mbik3

Thanks for the posts in this thread! It's inspirational.

I don't have photos of myself, but I've come down from 100 kg (220 pounds) to 92.7 kg (204 lbs) in the past 33 days (-7.3 kg or -16 lbs). I'm a 185 cm (6 ft 1 in) tall guy in my late thirties. The high end of my normal weight is something like 85 kg (187 lbs), so there's some 8 kg and at least another 8 weeks or more to go. I've lost the weight by using a calorie counter app on my phone and sticking to 1200 - 1600 calories per day, depending on the amount of excercise. Counting calories sounds tedious, I know, but I've found it surprisingly easy. I'm a scientist by training with some background in nutrition and metabolism, so I guess the approach doesn't seem as off-putting to me as it might do to the next person. The app makes things quite easy and it does graphical plots of your progress.

Cycling hasn't been much of a factor in the weight loss so far, mostly because I'm in Finland and it's December, but it did inspire me to clean and fix my bike and start riding to commute and to run errands. We've had an unseasonably warm and rainy December in Southern Finland, so the problem is not ice and the cold, but darkness, rain and the sharp gravel that is spread on the streets to keep people from slipping. It's tough on the tires.

Up until about age 30, I was always the tall, naturally pretty skinny guy, with a major sweet tooth. I've been suffering from a degree of depression over the past few years and self-medicated with a large amounts of cakes, cookies and ice-cream. Now that I've lost some of the weight - fairly easily - and feel much better about my waistline, I kinda can't believe I let myself go for as long as I did. Of course, the trick is not so much losing the weight but keeping it off... Anyway, I've started to think about bike touring, something I've postponed and postponed when I couldn't get excited about much of anything.