Us geeks, nerds, and technology lovers spend most of our day in front of a computer. We wake up and head the work where we spend eight hours on a computer to pay the bills. Then we come home and turn on our own laptop or desktop to relax with some games, code a project, or create content for the web.
All this time adds up and we find ourselves over-weight or out of shape. This is what happened to me over the years. I never got to large but I was over-weight and kept putting on the pounds. I am about 5' 9" (175.26 cm) and weighed in at 192 lbs (87 kg) the day I saw how big I looked.
By no means did I hold the weight well and looking at that photo, comparing it to how I looked in high school, was eye opening. I tried a few diets and only once did I loose any weight but when I stopped all weight came back plus a few extra pounds.
Talk about frustrating.
Disclaimer
I'm not a doctor and all the information that follows is my experience in losing weight. Do your own research to learn what will work best for you and your condition. Don't listen to some random nerd on the internet.
/Disclaimer
The Journey
April 2015
This is when I did the slow carb diet. I lost ten pounds (4.5 kg) in about a month. The problem was that I hated it, a lot. Once I stopped the diet, I gained all the weight back plus a few extra pounds in the next month. Clearly not sustainable but this might have been due to my lack of understanding.
July 2015
Here I learned about intermittent fasting and many of the health benefits it can have on the body. I remembered that when I was in high school, I never ate breakfast and was intermittent fasting without even knowing. There was no weight gain back then either and I would eat whatever junk sounded good.
After getting into the grove of intermittent fasting I lost about two ponds or nine tenths of a kilogram over the course of a month. Nothing impressive but I was still eating whatever tickled my fancy and not counting calories. The fasting also improved my mental clarity in the morning.
The style I was using at the time is know as the 'Lean Gains' method. This is were you stop eating after dinner, no snacks or caloric drinks, and then not eat again for sixteen hours. Luckily eight of those hours you can be asleep and the first few hours are after dinner.
February 2016
This is where I lost most of my weight. I counted calories and ate at a caloric deficit. Thanks to intermittent fasting it was much easier since I could eat two big meals instead of three or more small meals. The love of eating is strong with me and when I eat I want to eat big.
After about a two-and-a-half months, my weight dropped down twenty pounds or nine kilograms. At that point, my body stopped losing more weight, and I have been between 170-172 lbs since. From my experiences, the only reason I could keep the weight from coming back was intermittent fasting.
December 2017
I am still at 170 pounds eating whatever I want and using a six hour eating window instead of eight. This change in fasting time was to help keep me from eating snacks around two o'clock in the afternoon. Another thing I have dabble in is ketosis. Eating a high fat diet is interesting and seems to keep me full longer. This even comes without the midday crash that normally comes on a standard diet.
Let's Talk Health Tech!
Ok, all that is great, but this is a tech post day so let's talk about the tech we can use to make sure we meet our goals. Listed below are the apps I found to be the most useful in getting healthy. There can be a ton of confusion over meals, exercise, and sleep. The apps listed helped me to stay on track by tracking all the stats.
MyFitnessPal
I have tried many apps over the years and 'MyFitnessPal' has the best amount of food coverage out of them all. We can track calories, macros, water, and exercise. While it is hard to know how much an ounce or gram is across different foods, we pick that up as we go. Grab a cheap food scale and weigh everything until you have a good idea.
Fooducate
Another app that is great is 'Fooducate'. With this app you can search for any food and it will give us a grade on the food. 'F' being the worst and 'A' being the best. They even list out the nutrition information and why they gave that food the score they chose. Keep in mind that if you are on a low carb diet, you need to read the information. This is because they will grade wheat bread at 'A' even though it is full oh non-fiberous carbs.
Sleep As Android & Twilight
This app is only on android but you can find others like it for iOS. What this app allows us to do is track our sleeping habits each night and change them to get the best night's sleep possible. Without sleep it is much harder to get healthy and lose weight. While sleep still baffles science we do at last know it is important to get as close to eight hours of sleep as we can.
Along with a sleep tracking app it is good to use another app like 'Twilight'. What this and other apps like it do is change the color of your devices screen from the default blue hue to a more orange and red hue. Blue light can mess up our circadian rhythm making it harder to fall asleep. The harder it is to fall asleep the less sleep we get each night.
Liftium
This is the app I like to use for track my weight lifting progress. This app is simple and easy to use. You can add your own exercise into the app if it is not there by default. You may want something more complex or just use the fitness tracking in MyFitnessPal. Either way, it is always a smart to track exercise so we know the fat is melting off when the scale does not move.
Thanks for reading!
If you have any tips or tricks for getting healthy and in shape as a tech lover please share with us in the comments!