How I Lost Weight Without Ozempic or Wegovy and How I Kept It Off (Part II)
- I Increased Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT)
Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) is the energy expended for activities that do not include eating, sleeping or strenuous cardiovascular activity. My goal was to increase NEAT in an effort to prolong my gradual efforts at plucking low hanging fruit. I hate cardio. I know I mentioned that, but it bears repeating. NEAT was my effort at fending off the need for cardio until I hit a stubborn metabolic plateau that would absolutely require it.
When running errands, I parked my car in the farthest corner of the parking lot. I walked around Wal-Mart and Costco more times than I needed to. At work, I took the stairs and avoided the elevator. To avoid prolonged sitting, I got up periodically and walked around the office. In general, I took every opportunity to move without breaking a sweat.
I also took to leisurely walking for extended periods of time. I would listen to music or a podcast and this made the activity much more pleasurable and therefore much more apt to be a repetitive habit over time. I also opted to walk around in malls when the weather was too hot. There was something quite enjoyable and nostalgic about walking around in malls. In my previous life, I had always wondered why there were so many elderly people in track suits walking around in the malls of my youth. I get it now. Air conditioning and an endless stream of people and things to look at.
The problem with NEAT for many is not a physical impediment per se, but an intellectual one. The tendency is to be dismissive of small changes in light of outsized goals. Why expend the time and the energy on an activity that does not move the needle? This is to miss the forest by staring intently at one small tree and to forget that the power of incremental gains is cumulative. It is true that NEAT burns a limited number of calories in a single session, but string along hundreds of them over time and this will invariably amount to a massive step change in both lifestyle and waistline.
Moreover, cultivating the discipline to continue to engage in beneficial activities despite a lack of obvious results will pay dividends in the end by reorienting a person’s perspective so that they focus all of their attention and effort on the long game. The salutary benefit of a commitment to NEAT, in many ways, helps a person with more than just their waistline. A person who lives and dies with every short-term fluctuation tends to lack the ability and the intestinal fortitude to maintain the type of consistency that long-term change requires. Enduring change requires a great deal of hard work and sacrifice. I suspect that’s why weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are so popular. It’s easier to just take a pill or inject your body with a chemical that will bring short term success without the need for long-term effort.
- I Always Included a Cheat Meal
As long as I strictly adhered to my diet for all of my other meals, I always allowed for one cheat meal a week. Those cheat meals were essential for my mental well-being. They allowed me to break up a long journey into manageable chunks. The difficulty I ran into in past efforts at weight loss was its interminable quality. My motivation tended to wane when I could not see an end goal in the distance and the thought of continuing with my diet and exercise routine for the rest of my life always made me want to quit.
Cheat meals, for me, became mental way stations. It allowed me the headspace to not think of my weight loss journey as an entire 40-year block, but rather to see it in 6-day increments. Consequently, I didn’t need to be disciplined for decades with no end in sight. I only needed enough discipline and willpower to make it to my next cheat meal. This made the journey much more manageable.
I also discovered that most people on a weight loss journey, at some point, fantasize about certain foods. This was certainly true of me. The deeper into a weight cut one goes, the more constant and elaborate the fantasies. And those fantasies can become anticipatory pleasures or agonizing impediments to long-term consistency. I have been on both sides of the divide and I can say without hesitation that periodic wish fulfillment does in fact prolong motivation. Whereas constant deprivation depletes the willpower to keep going. I have found that I can endure just about anything so long as there is an end to it, no matter how fleeting and momentary.
Of course, my inclusion of weekly cheat meals made it so that I was unable to lose as much weight on as accelerated a timetable, but that was a tradeoff I was more than willing to accept in order to sustain long-term momentum.
- I Completely Renovated My Diet by Substituting Healthier Options that I Actually Enjoyed
About a month or so into my weight cut, I realized that I had plucked all of the low hanging fruit. I had hit a metabolic plateau and I refused to do cardio. Consequently, I realized quickly that I had to renovate my diet in order to continue to make progress.
Prior to making this decision, my diet was not at all healthy. My diet consisted mostly of sandwiches, chips, the occasional salad, Costco frozen lasagnas, frozen pizzas and fried chicken strips. My dietary preferences hinged largely on convenience, not health. As a result, my diet contained a large quantity of processed foods and I quickly realized that by switching to whole or minimally processed foods, I was able to attain greater satiety and sustain it for much longer. Ultra-processed foods are manufactured for quick absorption into the bloodstream, and it is not in the best interest of the major food conglomerates to produce food staples that satisfy hunger quickly. Greater profits come when more people eat more of their product more often.
By switching to whole or minimally processed foods, I was able to eat the same amount of calories to greater satisfaction. And I found that my new diet contained foods that I actually enjoyed eating. This was the key for me. If I had renovated my diet to include nothing but boiled chicken breast and steamed broccoli three meals a day, then quite frankly I would have likely opted to remain obese.
Oat bran and broccoli may make a person live longer, but those foods also make a person question why they would want to.
For my new diet, I substituted salads with low-calorie dressing. I also ate rice with low fat ground turkey or lean ground beef topped with sugar free sauces or low-calorie seasonings. My favorite meal turned out to be 93% lean ground turkey over a bowl of white rice topped with Hidden Valley Ranch Seasoning. I also ate sweet potatoes as a regular snack. I would simply microwave a medium sweet potato for five minutes and then eat it with salt. I also loved to eat oatmeal mixed with protein powder and some raisins.
I patterned much of my new diet after the diets of bodybuilders I admired. Right now, there are countless videos on YouTube of bodybuilders sharing their recipes for the daily meals they prepare and eat while on contest prep, when they must keep their caloric intake to a minimum. I found bodybuilders the most helpful in terms of coming up with creative ways to make healthy food taste good. Remember, this is a cohort of the population forced to make their meals taste good on a shoestring budget – both financial and caloric. One bodybuilder commented, “If you can’t make healthy food taste good, you’re not trying hard enough.”
- My Fasted Cardio Program: Walking at a Moderate Pace on an Inclined Treadmill
Eventually, I had to do cardio. I could no longer afford to focus all of my attention on Calories IN (# of calories I consumed). I had reached the point where any further cuts to my daily caloric intake would have made life intolerable. And NEAT was not necessarily helping me break through metabolic plateaus. So, in order to progress in my weight loss, I had to focus more of my attention moving forward on the opposite side of the weight loss equation, namely, Calories OUT (# of calories I burned). This was a sad day for me. But, the way I incorporated cardio was the key to my success.
First, I did my cardio in a fasted state. Fasted cardio has been a point of contention amongst bodybuilders and fitness gurus for a long time. Many swear by it. Others claim the “benefits” have no basis in science. I didn’t really care because intuitively fasted cardio made sense to me. If I exercised on an empty stomach, then the body would be forced to use stored body fat as an energy source. Whether this was true or not was beside the point. In the end, cardio is cardio. It burns calories whether a person does it on a full stomach or an empty one. I chose the latter.
Second, I incorporated my cardio gradually. My cardio of choice was walking on an inclined treadmill at a moderate pace. I would walk on a 10% incline at about 4-4.5 mph. This got my heart rate up and a sweat going, but it did not prevent me from having an intelligible conversation. I found this to be the sweet spot. I started out by doing this for approximately 45 minutes per session, 1-2 times per week. When I hit metabolic plateaus, I would gradually and judiciously pull on a variety of different levers – the incline, the speed, the duration or the frequency – in order to progress on my weight cut. I would listen to music or a podcast and I found this the most enjoyable means of enduring cardio.
There has been a long running debate on the benefits of high intensity interval training (HIIT) versus low intensity steady state cardio (i.e. walking on a treadmill). Many tout the benefits of HIIT – the sessions are shorter in duration, HIIT is ideal for maximum fat loss, and there is evidence to suggest that HIIT results in continued caloric burn after the session is completed. All of these benefits may indeed be real, but my primary focus was on adherence. I was maniacal about choosing the options – whether it was food or exercise – that would produce the greatest probability of long-term adherence. I could have endured HIIT for a time and I most assuredly would have burned a lot of calories in that time period, but HIIT had a very low probability of becoming a long-term lifestyle choice, which made it an impractical choice for me in terms of cardiovascular exercise. I have done enough yo-yo dieting to know that it is best to ruthlessly discard that which has no enduring value.
James Clear in his book, Atomic Habits, made the comment, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” A goal is great. Certainly, helpful. But, it becomes a fantasy if I am unable to adhere to the long-term processes and habits that will eventually make that goal a reality.
There was, in my gym for a time, a group of people enrolled in an informal CrossFit type fitness program. High intensity with little to no breaks. The leader of that group was enthusiastic and charismatic and certainly faithful and consistent in his attendance and dedication. The same, unfortunately, could not be said of his pupils. Students would come and go. Many would stay for just a few weeks. Attendance was sporadic at best and, more often than not, the class usually consisted of just the instructor and two other dedicated pupils. I could not help but think that his class would have been much larger and attendance much more consistent had he just put every single person on a treadmill for an hour with a podcast in their ear.
- I Took Progress Photos
Weight loss progress day to day or even week to week can be imperceptible. Some weeks I lost half a pound. Other weeks my weight loss stalled. Plateaus are endlessly frustrating and they can be, at times, an irresistible impetus to quit. By taking progress photos I was able to document my progress over a longer time horizon and I was able to see that my progress, though slow at times, was definite. Had I not been able to visually see this when motivation lagged I would have surely quit. Long-term adherence to a process is the ultimate goal, but to ignore the natural human tendency to desire fruit from labor is folly.