I lost over 70lbs of body fat in 2023

Spoiler: I started walking every day

It’s the New Year: the busiest time of year for the gym. Many people decide the calendar changing over means it’s time for a fresh start. It’s time to take their health seriously. Most people go hard for a few weeks and then stop. People give up on fitness goals for many reasons – injury from going too hard too fast, life catching up to, or realizing – like I’ve learned this year – losing weight is hard work that takes a long time, and requires a lot of self-motivation to keep going.

Me on December 31, 2023

I started taking my weight gain seriously in March 2023, which is the most read post I’ve ever written. Since then I’ve lost 40lbs on the scale, 70lbs in body fat (more on this below), and gone from a 2XL shirt size to a slim fit large.

Weight loss is about more than just aesthetics: while I now fit into clothes I haven’t fit in for 5 years, I’m also looking at my blood glucose (lower), resting heart rate (lower), blood pressure (lower). I’m running faster than I have in 5 years, and my VO2 Max is better. While I weigh more on the scale than I did 5 years ago, my body fat % is lower (from putting on muscle).

I didn’t go on any sort of special diet, count my calories, or join a gym. I’m not taking Ozempic (it’s fine if that works for you).

I made a few simple but effective changes that just about anyone can do:

1. I started walking every day: it’s a sustainable weight loss strategy that’s easy and accessible to most people. For fat loss it can be as, if not more, effective than HIIT workouts (like spin classes).

2. I was patient: losing weight is slow, difficult, and comes with plateaus. The scale is one metric, and often it’s a liar. You need to figure out what will keep you motivated on a long journey. Measuring your progress by weight as your core metric is going to make you miserable and demotivate you.

3. I focused on a high protein diet: eating enough protein will help you lose body fat and limit losing muscle (or even gain muscle) when you are trying to lose weight. Eating enough protein helps you stay full. Asking “Is there enough protein in this meal?” is easier to manage than labeling foods “good” or “bad” or counting every calorie. If you aim for 30g of protein at every meal and every snack you’re in a good place. Eating more protein will naturally cause you to eat less overall because protein is incredibly filling. It takes a long time to digest, meaning fewer snacks, and it burns more calories while digesting. It also helps you build muscle, which burns more calories as part of just being alive.

What’s changed?

I’ve been using the same Withings smart scale for a long time. Like many people, I stopped weighing myself as I gained weight because I didn’t like what I saw and I didn’t want to do anything about it. So I don’t have enough snapshots to make you a fancy graph, but I do have enough metrics to share this table about my body composition changes over the last couple of years.

Last Christmas was the largest I’ve ever been in my life, with a 38 waist, 2XL shirts. March 2023 was the heaviest – over 260lbs, but I had started putting on muscle without losing fat at that point. I was very physically active, but I couldn’t lose the weight.

Today I have the same body fat percentage and almost the same body fat weight as 2019 – but I weigh 25lbs more. That difference is added muscle from strength training, which I took seriously this year.

So while I’ve lost 40lbs on the scale, I’ve actually lost 76lbs of body fat and gained 37lbs of muscle. That’s losing 1.5lbs of body fat per week for a year.

Here’s how I did it.

1: Start with walking

I get it, it’s January 1. You want to get a gym membership, you’re going to go to yoga every day, you’ve cut out carbs, and you’ve changed every single aspect of your life all at once. You are committed. Really for real this time. It’s totally going to last more than 2 weeks.

Sure, Jan(uary).

Around March 2023 I started walking every day. It started because I was dog sitting, and I realized how much walking helped me feel better mentally. To be out in the sun, to be moving my body. It was also easy and I started losing weight quickly. I kept up the habit after the dogs left. Since then I’ve hit my Apple Watch Move goal every day for 306 days in a row now, thanks primarily to walking.

Walking every day bumped my average active calories up by 270 calories per day. I was already very active, so I went from an average of 880 active calories per day in 2022 to 1,150 in 2023.  A pound of fat has roughly 3,500 calories, so the additional 270 calories adds up to nearly 30lbs of body fat burned per year simply by walking.

I walk for 30–60 minutes every day, usually in the morning, sometimes again in the evening if I don’t run or lift weights that day.

Walking is easy to do. You don’t have to change your clothes (you do have to dress for the weather). You don’t have to go far. You don’t have to huff and puff and sweat. You don’t have to take a shower after. You don’t need a membership.

You don’t have to change your entire life.

You just need to go for a walk.

Can I really lose weight by walking?!

Yes. It’s like when your friends go to Europe, and come back saying “I ate everything I wanted and I lost weight!” And it turns out they walked everywhere.

I went for a walk with a friend yesterday morning – we were out for an hour, had a great catch up conversation. It wasn’t a fast pace, but according to my Apple Watch I burned 290 active calories (you will burn a different amount based on your height, weight, and speed).

Ideally you want to walk at a pace where your heart rate is above 100.

So I just… walk?

If you’re getting started with walking after being a couch potato for a while, it’s important that you ramp up slowly. There are many small muscles and ligaments that get involved and it’s easy for them to get stressed and strained, and you could accidentally roll your ankle if the tiny supportive muscles aren’t strong enough yet!

If walking as a workout is new to you, start with shorter walks – 20 minutes, once a day. Then add 5 minutes per day every week – going from 20 to 25 to 30 minute walks. It will take 2 months to get up to 1 hour long daily walks. This gives your mind, body, and schedule time to adapt to the new stress you’re putting on it, which is how you set yourself up for long-term success.

What do I do when I’m walking?

I really struggled with daily walking for a long time. I have a lot of social anxiety, and overthink basically everything. Why would I just walk around in a big circle for no reason? Won’t people think I’m weird? I need a purpose! I can only walk if I am going somewhere, or out with a friend, or walking a dog, or going on a hike.

And to the outside world, there’s really no difference between you walking for the sake of walking, and you walking to go get a coffee. Nobody knows your motivation! The difference only exists in your head, in the story you tell yourself about what other people think about you. (They are not thinking about you.)

Now, after almost a year of daily walking I never really think about it. I’m just walking.

I thought I would get bored but now I look forward to my walks. I listen to music, listen to podcasts, listen to nature, take a friend and talk, phone a friend, or write this newsletter in my head.

I like watching the seasons slowly change from one to the next. I like feeling the weather (yes, I walk in the rain and snow, but not the wind). I like the time to be alone with my thoughts – often I write these posts in my head while walking. I like the way walking lowers my anxiety and levels out my mood.

I’ve come to learn that how I feel before a walk (sad? tired? angry? hopeless? overwhelmed?) and how I feel after a walk (calm, inspired, level) is always different. It took me a while to recognize this, but now I know that walking is what keeps me level.

While “take a walk” is often said to help people cool down when they’re angry, it really works to regulate your nervous system from any negative emotions. If you’re going through a stressful time in your life it can be very helpful.

What should I wear when I’m walking?

You can wear anything, that’s the beauty of walking. You don’t need to change. You don’t need special shoes. Go in your PJs. Go in your fancy boots. Go in your birks.

Who cares?

You’re walking.

How fast should I walk?

Any movement is better than no movement, so if walking at a leisurely pace gets you moving then walk at a leisurely pace. There’s no need to prancercise.

I try to target having my heart rate in Zone 2, which is 99–115bpm. Above 100 is what’s considered “active” from a calorie burning standpoint (as opposed to the calories you burn from simply being alive in this world.) Zone 2 is where your body is most likely to use body fat as a fuel source, so if you are trying to lose body fat, 99–115bpm is a great place to be.

High intensity workouts, like a typical Peloton class, usually keep you in heart rate Zones 4–5. These zones rely on fast-access glycogen (sugar) stored in your muscles for fuel – burning glycogen can make you very hungry, as your body tries to replenish it quickly by making you crave delicious carbs.

So if you’re trying to lose weight, heart rate Zone 2 is your friend. This is great news because Zone 2 is so much easier.

Where do I go when I walk?

I don’t know, go out your front door and pick a direction!

I generally walk around my neighbourhood. I’ve got a tour the nice houses route, a walk through the park route, a walk by the library route, a maybe I can turn this into a grocery trip route, a fancy coffee route. But generally I just go around the neighbourhood.

It’s easy to overthink this and not go – to think that you need a plan, or a trail, or a friend, or a forest. That you need to go somewhere. But seriously just go out your front door, walk for 10 minutes, turn around, and walk back. There’s your first route, and your first 20 minute walk done.

Now do it again almost every day for the rest of your life.

2: Losing weight is slow and hard

There’s no mincing words here: losing weight through diet and exercise is a relentless amount of effort. It’s difficult to incorporate into your life until it becomes a habit. It’s time consuming. And sometimes it can feel like all that effort is for nothing.

It is just hard.

There are so many times this year I thought this was too hard and it’s going nowhere, but clearly I could do it and it went somewhere.

Walking every day really motivated me, because it was easy to do. Even through starting a new business, running a 24-hour fundraiser, even with my dad being in the hospital for 2 months, even through breakups, I never missed a day of hitting my Apple Watch Move goal. Some of those days I could only do two 30 minute walks because I didn’t have the capacity for anything harder than that. Some weeks I only walked, with no running, spinning, or lifting, because that’s all I could do.

Still, I walked.

On those days the walks did more than help close my Move ring, they helped keep me calm and keep me sane.

Remember that weight shouldn’t define you, but health and lifestyle outcomes should motivate you

I think the way we measure bodies sucks. Aesthetically, you can be beautiful at any size – you can and should love yourself. Empirically, weight and BMI are easy to get fixated on as they are comparable (to ourselves and others), but often don’t tell the truth of our health or body composition.

Today I weigh 215lbs, but I have a slightly lower percentage of body fat than when I was 195lbs. I fit into clothes I haven’t fit in since 2018. I’ve put on a lot of muscle, which has a higher density than fat – 1lb of muscle takes up 15% less space than 1lb of fat.

That 15% difference in density may not sound like much, but if you have a 38 waist, 85% of that is a 32 waist. That’s an incredible size difference. That explains how I can both weigh more and be smaller.

I bring this up because most people start by setting their “goal weight.” Calorie tracking apps ask for your “goal weight.” Was my goal to lose 50lbs? If so, I failed – only losing 40lbs according to the scale. Yet I lost 76lbs of body fat, so did I overachieve instead?

Is my goal now to stay at 215lbs, but lose more body fat? Or is my goal to get my health metrics in a place where I reduce my risk of stroke, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer?

Weight itself shouldn’t be a goal. So here are some goals to consider:

• Lower your risk of health issues, such as heart attack, stroke, cancer, and diabetes. You can look at measurements in your bloodwork like fasting glucose, triglycerides, your resting heart rate, VO2 Max, your average blood pressure.

• Improve your daily life mobility, such as your ability to lift things and go up the stairs, which strength training can really support.

• Feel good about how you look in your clothes.

• Feel good about how you look without your clothes.

• Body recomposition, where you lose body fat while gaining muscle.

I’m using the language “feel good” here because beauty is complex, and you can (and should) feel good about yourself at any size.

Your goal is really important because your weight is going to fluctuate daily, your weight may go up even if you become smaller in size. You may achieve your aesthetic goals at a higher weight than your goal weight. Your body may not ever be at the weight that you think it “should” be, and that’s okay. Weight is one metric among many.

Plateaus happen and they suck

Your metabolism will change and adapt to what you throw at it. So as you work harder, your metabolism adjusts. What worked in June suddenly stops working in July, your weight will plateau, and you will feel like all your hard work is for nothing.

I’ve been at a plateau of 215–220lbs for quite a while now, which would be demoralizing if I only tracked weight as my sole metric. But what’s happening in the background is a quiet trade of body fat for muscle mass. I have slowly been building up strength – and maxed out my adjustable dumbbells for some exercises – so I started going to a gym to use a barbell (and last week got my own squat rack!) So while my “weight” is stuck, I’ve gone down in pant size, shirt size, and bulked up in muscle.

It’s important to understand what’s happening in a plateau and not let weight be the driving metric. Tracking metrics like body size with a measuring tape once a month can help break through the noise of the scale being a liar.

Your body shape will change in an annoying way

One of the challenges with fat loss is the difference between how you look in clothes, and how you look naked. There are two main kinds of fat to consider here: subcutaneous fat, the soft, pinchable kind under the surface of your skin; and visceral fat, the firm fat that surrounds your organs – think someone with a broad abdomen and skinny legs.

Visceral fat is extremely harmful to your physical health, while subcutaneous fat is what most people focus on during a weight loss journey. The good news for health is that you will lose visceral fat first. This leads to some confusing changes in your body, because you’ll notice your clothes are looser, they drape better, you may even need to go a few sizes down – but when you pinch your arms, your thighs, or your belly, you’ll still have that baby fat under your skin. That pinchable fat will likely be constant until you’ve burned through most of your visceral fat.

This means that in your clothes you will look like you’ve lost weight, but naked you “look” the same in the mirror. Again, this can be very demoralizing. It doesn’t mean you aren’t making progress – you are! But the soft fat is the last fat you will lose, and it is the most difficult fat to lose, and you likely won’t lose it until you lose everything else.

I’m sorry to tell you that but you it will help you to know what’s happening.

Losing weight takes time

Body fat is primarily made of carbon and hydrogen. So when you burn fat you lose it by breathing it out or peeing it out. Imagine peeing out 50lbs. That would take a long time.

Losing up to 1.5lbs of body weight per week is considered healthy. Anything higher than that and you’re at risk of losing muscle mass, not just fat. This can lead to long-term issues with your physical health, including heart and organ damage.

Accept that it’s a long and slow process, and you can get there.

Your body might have needs you’re not meeting

Weight loss advice often gets reduced to calories in, calories out – or CICO. The challenge with CICO is that metabolisms get messed up for all sorts of reasons, like stress, illness, and underlying health issues. This could mean your baseline metabolism, how many calories you need to exist in this world, can change through your life. Your body adapts to the stress put on it.

Before going on any weight loss journey it’s important to check in with your doctor and understand what’s going on in your body. There could be underlying issues impacting your metabolism. For me, I had an iodine deficiency, iron anemia, and low B12. It took 6 months of focusing on my underlying metabolism issues before exercise even had an impact on my body.

Getting your standard bloodwork done at your doctor’s office will also give you a set of baseline metrics other than weight and body measurements to compare to as you progress. Always consult with your doctor before making significant changes to your diet and exercise.

3: Eat enough protein

I’m going to write a separate series of newsletters on this topic, with recipes, since how I approach a high protein diet has changed a lot through this year.

The main thing I would say here is that calorie counting is exhausting, macro tracking is exhausting, diets are exhausting. Most of these tools lead to disordered eating, where it becomes more about control and less about living a happy, healthy life (which should be a goal of weight loss!).

I like the simple question to ask at every meal. “Is there enough protein here?”

Aim for 30g of protein per meal. If there is 30g of protein, add a lean protein. That could be a protein shake. It could be a side of green peas or broccoli. It could be a protein bar. It could be a few slices of deli turkey breast.

I like this because it’s non-judgemental, it’s an easy question to answer. It’s easy to act on.

I wanted to have a piece of a salted caramel chocolate tart I made for New Year’s Eve as a snack (recipe from NYT Cooking, non-paywall link). But that’s a high sugar, high fat, low protein treat. So I also had a protein shake, which meant I felt full and I did not go back for a second (and likely third) slice of the tart. (It’s very good.)

Keep it simple

These are some of the simple, straightforward tools I’ve used this year to lose weight – go for a walk, be patient, and eat enough protein.

I know it’s more fun to do something dramatic, especially as the calendar flips over. But weight loss is a marathon, not a sprint.

Here’s to wishing you all a happy, healthy new year.

Marko