Be Curious, Not Judgmental: Thoughts on Losing 75 Pounds in 2023
As a warning, this post contains content relating to intentional weight loss and calorie counting.
We’re squarely in New Year’s Resolution season, so I’ve written this post about how I approached a goal last year and what I learned from it. Why am I writing this? Although I’m not sure closure exists, it would be nice to find closure on a part of my life I’d like to leave in the past.
Weight loss and fitness can be thorny topics. I am absolutely not qualified to give anyone professional advice, and nobody should feel the need to change if they’re happy with their body. I also know that many people, for a variety of reasons, do want to lose weight, so I’m sharing some thoughts I wish I had seen this time last year.
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Since I can remember, I’ve liked trivia.12 I would learn something I hadn’t known before and would hold onto it as a shield to defend against boredom. For example, I probably think about the following at least once a week:
In a room of twenty-three or more people, at least two of them are statistically likely to share a birthday.3
I spent sixteen years of my adulthood collecting tidbits like that one, or this one:
Shel Silverstein, the children’s author who wrote Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Giving Tree,4 also wrote the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue.”
Trivia brought, and brings, people together, especially in my life. My most immediate friend groups after law school were pub-trivia groups. Competitive Jeopardy! play is a weekly part of my life. A regular contention of mine is that “trivia” is far more popular than we realize. If you doubt that, find any group of American adults and see if one of them knows how many MLB no-hitters Nolan Ryan threw,5 or whom Travis Kelce is currently dating.6
“The Star-Spangled Banner,” the U.S. national anthem, has three verses in addition to the single verse generally heard in performances of the song.7
These facts, and many like them, make up the chairs and couches and tables that are my mental furniture. I spent sixteen years as an adult learning—and caring that I learned—that, for example, Ulaanbaatar is the capital of Mongolia.
During that time, I thought about my health in the same way I thought about using my kidney, in that I did not. I can’t tell you that I “let myself go,” because there was nothing to let go—I’ve just never been in great shape. I ate and drank whatever I wanted, having vague notions of what was good for me and what was bad for me but not taking action accordingly. I never worked out or considered working out.
From 1912 to 1948, the Olympic Games awarded medals in architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.8
I was dimly aware that I was gaining weight. I probably weighed around 190-200 pounds in college, around 210-220 in law school, and about 230 as a 30-year-old, though I can’t say I was measuring closely. During the height of the pandemic, I would sometimes step on the scale on a lark. My weight was consistently between 234 and 238 pounds. I now know that, at least by BMI,9 I had been overweight from ages 20 to 24 or so, and obese since then.
Gerald Ford is almost certainly the only president to have tackled a Heisman Trophy winner.10
Suits that once fit me no longer did. Low-stress tasks like climbing stairs or walking through a mall sometimes left me breathless. I would sometimes imagine a future version of myself on the show Jeopardy! as a skinny person, without any thought put into what would change between now and then. I never took an interest in my health, because my health was never interesting to me.
The last time the guillotine was used for a government-sanctioned execution in France was the same year that Star Wars was released in theaters (1977).11
And so it went, until seven months ago. My wife and I welcomed our first child into the world. We rarely slept more than three hours at a time for those first weeks. On June 21, 2023, I stepped on a scale on another lark, wondering if I now weighed below 238 pounds. I had been snacking more and sleeping terribly, but I had also not been going out with friends, so I was somewhat optimistic that my weight might be lower.
I weighed 252 pounds.
One person dies every 33 seconds in the United States from cardiovascular disease.12
A few days later, I went to the doctor for a physical in the first time in over a decade and learned that I had stage 2 hypertension (i.e., high blood pressure) and was pre-diabetic.13
Approximately 54% of strokes and 47% of coronary heart diseases, worldwide, are attributable to high blood pressure.14
I had been a father for two weeks, and I was already failing.
According to one study, children with an obese parent were on average overweight by the age of 6.15
I went on blood-pressure medication. The day that I bought a blood-pressure monitor was one of the worst days of my life. I was 34 years old, monitoring my blood pressure daily due to my own bad choices. I realized that if I kept doing what I was doing, my health wouldn’t stay constant; it would get worse.
An object in motion tends to stay in motion.
“I need to change something, and I need to change it now,” I thought.
The first step to fixing a problem is often identifying it. The reasons that people strive to be healthy were, obviously, not reasons that had sufficiently compelled me before now—otherwise, I would have already been living a healthy life.
Here’s an example of what I mean. A common aphorism that you might see in the gym-going crowds is something like “No matter how slow you go, you’re still lapping people on the couch.” That sentiment does nothing for me; in fact, it’s demotivating to me. The need to be better than someone else, and to be motivated by that thought, is deeply odious to me. There’s nothing inherently virtuous or admirable about running, compared to any other hobby that doesn’t hurt other people.
I looked up dieting and fitness strategies, still feeling like an outsider. You know that dream some people have? They’re in school about to be given a final exam, and they’re confused because they don’t recall being in this class—or even being in school? That was my waking life. I was sitting for an exam in a class I had no idea I was taking, and I was going to fail.
Days later, still reeling from the diagnosis I had received, I fiddled with the blood pressure monitor and read the (dismal) results.
A blood pressure monitor is called a sphygmomanometer, as the prefix “sphygmo-” relates to the pulse.
Oh.
I had spent my whole life being curious about so many things, but never my health. That needed to change—now. I needed to find sphygmomanometers as interesting as I found Ulaanbaatar. To echo that scene from the first season of Ted Lasso, before the show got worse, I needed to be curious, not judgmental, about myself and how my choices were affecting me.
A pound of body fat contains approximately 3,500 calories.16
I made a plan—more on that below—but in the first days, I had no particular belief that any of this would work.
Studies estimate that the percentage of individuals who lose weight and successfully maintain the loss has been estimated to be as small as 1 to 3 percent.17
I decided to take comfort in the idea that facts don’t care about my feelings. I wasn’t unhealthy because I was a bad person, or unworthy of health. I was unhealthy because I had made choices leading to un-health. My problem wasn’t one of virtue or willpower; it was one of thermodynamics. Change the inputs, change the outputs. Trust the process. Be curious.
Having been in the academic and business worlds long enough to have been repeatedly told the virtues of “specific” and “measurable” goals, I decided not to set any particular goal like “lose X pounds in Y days.” Weight, after all, is an output and not an input.
Your body’s “total daily energy expenditure,” or TDEE, measures the calories you expend in a day. This number is, for most people, largely determined not by exercise but by basal metabolic rate (BMR), or the baseline things your body is doing to keep you alive.18
I found so much conflicting information on how to lose weight (carbs are good! carbs are bad! Red wine is healthy! Red wine is very unhealthy!) that I decided to avoid any particular kind of diet and to, at the outset, completely ignore macronutrient counting. I would be allergic to the word “never.” I knew that, if I tried to enact rules such as “never drink Coke” or “never eat pizza,” I would inevitably break them, and I didn’t want to make a plan that was doomed to fail—and that would demoralize me once it did.
Instead, I did four specific things every day, mostly geared towards being more mindful and intentional:
Track, to the best of my ability, every calorie in my diet.19
This was the most important step. By using a food scale20 to weigh my food, and trying to measure how many calories were in what I was eating, it quickly became obvious that my intuition about certain meals was completely wrong. The dried mangoes that I thought were a good option (the bag says “organic”!) were extremely caloric—just three ounces of them totaled 300 calories.
Another example: One 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola contains about 140 calories. Drinking one fewer 24-pack of Coke, all other things being equal, should result in weight loss of about one pound compared to the world in which the 24-pack is consumed. Of course, all other things are never equal, but the goal is to estimate, not be precise.
Some people make their own spreadsheets. I used the phone app Lose It!, which let me scan bar codes. I generally found the app to be very good.
Even the sheer act of measuring can change your behavior. It’s easy to grab a handful of chips, but it takes more effort to measure those chips and log the behavior. Making my eating habits more deliberate and intentional helped me make fewer bad choices, and to make my bad choices part of my plan whenever I did make them.
Once I had tracked calories for a little while, I decided that I’d try to consume about 1,750 calories a day, on average. I ate a bit less on weekdays and a bit more (sometimes a lot more) on weekends. Many outlets advise to never consume below 1,200 calories a day, so that was my floor. Chicken, spinach and blueberries became my friends. I estimated that this path would, on average, result in weight loss of around two pounds a week (though that number would change as I lost weight).21
Drink at least 64 ounces of water.
My problem wasn’t hydration, but I picked up this habit because water could replace caloric drinks, and because it seemed like an easy and sensible step.
Why 64 ounces? This is a bit embarrassing, but that was the size of the cheapest water bottle I could buy online.
Walk at least 10,000 steps.
10,000 is an arbitrary number (probably popularized by people who sell pedometers). Regardless, I bought a pedometer and monitored my daily step count.
I happen to be someone who paces, which was greatly helpful. Similar to the water habit, this was really about finding something to do that replaced other, worse habits.
In the month of July, I walked 12,623 steps per day. In August, I walked 17,403 steps per day. In September I began running (more on that below).
Walking, it turns out, is a cheat code. I suspect that the only reason that walking isn’t popularized more as a general fitness step is that the people who want to sell you things can’t readily make money off of you walking more.
Weigh myself.
I had spent so long not being interested in my weight, in part because I didn’t actually know my weight at any given time. I decided that this needed to change, and one way to do that was just to measure it.
Your daily weight is a function of a whole lot of things (mostly water weight), and changes you make probably won’t be readily apparent. I told myself that I would have to be patient and focus on the inputs—these four steps—rather than the outputs.
In the approximately 28 weeks since I first stepped on the scale, I’ve lost 75 pounds. I weighed 243 pounds on July 1st, 226 pounds on August 1st, and 211 pounds on September 1st. Since then, the pace of my loss has tapered off, which makes sense: I weighed 202 pounds on October 1, 193 pounds on November 1, 186 pounds on December 1, and 177 pounds now. Along the way, I was able to shake the hypertension, and I’m no longer on blood-pressure medication. I haven’t been tested yet, but I also strongly suspect I am no longer prediabetic.
I should add some context here. I have had a lot of advantages. For the first few months of this journey, I was on paternity leave. My wife has been outrageously supportive throughout this process, both emotionally and in terms of helping plan through the logistics of all this. My family and friends have been supportive. I don’t have other health complications that could have affected these choices.
In my defense, I had the specific disadvantage of my life being disrupted by the new challenges of parenthood,22 but I actually consider this an advantage. My whole life was already upended, so my health changes didn’t feel as dramatic. I also had a “why”—I needed to be better, for somebody else.
So what did I learn? I know it sounds odd to say, but I don’t think the actual physical choices were all that important. Instead, I learned three things:
I needed to work with the brain I have, and not with the brain I wish I had. As I said above, the things that seem to motivate many people to work out and care about their bodies didn’t necessarily motivate me. I didn’t need to change who I was—I just needed to state the problem in terms that worked for me.
For a different person, tracking calories might lead to unhealthy behaviors, and daily weighing might lead to discouragement.23 Of course, many approaches work for other people that probably wouldn’t work for me. Work with the brain you have, and whatever your goal is, make a plan that works for you.
Tracking was everything. None of this would’ve worked if I didn’t start counting calories and tracking my weight. If I don’t know what I’m doing, how will I improve?
I’ve been focusing on “be curious,” but it’s also really important to be “not judgmental.” There have been—and will be—days where I eat far more than my TDEE. That’s fine! Festive dinners and unhealthy foods are part of the joy of life (at least, my life) sometimes. As long as I was tracking everything, I knew I could sometimes afford to partake.
I am indebted to two specific pieces of writing:
Bill Barnwell writes about the NFL for ESPN. A few years ago, he wrote a piece on his weight-loss journey that I found tremendously helpful in the first few weeks of my journey.
Earlier this year, Venkatesh Rao wrote about the concept of using a “report card” to measure the components of your life you are currently “studying.” The piece isn’t explicitly about fitness, but I really liked framing the problem of my health not as an intrinsic part of who I am, but as a “class” I could study for and get a passing grade.
Rao’s piece also has this fantastic line: “The body, after all, is necessarily a full-stack domain. You might not be interested in your cholesterol, but your cholesterol is interested in you, and can make its presence felt.”
What’s next? I’d like to lose 10 or 15 more pounds, and then begin the hard work of maintenance. I’ve also started running for the first time in my life.
Last September, I realized that my goals would lead to diminishing returns—for example, walking 10,000 steps will lead to less weight loss as you get better at walking and weigh less. I decided to get ahead of that issue by doing a “couch to 5K,”24 which means undertaking a training program that leads to being able to run a 5K without walking. A 5K seemed like a sufficiently attainable medium-term goal. I completed that program and ran a 5K in November, and found that I really enjoyed it. My new medium-term goal is a half-marathon, which I’m hoping to run in a few weeks.
When I lose four more pounds, I will be “healthy,” as defined by BMI. I can run for a few miles at a time. I look better, even if I do still look like a goofy balding guy. It’s hard, though, not to feel ashamed for all the effort it took just to get to a place I should have already been. It’s hard not to think “Why didn’t I just do all of this ten years ago?”
Back to trivia. I’ve learned enough about the trivia community to know that there are some players who are absolute monsters at trivia. They’re not just the people you see on Jeopardy!, either. (Some of them read Trivia Factorial!) I am, objectively and measurably, a mediocre trivia player compared to these folks, just as I am a mediocre runner compared to people who actually run, and am of mediocre health compared to many of my peers. But I don’t mean that negatively.
The word “mediocre” comes from the Latin word “mediocris,” combining “medius” (middle) and “ocris” (mountain). Mediocris describes someone who is partway up the mountain.
Not at the top of the mountain. Not at the bottom of the mountain. Somewhere in between. The important thing isn’t where you are on the mountain; the important thing is that you keep climbing. In a year from now I’ll probably still be a mediocre trivia player and a mediocre runner. But I’ll be better at both, and it’s that climb I’m trying to celebrate. I want to be curious about what I’ll find above me, and not judgmental about where I’ve been.
Part of liking trivia, and writing a “hidden connections” newsletter, is being a person who is easily sidetracked. In an attempt to try to keep this post focused, most of my digressions have been relegated to footnotes.
Some trivia enthusiasts bristle at the term “trivia” to describe the field, due to the fact that the word “trivia” generally means “of little importance.” The Brits would use the term “quizzing” instead, for example. If there were a clearer term for American audiences, I’d use it. Since everything has the importance that we assign to it, no more and no less, I’m fine with “trivia.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem. Yeah, yeah, Wikipedia isn’t necessarily a great source, but we’re going to go with it here.
There are a lot of opinions online about how The Giving Tree portrays a messed-up conception of boundaries and love—for example, here’s the New York Times opining on the book, and here’s a counterargument by Freddie deBoer here on Substack:
Seven no-hitters, by the way.
Taylor Swift, of course.
In one of our past newsletter editions, we wrote about Walter Winans, who won a silver medal for shooting and a gold medal for sculpting in the 1912 Olympics. Winans passed away while riding a horse during a race.
There are many readily available critiques of body mass index (BMI) online, such as this one. I use it here as a sketch, and not as any particular endorsement of using BMI to evaluate personal health.
Specifically, Ford played football at the University of Michigan and tackled Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago, back when Chicago was part of the Big Ten. Berwanger is notable in history as the first person to be drafted into the National Football League, though he never played.
Another tidbit from a prior newsletter: You probably know that the nine primary Star Wars films all have subtitles (such as The Phantom Menace or Return of the Jedi). Only one of those nine subtitles is actually spoken aloud in the relevant film, though: The Last Jedi.
An unstated premise in the main text of this post is that weight loss was tethered to better health outcomes for me. I believed this because my doctor told me this, with respect to my health. Your health provider may not have the same advice for your situation.
There are also many readily available critiques of “the 3500-calorie rule,” such as this one. When it comes to health, really, there are many readily available critiques of everything. In any case, whatever the problem with the method is, the problem is not the number 3500.
This advice, as well as the steps I describe regarding my view on calories and nutrition are largely copied from advice I received from the subreddit r/loseit. The approach is generally known as CICO, or “calories in, calories out.” I found their compendium extremely helpful in my early days of trying to lose weight. A common saying in the community is that “you can’t outrun your diet.”
Of course, nutritional information isn’t available for everything you eat. This is one of the hardest parts of the process, but the key is to try to find comparable foods that you do know the nutritional information for, and be as honest and realistic as you can be. For example, your local pizza place may not post their calorie counts, but many pizza chains do.
For example, this food scale is ten dollars on Amazon.
You can use a spreadsheet such as this one to reverse engineer your own TDEE, if you have a good estimate of your weights and what you’ve been eating.
For example, this study suggests that fathers on average gain weight in the first few months after their child’s birth: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8687129/
One Reddit community for people who have largely rejected CICO (and thus much of what has worked for me), if you want a contrary view, is r/intuitiveeating.
There are many “couch to 5K” programs out there. I did this one.