I burned 30 pounds of fat in 4 months — here’s how

I have just officially burned 30 pounds of fat, taking me to one of my health milestones. Here’s how I did it. The short version is setting goals and a clear pathway to get me to those goals, but in real life it wasn’t quite that simple. It usually isn’t when you’re in your 40s and trying to improve your physical health.

Burning Fat vs. Losing Weight

Notice that I didn’t frame my goals as losing weight. They say the scale doesn’t lie, but it does leave out some important context. When you start exercising, you’re likely to both burn fat and build muscle. In my case, my exercise of choice was riding my bike, and that meant I’d get some nice leg muscle going. I didn’t want that muscle building to count against my goal, so I set my goal as pounds of fat lost.

Of course, having a different metric implies finding a different way to measure my progress. For me, it was simple math.

You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure

In 2021, I ran more than I ever have, and I also rode my bike more than I ever have. I had YouTube videos of David Goggins yelling at me while I did push-ups.

I was working hard, but it wasn’t working. I gained weight. Not good weight either. I was a slug. A slug with decent cardio, but a slug nonetheless.

It occurred to me that part of the problem was that I was miserable for much of the year, and when I’m miserable I turn to some of my favourite dopamine hits — beer and junk food. I didn’t really have a clear picture of the impacts that consumption was having. I figured it wouldn’t be good, but I needed to know for sure.

So I designed a spreadsheet to track my calorie burn, and my calorie intake. This spreadsheet became the basis for how I was going to measure pounds of fat burned.

I know a lot of people hate tracking calories, but there’s two really good reasons to do it.

One, you learn where your calories are coming from. I kind of already knew but the math confirmed it (beer and junk food). But there were some other insights I gained that were less obvious. Some foods have far more calories than you think, and other foods far less. I swear my overnight oats have more calories than bacon & eggs. That’s downright bonkers, and I still opt for the oats because they’re healthier, but this is the kind of insight that careful calculation of calories will give you.

The other major benefit to tracking calories is the self-signalling. If you commit to figuring out all the calories you’re taking in, then you signal to yourself that you’re committed to the journey as a whole. Before I did this, I might only think about getting fit once a day, when it was time to exercise. Fitness wasn’t part of the rest of my day. As such, the act of sitting down with three beers and a bag of chips was disconnected from the act of exercising and also disconnected from the goal of losing weight.

When I first started tracking calories, it was a painstaking process, but going through that work signalled to myself that I was committed to making it stick this time. I thought about my health all the time, not just once a day, and this made it a lot more difficult to open a beer or bag of chips, knowing that I making the deliberate choice to undermine my efforts.

Calorie counting gets easier as you go, by the way. If you eat the same things, you can just look up what it was before. This actually encouraged me to repeat meals that I found to be both tasty and reasonably low calorie intake. Yes, at first it was annoying to have to read the labels on everything and crunch the numbers. That most food labels don’t contain easily divisible serving sizes is a nuisance, but if you’re using a spreadsheet, the math is easier.

I knew as soon as I started tracking calories, the very fact that I was tracking them would change my behaviour. That’s exactly what happened. I started editing myself — I ate fewer snacks. I would open a bag of chips, but only eat a quarter of the bag. I started questioning “do I really need this beer?”

Then came a shock.

Calories in < calories out

Calories in versus calories out is the most reliable way to lose weight. All the fads, tips and tricks out there are based on cals in < cals out. Stimulants increase calorie burn. Cutting carbs will almost certainly reduce your calorie intake. Juice fast? That’s definitely cutting your intake. In fact, if your daily norm is to break even on calories, occasional juice fasting works, because fast days are win days and every other day you break even.

When someone is winning with some product or diet, they’re winning the calories in, calories out game. That product or diet is simply the formula for winning the calories game.

The shock for me occurred when I read that you have to burn 3500 surplus calories in order to lose a single pound of fat. My second day of tracking I had a calorie burn surplus of 234. At that rate, it would take 15 days to lose one pound of fat.

This speaks to one of the reasons a lot of people struggle to lose weight — they don’t have a realistic sense of what is possible. So they set targets like losing 10 pounds in 2 weeks. Technically that can be done — a stomach virus or a coke bender might be required, but technically it’s possible. The problem is that it’s neither realistic nor sustainable. And, honestly, if you don’t intend to sustain your fat burn, why bother doing it in the first place?

The combination of diet and exercise I mapped out for myself only had me burning 4 pounds in 2 weeks. Not heroic, but not chump change. The important part was that this was sustainable. I could do it for months.

It’s also worth noting that I had a committed target in mind. I wanted to drop 30 pounds of fat. That’s 105,000 surplus calories burned. I had a deadline in mind (a trip I was taking) and with these numbers in mind I realized I needed far more surplus calories burned than I was doing at the time. I had enough runway to hit my target in my desired time frame, but it would require me to focus a lot more on burning pounds of fat than I had ever done in my life.

It’s not easy

This is where it got tricky. I love riding my bike, and I love running. That’s a great baseline. Folks who don’t like exercise don’t have this advantage, and probably will hate getting started. Eventually, the fitter you get, the more your body craves exercise. But if you don’t have a baseline of loving exercise, those first few weeks are probably going to suck. Best to mentally prepare for that.

So I had an easy pathway to burning more calories, but I didn’t work out every day. It took a good two months to finally lock into a rhythm of exercise, and three months to get to a point where I was burning a steady 4000 calories per day. It sounds easy on paper but that’s because I’m on the other side of those two months…during that time it was a tough adjustment, where I had to continually make tweaks to my lifestyle — tweaks my body and mind often resisted.

I didn’t want to give up my junk food and beer. In other words, I didn’t want to give up my dopamine hits. I needed those. So I had to start addressing the problem at its root — the burnout and stress in my life. And some deeper shit, too.

There’s lots of pathways here but getting in touch with your future self is a powerful one. When you start understanding who you want to become, you start acting like that person. If being fit is part of that, you’ll start activating that pathways thinking that helps you find solutions to challenges, and overcome roadblocks. This was huge for me, because not only did I start thinking about ways to increase my surplus calorie burn, but I also started to feel better mentally. That made it easier to let go of my dopamine hits.

Another mental thing with the spreadsheet is that the running total of pounds of fat lost is your gains. So let’s say you want to burn 30 pounds of fat by a certain date, like I did. I wanted to focus on the pounds of fat burned, rather than the target itself. The target allowed me to run the numbers to find the pathway, but otherwise, I decided it was best not to obsess over the 30 pound number.

That way, if I only got to 27 by my self-imposed deadline, I would be pumped about dropping 27 pounds of fat from my frame, not getting down on myself for not making my target weight on time. I’m not a boxer, nobody cares if I don’t make weight. I’m the only one who cares, and there’s no point in feeling bad, so I made sure only to focus on the wins. In fact, only the scale notices the difference between 27 and 30. Everybody around you will only notice that you’re fitter.

If you’re the sort of person to gets disappointed when you think you’ve failed, definitely focus on the wins. Viewing your efforts as successes makes you want to succeed more. You build confidence and momentum.

Over time, I got a place where I was burning 4000+ a day, and had a surplus calorie burn of 1000+ each day. That included the recovery days.

Jedi Mind Tricks

That was jedi mind trick I played on myself. At first, I wasn’t working out every day. My bike rides were too long and took a toll on me. So I would have “rest days”. The problem with a rest day is you view it mentally like a day off. I would just accept that on a rest day I would take an L — that is, I would consume more calories than I burned.

Then I started calling them recovery days. Recovery isn’t a day off, it’s part of your fitness plan. In other words, it is a day to specifically recover from training to prepare for the next training. It’s not a day off to sit on the couch drinking IPA and eating chicken wings. All of a sudden, I no longer accepted taking an L on recovery days, because those were still days where I was working towards my goals. I went from taking an L a couple of times a week to taking an L a couple of times a month.

That shift in verbiage helped me to accelerate my pace of fat burning.

The Running Total

The other thing I put on my spreadsheet was total pounds of fat burned. A running total. That was great for motivation, because you have a live running total of fat burned. I would question an extra snack, knowing that it would make the number go down. Sometimes, I’d throw in an extra walk if I was close to ticking off another pound burned — if that extra walk would allow me to hit a milestone today instead of tomorrow, I would absolutely do that.

The running total of pounds of fat burned creates far faster feedback than a scale. It’s also more accurate because it’s a spreadsheet and not a scale. On the scale, your weight naturally fluctuates over the course of a day so the scale can be demotivating if you look at it at the wrong time.

The running total in the spreadsheet also counteracts the mirror, too. The mirror is the biggest liar of them all. The mirror is more likely to reflect what’s in your mind than what’s in your eyes. On those days when the mirror is telling your that your efforts are futile, you’ll have hard numbers to prove the mirror wrong. As long as you’re not lying to yourself on the spreadsheet, the numbers will bear themselves out eventually, regardless of the whatever the capricious scale and lying mirror say on any given day.

The other thing the running total helps with is letting you know the consequences of your actions. I didn’t want to go cold turkey on beer and junk food. First of all, I haven’t solved all the underlying issues behind my quest for dopamine hits. Second, we all know that cutting out tasty things will often lead to rebound eating. That’s why diets don’t work — if I go a month without pizza I’ll probably eat pizza for a week straight when I’m done. But having that running total allows you to make your own decisions about your plan, based on facts.

For me, my time frame was clear. The deadline was firm — a trip that I’d booked — so I was willing to make more sacrifices, and spent more time dialling in my systems. But I was able to do so precisely because I had developed the tools to make it happen. I wasn’t very good at this the first month, but focusing on the process every day allowed me to get good at burning fat quickly.

Going forward, I’m not done. I want to burn another 20 pounds of fat. I know I can’t ride my bike in the winter, so even though I want to burn another 20 pounds of fat, I imagine it won’t happen quite as quickly. But I can actually crunch those numbers and know if my target time frame is reasonable or not. That way, I can build in things like Christmas indulging, and make changes to increase my calorie burn or lower my intake if I start to fall behind my targets. Or I can add a month to my time frame — the point is sustainable good health, so a month isn’t a big thing in the long run. (p.s. you can read how it went here.)

The key is that having come this far, I went from being not very good at burning fat to actually being not bad at it. That’s the most powerful win.