My Weight Loss: Then and Now

It’s been a year since I decided to lose weight and began exercising. I’m baffled by how much have happened, how much weight I’ve lost and how much more confident I’ve become.

It’s like a new and better me. I’m still not exactly where I want with my weight on the scale, but I’m very happy with how my body looks now.

To celebrate my one year weight loss anniversary I took a new picture of myself today. And yes, it’s in my underwear again. I don’t own any bikini anymore… I’ve spent all summer going from store to store to look for the perfect bikini, but I found none.

The one from the left in my old bikini is before, a year ago and the one to the right is taken today. I’ve gone down from size large to small in tops and from xtra large to medium in leggings and from UK size 14 to 10 in dresses.

I like my body so much more now and I’m actually very happy with it. I don’t mind what the scale says, as long as I maintain my weight. Still, I would like to lose 1-2 kg to reach my goal weight.

Soaked in sweat!

You know you have put in the right amount of work, when you are actually soaked in your own sweat from top to bottom and from fingertips to your toes. If this happens to you every time you work out – good on you! I don’t normally sweat THIS much when I work out, but yesterday I just had extra fun with my workout 🙂

Keep on working on your goals and you will get there soon! Remember that hard work pays off :b

How to Calculate Calories for Weight loss

When you have decided that you want to lose weight, it is a good thing to start out by calculating your calorie requirement per day to find out how much of a deficit you will need for your weight loss.

I’ll try to keep this short and simple, so it is easy to understand for everybody.

1st – Calculating your BMR

The first thing to do, is to calculate your BMR, which is short for Basal Metabolic Rate. It is the amount of energy or calories your body burns just by being alive (and doing nothing). To find your BMR you can use an online calculator which uses your height, weight, age and gender. Please note that it is only an estimate.

I used this calculator from MyFitnessPal or you can simply use another site, just search for ‘BMR calculator’.

My BMR is currently at 1391 calories/day. This is how many calories I’m burning just by doing nothing. Now we have to know our total daily calorie requirement, which is also how many calories we will need to maintain our current weight.

2nd – Calculating your total daily calorie requirement

For this step you have to take your BMR number and multiply it with your level of activity. The level of activity is how much exercise you are doing right now and planning for your weight loss.

For me, I exercise 1-3 days per week at the lowest. I like to pick the lowest because on weeks where I get in more exercise I’ll just have a bigger deficit than planned. Anyway, you have to take your BMR  number and multiply it with the factor for the level of exercise.

For me, the calculation would look like this: 1391 calories x 1.375 = 1913 calories/day.

That means that my total daily calorie requirement is 1913 calories I would need to eat in a day to maintain my current weight.

But because we want to lose weight, we go to step #3.

3rd – Creating the right Calorie deficit for you

In this step you have to think hard about how fast you want to lose weight. Please don’t just pick the fastest way, for many people that doesn’t work or last for long. I think it is better to pick a normal steady peace and lose weight in a healthy way. But it is your body, so it’s all up to you.

As you can see on the table, the higher daily calorie requirement you have, the greater the deficit will be to lose weight. The percentage of the calorie deficit also decides how long it will take you to lose weight. You can calculate your own deficit based on the table like this:

[your daily calorie requirement] x [percentage caloric deficit] / 100 = your calorie deficit.

Then take your calorie deficit and subtract from your daily calorie requirement like this:

[your daily calorie requirement] – [your calorie deficit] = how many calories you can eat per day.

Just to show you an example, my calorie deficit equation would look like this:

1913 x 25 / 100 = 478 calorie deficit and then it would be 1913 – 478 = 1435 calories that I can eat per day.

Your calorie deficit should be from both exercise and diet. There is two ways to make a calorie deficit and that’s by ‘saving’ the calories (not consuming them) and by burning them (exercise). For a healthy weight loss it is recommended that your deficit should be from both exercise and diet. That means from my 478 calorie deficit which I have, I can choose to either save them or burn them. I do a combination of both and how I do that is by only consuming my 1435 calories per day and then on days where I exercise and burn more calories, I consume more calories than on days where I don’t work out.

Let me explain:

Days where I don’t work out (rest days) – Consuming: 1435 calories.

Days where I work out – Depending on how many calories I burn, I can eat half of the calories I burned as extra calories for that day. Like, If I burned 300 calories form exercise a day, I would eat 150 calories extra that day. That is because when you exercise your body needs more energy to keep going. You can eat all the calories which you burned without gaining weight, I just like to only consume half.

Now, I can’t give you an estimate in days, but I can tell you that, the lower the percentage is the slower/longer your weight loss process is going to take and the higher the percentage the faster it will go. You can adjust the percentage to your liking depending on how much of a deficit you want. Again, please don’t just opt for the fastest way. It really depends on how much you weigh from the beginning. You can always change your deficit, if you feel that you need to eat more calories or less, just remember that eating more will result in a slower process and eating less in a faster process.

Please don’t eat under 1200 calories for women and 1500 calories for men. This is the absolute lowest calorie intake we need to keep our body healthy. The National Institutes of Health recommends eating between 1000-1200 calories for women and 1200-1500 calories for men. If you eat less calories than this recommendation, it can lead to dizziness and unpleasant side effects. What is worst, is the fact that eating less calories than needed won’t help you lose weight, but you’ll actually gain weight.

I recommend that once a month you look at your current weight and calculate your calories, just to see if your on track or you need to adjust your deficit. Remember to listen to your body, if you feel hungry at the end of the day, maybe eat a few more calories and if you want, you can add in some more exercise to burn more calories.

4th – Keep going!

Remember that weight loss is 80% diet and 20% exercise, so you have to get in some exercise and eat healthy.

I want to mention that I’m not a doctor or an expert in this field whatsoever! This is just what has been working for me and it might or might not work for you. I would strongly advice you to contact your doctor or a fitness/health expert especially if your weight loss is of greater scale!

This only functions as a guide. I recommend reading more on the subject by searching on Google (or another search engine).

I do hope it helps somebody out there.

The First Before and After Pictures

These pictures are taken some time ago (before in the red bikini is July 2014 and the after picture in purple is from March 2015). I wouldn’t normally post pictures of myself almost naked, but what the heck, it’s only my body.

It shows how much weight I’ve lost and how far I’ve come! Since 11th March I’ve lost more and now weigh 64,4 kg today. Yay! I’ve actually lost 10 kg since December/January! Yay me! I think I have to celebrate later today, maybe with a good workout?
And what the heck happened to my skin? It got so much more even! And a lot of the stretchmarks aren’t that visible anymore (They have actually become lighter than before now). I really like my body now that I’ve lost weight. Before it looked like my body was about to blow up or something.. I also feel so much lighter! Yay!

The Thing About Self-Confidence in Weight Loss

I felt that in the beginning of my weight loss journey, my self-confidence and self-esteem were very low. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a chubby young adult who didn’t like herself at all. It was so easy for me to pick on myself and mention all the parts of my body that I hated. At times, I felt so bad about my looks, that I didn’t want anybody to take pictures of me at parties and I would rather stay at home on the couch than attend a party were other people might make fun of me.

Just before I started to lose weight, I tried this exercise where you look at yourself in the mirror every day and only say positive things about yourself and your body. As the days passed, I started to like myself more and more. I felt more comfortable in my own skin. Even though I hadn’t lost any weight yet, I started dressing differently – more colorful and bright. While in the first half of my weight loss journey, I didn’t actually feel much different, mostly because I simply couldn’t see the weight loss on my body. The scale showed that I’d lost weight, but I felt like my body didn’t show it. That actually made me lose confidence in my training and I thought about quitting. My mom and the rest of my family kept telling me, that they could see that I had lost weight, but I didn’t believe them because I couldn’t see it myself.

It was only when I got my fiancée to take some new pictures of me and I compared them to some old ones, that I realized how much weight I’d actually lost. Omg. My legs, thighs, arms, stomach and head! When I saw those before and after pictures, I also realized how chubby I was before. It made me a bit sad, but so happy that I actually managed to lose half of my goal. After that day, I suddenly became much more confident in myself. I guess I had such a hard time believing it, that I had to see ‘proof’ first. If I had just taken pictures every second week, I would have seen it earlier and spared myself the self-hating. So please, remember to take pictures of yourself, so you can document your process. You don’t have to show the pictures to anybody, just keep them for yourself – as a reminder.

Therefore, the point of this post, is that, self-confidence and self-esteem is tightly connected to our weight or what we think about ourselves. Confidence is greatly about feeling comfortable in your own skin. It doesn’t matter how you look, just what you feel about how you look. Sometimes I see people that ooze confidence and they give out this ultra-positive energy. These people have realized at some point in their lives that, when they are happy and love themselves, so will other people. I want to be one of those happy people that makes other people happy! What can we do to become one of those people?

• Be thankful for what you have
  • First you have to be thankful for what you already have and accept it. When you are thankful, you are giving out positive energy that other people will notice.

• Speak positively
  • This is important! You have to stop using negative words are speaking in that manner. Surround yourself with positive things, speak, and think about all the positive things you have. Try doing a challenge, where you do positive self-talk for seven days. You will see that it gets easier after this. You have to speak positive about yourself, your body and the rest of your life too.

• Love yourself
  • Loving yourself can be hard, especially if you have low self-esteem and you just don’t see any good or positive qualities about yourself. But you are wrong. Everybody had something, that is unique to them. Try to focus on something that you like about yourself instead of the negative, like the fact that you might have beautiful eyes. When you start looking at all the things you like about yourself, you will see that loving the rest is easier.

• Brace yourself with inspiration stuff like happy songs, quotes, art or movies
  • We are humans. Sometimes we fall and sometimes we are negative. We can’t always stay happy and laugh. You can to accept that, but we can still do our best to surround ourselves with positive things, feelings and people. Therefore, it can be a great help to listen to inspirational songs, find wallpapers or inspirational art you can hang on your walls. All this will help remind you to stay positive and strive for your goal.

• Smile more
  • Smiling can actually make you happy, even when you’re not. If you are feeling down or sad and actively want to be happy, just smile, goof around, and you’ll find yourself happy again. When you smile, it can make other people happy too. Smiling is infectious and you could make somebody’s day better just by smiling. Another benefit is that smiling makes you more attractive – so smile more and feel confident! Smiling can also lead to laughter, which is funny. Smiling just feels good, so do it 🙂