What I Learned After Losing 67 Pounds in Three Months
Hey, James here.
Life update: I dropped from 245 pounds to 178 pounds between June and September.
Yes. It’s kind of crazy. In Mr. Beast’s lose 100 pounds, win $250,000 video, the participant, Majd lost 100 pounds in 178 days and banked $417,650 dollars. To put things into perspective, Majd lost approximately 50 pounds by month three with world class trainers while working out 247. I lost a total of 67 pounds by just eating at a calorie deficit, walking 13k steps a day, and going to the gym four times a week. When I found out, I literally fell on my knees at Walmart.
67 haha..
Before we dive into the details, I want to acknowledge the support and guidance from my friends and family throughout my journey:
My gym bro Lorenzo Etchevehere for taking the time to teach me the ins and outs of full body workouts and showing me the importance of consistency.
Rushi Moore for the dietary advice. Lime juice on chicken thighs are crazy good.
My friends from way back: Jeb Song, Johnny Wei and Suryansh Singh for words of encouragement, for believing in me and sticking by my side even when things got difficult.
Last but not least, I want to thank my mom and dad for being my biggest supporters, giving me well-needed reality checks and reminding me to importance of enjoying the process instead of constantly chasing for the next big thing.
Now for everyone interested in progress pics, you can find them here in this video:
So what did I learn?
Eat in a calorie deficit and stop ordering Doordash
Losing weight is 80% diet and 20% exercise. To lose weight, you must burn more calories than you eat. I used this calorie calculator to find out the exact amount of calories I need to consume in order to lose weight and tracked everything with MyFitnessPal. An obese person can easily lose around 5 pounds if they stay in a calorie deficit. For me from 245 to 238 took less than two weeks and all I did was eat more filling and healthy foods that are low in calories.
The best advice I can give for any college student to stay in a calorie deficit would be to delete Doordash and install Instacart. In my near 250 pounds days, I was ordering Doordash on the daily. You will be surprised at how many healthy meals you can cook with just $40 worth of groceries instead of ordering five Big Mac meals.
If you are a rich boy and can’t cook, you can always go for Chipotle bowls, which are surprisingly healthy. You can use the Chipotle nutrition calculator to estimate how much calories you are consuming with your order. My go to order for the burrito bowl is brown rice, pinto beans, chicken, tomato & corn salsa, guac and lettuce which comes down to between 1300 to 1500 calories and extremely filling even when I was 220 pounds.
Personally, I became infatuated with cooking and eating the same meals on the weekly. No matter if you eat one meal or ten meals a day, you need to stick to a routine. For instance, I eat at Chipotle twice a week and cook for the rest of the week. For the non-Chiptole days, I do four chicken thighs, eight brussel sprouts, five cups of baby Argula, two eggs and one potato which comes down to about 1300 calories. On the topic of cooking, I would advise everyone to weigh your food, especially potatoes. It was only till I dropped from 230 to 210 that I realized I was eating 500 grams of potatoes a day instead of what I logged as 200 grams.
It is ok to mess up
Did you know your body can hold up to five to eight pounds of water weight? Yes, even for Shaggy from Scooby Doo and Patrick Star, it is literally impossible to gain five pounds permanently in one week. If you eat a big succulent Chinese meal worth 5000 calories on Monday, you can just eat less from Tuesday to Thursday. If I am 200 pounds and 5’10, I can fast for a day and eat at 1500 calories for the next two days, then around 1700 calories till Sunday. Overall, I will still lose two pounds that week. You need to look at calorie deficit from a weekly perspective, not from a daily perspective.
If you want to explore fasting, you must take salts and electrolytes or you will literally die from dehydration or malnutrition (seriously). I do not recommend anyone below 195 pounds to try it for longer than 3 days as you will be completely exhausted even with proper hydration. Trust me, I tried. LMNT and black coffee is a good combination for anyone interested.
Free up two hours to walk 10km or walk at least 15k steps everyday.
Consistency is the most important thing for any weight loss journey. What pains me the most is to see a person running 6 miles two times a week and be like “that’s enough cardio for the week”. When you are over 200 pounds, walking is better than running and running can actually permanently hurt your joints. On average, walking six miles burns 500 to 700 calories, running six miles in 30 minutes burns 600 calories. Although running is time efficient, it is bad when you are obese and you cannot do it seven days a week. On the contrary, you can walk six miles everyday and still feel like it was nothing after 10 minutes of rest. Of course, it was hard for me at 245 pounds as every trip took me about two and a half hours but just know that your stamina will improve a lot in two weeks and 6 miles will feel like nothing in no time.
Hit your protein and do full body workouts three to four times a week
Ideally, you want to build muscle and lose fat at the same time. However, this is impossible for newbies as it takes a lot of energy to burn through your fat reserves. What worked for me was doing low maintenance cardio and strictly following a calorie deficit from 245 to 215 pounds. When you do full body workouts to build muscle, protein is key. It helps with recovery and energy a lot. Ideally, you want to get protein at a 2:3 ratio to your current body weight. So if you are 215 pounds, you should be getting at least 161 pounds of protein. This might sound too much, but completely achievable with protein powders. I use this protein powder.
It can be very intimidating going to the gym. You don’t know what in the world you are doing and have no clue what arms days or leg days mean. At first, having a gym buddy can help with the anxiety, but you will soon realize only you can motivate yourself. Everyone going to the gym is working towards something and you should be proud of yourself for taking the initiative. I usually workout between one to one and a half hours at a time either from 6:30 to 7:30 am in the morning or 9:00-11:30 pm in the evening. I will release the full workout routine in another blog in the coming weeks.
You will always be the last person to notice the difference and the weight loss will slow down
As long as you don’t quit completely and make consistent efforts, you will always see tangible results in the long run. When I dropped from 245 to 210, a whopping 30 pounds between July and August, no one said anything, yet from 210 to 190 every pound made a huge difference. You have to stay consistent and stay hard.
Weight loss is a marathon, not a sprint
The weight loss will get harder the leaner you become. I struggled a lot with body dysphoria between 195 pounds to 185 pounds. I looked good in the mirror but still heavy on the scale. In the beginning, weight loss will come quick, sometimes even 8 pounds a week but eventually, it will slow down because you have less fat reserve to burn and have to work very hard to build pure muscle mass.
As a soon to be graduate and Gen Z man with anxiety issues, I often focus way too hard on the results, envisioning either overwhelming success or total defeat, and fail to enjoy the process. Even when I did hit my goal weight of 178 last month, it felt extremely underwhelming as I was expecting an eureka moment. I was unable to recognize the fact I am already living my best life with the best physique I’ve ever built but too caught up in the results to enjoy it. I didn’t even realize I was already so big that newbies are coming to me and asking me how to do specific exercises at the gym. Instead of going crazy in hopes to achieve the next big end goal, why not learn to enjoy the process and have absolute confidence that you will achieve it given time?
Thank you for reading this blog. I hope you learned something useful.
Quote of the day:
“The common feeling that your life has not begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future.
This idyll is a mirage that'll fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death.”
Gurwinder Bhogal
