Eating 8 Times A Day And Losing Weight
I'm 5'8, 133lb., I eat all the time, and I don't work out; how?
“I don’t understand how you stay so skinny; I feel like I always see you eating.”
My dad said this to me in the kitchen recently. I answered: “portion control.”
I’m not a very particular person, so I don’t fuss around with anything like a “diet.” I think it’s obvious when something is really unhealthy (it tastes good but doesn’t leave you feeling good later on); but it can be hard to make healthy decisions all the time without systematizing your decision-making.
I’m going to give you the very light gamification tools I used to get from 190lb to 145lb in 2020 and to maintain that weight for more than three years (I’m 133lb now, but only because I’m working out more and eating even less lately).
The reason for my dad’s surprise is because he knows I don’t work out. Unlike myself, he is in the top percentile of the healthiest people his age (55); biking 70+ miles every day that he can, and still upset that he’s not benching over 300lb. anymore (just close to it) after injuries which ended his ability to run. He’s a vegan and eats maybe twice or thrice a day (with minimal snacking); so I can understand how, from his perspective it looks like I’m eating even more than he is, working out not at all, and staying skinny.
My dad was overweight for a period of time in his late 20s; and watching him get ripped again in his 30s and stay that way has always inspired me that I could get my health on-track even later in life if I had the determination to do so. I found that determination after committing to gender transition at 28 years-old.
Never having lived an active lifestyle, it is only now, AFTER losing weight and maintaining that shape long-term, that I’ve become more active—thanks to the confidence in controlling my body given to me by having so much less of it to manage—and started trying to get “in-shape” in the way you think of when you see people who actually work out.
The only weight-conscious rule I’ve ever bothered memorizing is the general principle that the average person consumes about 2000 calories a day just by nature of being awake and doing things.
In very simplistic terms, this means that if you consume more than 2k calories in a day without over-exerting yourself physically to compensate, then you will gain weight.
(Even still, if you do exert yourself, you will likely convert some of your mass to muscle, and so gain weight in a more usable way.)
If you consume fewer than 2k calories in a day, then you are more likely to lose weight; especially if you sustain a habit of consuming fewer calories than you exert.
(It should be noted that this is NOT a way to build muscle. Depending on the intensity of your movement in a day, it might make your body more shapely; but consuming fewer calories than you use in a day only has the effect of reducing your overall mass.)
You can decide to get skinnier, decide to buff up, to cut, to bulk, or whatever you want to do with your body; but doing it ON PURPOSE will give you infinitely more gratification than doing it on accident, I promise.
It’s very easy to find out how many calories are in your food, and to keep track of how much you’re eating over the course of a day. If the calories aren’t literally listed on the packaging of the food or the menu that it was ordered from, you can look it up online.
If you know that you plan to eat three meals and two snacks in a day as a matter of habit, then you need to make sure that there are <600 calories in each of those three meals, and <100 in each snack. If you find that you can satisfy yourself without eating as many times in a day even after cutting the calories on each of those meals, you’ll make an enormous dent in your overall intake and rapidly start to lose weight.
I’ve never been a huge fan of breakfast food. Everything I’ve heard from food science is that the whole concept of breakfast was invented by modern ad campaigns with no foundation in health.
One of the most powerful ways to keep yourself accountable is to perform some kind of physical activity after waking up and before consuming calories in a day, just to really activate your hunger and ensure that you’re more likely to make rational food decisions after the activity; rather than shoving as much sugar into your sleep-addled brain as you can to wake up. (Wake yourself with black coffee if you must.)
NEVER DRINK CALORIES—I forgot that this doesn’t go without saying.
Just don’t do it. It’s very easy to avoid—just look for drinks that say “zero” or “diet” on them, and drink lots of water (I still fail at this part).
As long as you’re counting calories, it literally doesn’t matter what you eat—just how much. You could eat a single square of chocolate 7 times in a day and you’ll still lose weight; but you’ll probably be hungry.
You could have a McDouble for breakfast, lunch and dinner and, as long as you don’t have any fries with that and all the Cokes are diet (and you don’t have any snacks in-between), you’ll lose weight (I’ve done this); but you’ll also start to feel like you’re missing some nutrients that make you feel good and digest right.
You could eat just six Taco Bell deluxe tacos every day and probably be healthy.
But let’s not speak in extremes; let’s be reasonable. I personally like to have at least 1 “real MEAL” meal in a day, and maybe a smaller dish or two (or three) over the course of the day, and a couple of snacks.
“Snack,” to me, by definition must be under 150 calories. 1 cheese stick is a snack. (4 cheese sticks is a “small dish”.) A handful of cereal could be a snack, but a bowl of cereal is a “small dish.”
Sure, the cereal and the milk say that they have 150 and 80 calories apiece per serving; but serving sizes are always listed smaller than anyone considers satisfying, and so it’s safe to assume you’re probably consuming 2 servings or more at a time, and to account for that going in. Remember, the amount of calories per serving listed is based on their definition of a serving, not yours (no matter how unreasonable).
It’s not at all difficult to eat a satisfying meal with less than 1000 calories; and in fact, anything reaching above that calorie count reads as ridiculously indulgent to me, and all but guarantees some kind of stomachache later.
For me, the knowledge that I can have at least one really satisfying meal a day so long as I watch what I eat for the rest of the day is always empowering; and of course, if you do work out, you really don’t need to exercise the same kind of self-control in what you eat at all (and in fact will probably be upset by how much more protein you’re supposed to consume to build muscle mass).
This is my perspective as a foodie who spent entirely too much money going out to eat over the last decade, and who still sometimes eats myself sick because I forget that I’m small now and my body physically cannot handle a thousand-calorie import.
I wouldn’t describe what I do as “counting calories,” because I don’t keep track of the actual numbers over the course of a day; I’ve read the numbers on the things I eat enough to have a good sense of what is calorically dense (sugar(read:sauce)) and what isn’t (seasoning), and what is going to make me feel worse after eating it (Arby’s).
Sometimes I get a sense that I’m gaining weight and cut back for a bit; and then I might start gaining again when I’m in a more stressful situation and paying less attention to what I consume, or start consuming more emotionally; however, as soon as I start feeling the physical effects of gaining weight, I realize that my emotional state is only going to get worse if I don’t bring that to the forefront of my concentration, and the cycle repeats.
Luckily, it’s pretty easy just to NOT eat.
I understand how my dad might see me eat a bowl of cereal, a handful of crackers, a small plate of chicken nuggets, a cheeseburger, a bowl of macaroni and cheese, and two ice cream sandwiches in one day and wonder how I’m skinny.
When you understand the effects of the things that you eat and the use of calories, you will start to respect them a lot more not only for the necessity of actually consuming the number of calories needed to accomplish your physical goals, but also for the way your own body becomes modular to the effects of your activity. You can decide to get skinnier, decide to buff up, to cut, to bulk, or whatever you want to do with your body; but doing it ON PURPOSE will give you infinitely more gratification than doing it on accident, I promise.
When Bird and I were travelling and working over the last 6 months, we sometimes had some juice, a muffin, or a handful of cereal from the hotel on the way to work; ate one huge meal after work, and then maybe a little bit again before bed; and it wasn’t healthy. We were doing a lot of physical work and should have been eating more than we were; but we never took lunch breaks because we were always on crunch time to make the most money possible, and could only fit so much food into our bodies in the few hours between getting home from work and going to bed.
Moreover, while our work was physically taxing, it wasn’t muscle-building so much as body-wrecking—requiring unnatural and straining movements. We did not gain weight nor did we gain much muscle; we ate unhealthily and were often in bad moods—even though the fact that we went out of our way to eat something that tasted good and spent a lot of time in breweries was our favorite part of living.
It’s easy to eat very little and still be unhealthy, or to eat very unhealthily and to still lose weight; and so a general conscientiousness towards everything going into your body is necessary to keeping a feeling of health.
I tend to feel better when I regularly consume bio-health drinks (those cheap ones they sell en masse in the yogurt section in US grocery stores), bananas, spoonfuls of peanut butter, glasses of milk or juice (I know I said not to drink calories, but just think of these as food snacks and not drinks), drinking diet tea instead of diet soda (I’m not a coffee person), ordering the small combo, the smaller sandwich, the healthier side dish, and taking just the one handful of Cheeze-its without even removing the box from the pantry.
I understand how my dad might see me eat a bowl of cereal, a handful of crackers, a small plate of chicken nuggets, a cheeseburger, a bowl of macaroni and cheese, and two ice cream sandwiches in one day and wonder how I’m skinny; but by my calculations based on the amount that I would eat of each, I think it totals around 1800 calories; and I’d lose weight on that day based on my usual work-out of planking for a few minutes and going up and down the stairs to my loft over and over again.