2025. A new year. A fresh start. This will be the year. This will be the year I go to the gym. This will be the year I eat healthy. This will be the year I reach my goals. This will be the year I actually do what I said I would do. We've all been there. I blink, and suddenly it's the middle of February. Raise your hand if your still making progress on your goals. My hand is down.
Six months ago, when I decided I didn't want to wait for a new year to start making healthier choices, I told myself I'd change. I was going to go the gym five days a week, I was going to stop eating processed crap, I was going to get my 10k steps in daily, I was going to reduce my screen time, the list goes on. Spoiler—today, I am doing every one of those things ten times as much as before. In case you haven't figured out the kind of person I am by now, I was not doing any of those before.
Despite my failures, I am healthier now than I was six months ago. How? Two words: calorie deficit.
This is absolutely not to say that being in a deficit makes you healthier. That is not guaranteed. It may even be the opposite. The only thing it guarantees is weight loss. Your goal may be to maintain your weight, or even gain weight. So how has it improved my health? Of course weight loss is a part of it. However, five of these six months have just been trial and error. Throughout this whole process, I've had to try and figure out how many calories to eat in a day, how many I burn with activity, what my BMR is, etc. Other than the fact that I have lost weight, I have acquired so much information. To go back to the question of how a calorie deficit has made me healthier, the answer is awareness. The process of being in a deficit has brought me awareness, in turn making me healthier.
When I first started, I realized that I would need to track my calories, so I downloaded an app to do just that. After answering a few questions, the app told me how much protein I had to eat and that I was burning roughly 1,700 calories a day, so it gave me two options: eating 1,450 calories a day to lose half a pound a week, or to eat 1,200 calories a day and lose one pound a week. I didn't quite know what 1,200 calories looked like, so I chose the latter. For a good two months following that, I saw red circles to indicate I had surpassed my acceptable intake by several hundred calories on most days. I then decided to try the other option, which was much easier. To track my progress, I weighed myself weekly, and soon realized I was actually gaining weight. I concluded that I was tracking my food inaccurately, so I invested in a food scale. I was shocked at how much 30 grams of cake really was, but all that mattered was my target of losing weight, so I accepted reality. Although I was tracking food to the gram, I still was not losing weight. This time, I concluded that I wasn't actually burning as many calories as I thought I was. Though I hated it, I adjusted my intake accordingly. Just when I had finally figured things out, my family and I were leaving for a vacation to Mexico. You can imagine where this story is headed. I gained seven pounds on that trip. The weigh in on the morning after the return was the most discouraging moment of my life. I was so close to quitting. For the next week after, I barely ate, and eventually lost three pounds. I acknowledged that I couldn't keep living like that, so I went back to normal, and accepted that I'd have to do this slowly.
I apologize for boring you with the details, but those were a very small portion of the setbacks I faced. It's fine to make mistakes. In fact, mistake-making is supposedly the greatest teacher.
I started my health journey just a few months ago. I am still learning. I am not a dietician, nutritionist, doctor, or health-expert, so feel free to take everything I have said with a grain of salt. I am certainly not qualified to speak on matters of health. In all honesty, most of my knowledge relating to health has come from Instagram reels. In all my years of schooling, I received a single week-long unit on nutrition in ninth grade biology. I just find it interesting that an app where you can watch an AI generated Joe Biden singing has taught me more about dietary health and fitness than the U.S. school system in all these years.
Still, there is a lot of information out there. Your body doesn't actually need carbs, but it's you main source of energy. The carnivore diet is beneficial, but too much red meat is unhealthy. Intermittent fasting helps you lose weight, but skipping breakfast isn't healthy. This is the kind of advice I hear.
The point of this post is not to tell you that you should be in a calorie deficit, or to go on a keto diet, or to do intermittent fasting, or that you should do any one kind of diet. If there's one thing to take from this post, it's this: just start. That's it. Everything you need to know will come after, with time, patience, and most importantly, experience. The information I have learned from doing is priceless. As much as we want one definitive answer, we can almost never have that. So go and try something. Learn from it. And in the process, you might gain 10 lbs. That's okay. "The road to success isn't straight." We've all heard that line. Unfortunately, as I am not successful, I cannot confirm that quote. "The journey is just as important as the destination." That one, however, I can confirm. When I started, I was impatient, eager, and desperate—impatient to lose weight quickly, eager to build muscle in a short time, desperate to look and feel healthy. We are not carbon-copies of each other. What works for another person is not certain to work for you. There's one way to find out—try it.
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