learning about nutrition, calories, macros, working out and how all of it comes together.

Ever since then I started yo-yo-ing through MFP. xD I’d get super serious for a month or two, lose weight, but then the first plateau would come or something stressful would happen at work (and there have been some big stressors there) and I’d just give up, turn back to my comfort food and gain it all back and then some.

Then I pretty much stopped counting and working out for a whole year, concentrated instead on my career (and it sky-rocketed), but my unhealthy relationship with food remained. This January I weighed myself at about 208lbs – almost 25lbs gain since last summer. *kitten*, I had to do something. So I started preparing myself for my new weight loss journey. I started paying more attention to what I ate, I started logging food every now and then (a veeery rare “now and then”). I wasn’t counting properly calories, but I was eating mindfully. I spent most of February and March traveling to exotic islands and throughout Europe (both pleasure and work trips), but on 26th March, my official “start” I was already weighing at 203 lbs.

Today is the 34th day of my journey and today I recorded my weight at exactly 10lbs less – 193lbs. I’m still far, faaar away from where I want to be (maybe another 40-50 lbs), but this is one amazing progress towards my goal and in a rather short amount of time.

But things are different this time. I’m a lot more mindful of what I eat, how and when I eat. When emotions take over I let them run through me and don’t use food to muffle them. And this time around I’m in a lot better relationship with the scale and the numbers it shows. I told myself that I’d give myself the first month to analyze what is going on to see whether the expected weight loss of my method would match the actual one. I kept telling myself that fluctuations are normal, that sudden gains are normal, I’ve been following MFP for so many years and I’ve seen it with so many other people and I’m no different than any of them.

So, I set myself to follow TDEE-500cals as a calorie goal. For my TDEE I chose something between Lightly Active and Moderately Active, simply because there are weeks where I go to the gym 4+ times, log 15k+ steps, but then there are weeks that I hardly log more than 6k steps and no gym. And I’ve been adjusting my TDEE-500cals constantly based on my weight loss and my new workout habits.

You see, I’m a rather logical and analytical type of person, so numbers mean a lot to me. So, I started logging everything.

Each morning I’d start with weighing myself. Same time, same conditions.

Each day I’d log what I eat, and when I didn’t (business trips) I’d still eyeball to not go over my TDEE-500 cals. Each day I’d record just how many calories I was under or above my daily goal.

For the past 34 days logged 15 563 calories under my goal, which means that based on that unintentional cut I should have lost about 4.45lbs. And my TDEE-500 cals for the past 34 days gave me a cut of 17 000 calories, equal to 4.85lbs loss.

So, from CICO/mathematical point of view, I should have lost about 9.3lbs.

While my scale points at 10lbs loss.

As I still don’t have a trend, I’m willing to believe that the 0.7lbs difference between what CICO/math is saying and what the scale is saying is water weight. But I intend on continue following everything (I’m seriously a math nerd) and if the difference remains or if it grows, then I’ll simply know that my TDEE is higher than what I estimate currently, and I’ll adjust it accordingly.

Ever since I found MFP three years ago I’ve known and believed that CICO is the “big secret”. This time I have my numbers to keep reminding me that even if I plateau or my weight fluctuates from one day to the next, you simply must move forward.