I lost the fat — on the wrong advice

Let me tell you the truth about how I lost my belly, because the usual version leaves out the part that actually matters.

Years ago I carried too much fat. I have written elsewhere about how a physical job did not protect me from a belly — I got to around ninety-five kilos, most of it soft, and I decided to do something about it. I cut, and I got down to seventy-eight. On the scale it was a clear success.

But here is what I do not usually say: I did it badly. Not through my own stubbornness, but on the advice of someone on a forum who presented himself as a dietitian. And at the time I could not see the problem — I was pleased the weight was moving. It was only later that I understood I had spent months hungrier and more miserable than I ever needed to be.

The man online had a simple approach: if the weight is not moving fast enough, drop the calories again. So I did. And again. And again. Each time the number went down, and each time I was told to go lower still, until I was eating around 1800 calories a day.

For a man of my size, doing physical work all day, 1800 was not a diet. It was starvation with a spreadsheet. The hunger was constant. Not "a bit peckish before lunch" — a deep, grinding hunger at every hour of the day, the kind that makes it hard to think, hard to sleep, hard to be a decent person to the people around you. I functioned, but only just.

And the maddening part is that it was completely unnecessary. The fat would have come off at 2500 calories perfectly well. It would have been a little slower — I would have had to wait a bit longer for the same result — but I would have felt like a human being the whole way through. Instead I was told faster is better, and faster cost me months of feeling terrible for no extra benefit worth having.

I am not guessing at this. I know it now because I finally understand my own body, and the numbers tell the story plainly.

Today I weigh a hundred kilos — more than I did back then, but now it is muscle where it used to be fat. And today I eat around 4200 calories a day, and for the last two or three weeks my weight has been holding steady, even drifting down slightly. That tells me something precise: around 4200 is roughly my maintenance right now. The point where I neither gain nor lose. My "zero".

Now work backwards. My job now is more physically demanding than it was back then, so I burn a bit more today than I did during that cut. Not wildly more — I am not torching an extra thousand calories — but some. So back then my maintenance was probably somewhere around 3000 to 3500, maybe a little more. Certainly nowhere near 2000.

Which means 1800 was not a modest deficit. It was a huge one, far bigger than I needed. A cut of a few hundred calories below maintenance — landing around 2500 — would have peeled the fat off steadily and left me able to live. The stranger took me a thousand calories too low and called it progress.

Here is the whole reason I am writing this, and the one thing I want you to take away. Do not copy my numbers. Not the 1800, obviously — but not the 2500 either.

Everybody's zero sits in a different place. It depends on your bodyweight, how much fat you are carrying, the kind of work you do, and how much you move in a normal day. There is no single right number, and anyone who hands you one without knowing your life is doing exactly what that man did to me.

Same number, two completely different meanings. Eighteen hundred calories nearly broke me and might be a perfectly sensible figure for a lighter person with a desk job. That is exactly why copying someone else's diet is a trap. The number that transformed one person can be far too little, or far too much, for you.

You do not need a stranger on a forum for this. You need to find your own maintenance, and it is not complicated:

• Track what you already eat for a week or two, honestly, in any food app, without changing anything. Weigh yourself across that time. If the weight holds steady, that average is roughly your maintenance — your zero.
• Take a modest step below it, not a plunge. A few hundred calories under maintenance is plenty. That is a diet you can live with, and one you will actually finish.
• Judge it over weeks, not days. Steady, slow loss with your hunger under control beats fast loss that makes you miserable and quit.
• If you want it done properly, see someone real. An actual qualified dietitian — with real credentials, not a forum name — will set this around your body and your life. That is worth more than any stranger's confident number, mine included.

• Losing weight and doing it right are not the same. I lost the fat and still got it wrong — too low, too hungry, for no extra benefit. The scale moving is not proof the method was good.
• Lower is not better. A gentle cut you can live with beats an aggressive one that grinds you down. Slower and survivable wins, because the diet you finish is the only one that works.
• Your zero is your own. It depends on your weight, your job, your movement. Find your maintenance and step just below it — do not copy a number from a stranger, and that includes me.

I got the result but paid too much for it, because I trusted someone who did not know me. You do not have to make the same trade.