I spent most of the summer pegged at about the same weight. I wasn’t weighing myself very often, but I also wasn’t worrying about it too much.
I have a dim view of attempts at breaking down being healthy to simple logical clauses. Things like “Get your BMI below ___ and you will live longer” tend to not stand up long term. Remember oat bran? So I tend to think that obsessing too much about my weight is the road to an eating disorder. And, given my blood sugar problems, I can’t just go on a starvation diet without screwing up my brain.
So, mostly I’ve been working on my goals that are mostly related to having better cycling abilities and blithely ignoring any question about how much I weigh. But then I weighed myself and realized that I was down several pounds from where I was before.
I know the biology of caloric reduction. It’s one of the few things that reduces down to an engineering problem. There’s a bunch of energy stored in the body. First is primarily glycogen, which is mostly a temporary storage. After glycogen, there’s fats, which are generally good to burn because those are why I’m not so big. After a point, your body starts to burn proteins, which kinda make up your major organs and muscles and stuff, so it’s really not very good at all to need to do that.
There’s some control mechanisms there built around the assumption that you are living in the wild as a hunter gatherer that are pretty much useless in today’s society where you can go to the grocery store but you’ll appreciate if you ever get stuck in the wilderness and have to eat bugs to survive. The body can look at your storage levels and energy levels and lay in a nice store of fat when you really just want to lose weight.
All of this is from memory. I checked on Wikipedia to make sure I was getting the names right.
Anyway, I knew that I was down a few pounds from where I was but I couldn’t actually remember when I’d weighed myself last. But right now, there’s been a bunch of Hindu holy days and so, to respect my wife’s religion, I’ve been eating mostly veg. The Indian vegetarian diet uses so much dairy (especially yogurt) that it’s fairly hard to get the standard vegetarian problem — not enough B-12. And there’s enough sources of proteins and fiber and other nutrients in what I’ve been eating (Easy enough: Eat a wide variety of stuff and you’ll probably get enough of everything) but I started to get a little concerned that I’d be eating too little food in general. Because I can make kichadi and poha and three bajis (opo squash, cabbage, califlower) reliably and be able to eat them all week from leftovers, but after that, I start to exhaust my repertoire and get sick of my own cooking.
So, ehrm, after tracking my weight, I discovered that I was eating around 800 too little calories, which I felt was a little too much of a calorie deficit, so I’ve been trying to adjust my eating upwards. I’ve still probably got some weight to lose overall, but I’m perfectly happy to just trade a good percentage of my body fat for muscles. Because right now, I look better, can make it up hills that were hard before, can bike longer distances than I was able to do before, and keep biking faster. I’m actually at the point right now where it’s not enough of a workout to just bike between home and work… I have to do 20-25mph sprints on my way home because otherwise I don’t work myself hard enough.