Once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to ignore.

About three years ago I lost ten kilograms, and I became the lightest I’ve ever been. I’ve been a keen exerciser for most of my life, usually sticking to a schedule of about five to six sessions per week. But for someone who exercised so frequently, it started to bother me – why was I just a little bit pudgy around the middle?

The extra fat I was carrying certainly didn’t mesh with how I thought I should look, given my exercise habits. And I realised I had pretty much always been like that – I hadn’t noticed myself suddenly becoming markedly heavier as I’d aged.

As someone who was getting older and already exercised quite frequently, it seemed like it would be a little risky from a sustainability standpoint to keep increasing my activity levels. No – the solution was not to be found by increasing output. It would have to be achieved by throttling the input.

So I started doing something that I had never tried before, or even really thought about – counting calories.

Tedium and enlightenment.

Counting calories is tedious. You generally need to log all the food you eat in some sort of app or website, which does the calculations for you. And no, you can’t just have that extra biscuit or after dinner mint without logging it – because that would be cheating.

As such, eating at a restaurant when you’re trying to count calories is difficult. Who knows exactly what ingredients the chef used to make the meal? For these situations, you need to become comfortable with the idea that you are making an estimate, which may or may not be entirely accurate.

During each day you find yourself needing to consciously log everything – all those things that you used to just eat on autopilot. One piece of bread here, a mint there. In the beginning I found myself religiously logging all food to get a good read on where I was at.

Tedium aside, the process was also quite enlightening. There were certain foods that I had been consuming with previously little thought, that were eye-openingly filled with calories. Most people know that a Mars bar is not healthy – it’s fairly obvious. But there were other foods that surprised me a little.

Peanut butter, for example. Yes, it’s called butter, but given its clear association with peanuts, I assumed it was not too bad. And then there is full-cream milk, which didn’t seem like a big deal to me either, even with cream in the name.

Other nuts like cashews were also unexpectedly loaded with calories – unexpected at least for me, anyway. Yoghurt is another food that seems to be promoted as fairly healthy, but from a calorie perspective it turns out that it can be quite the opposite. And don’t get me started about Milo – one of my favourites growing up. Forget the marketing hype that it is “fuelling” you… it is making you fat (at least at the volume that I drank it, anyway).

Of course, it’s true that some foods may be high in calories, but also high in beneficial nutrients – but in my case, I was only looking at calories to keep things simple for myself.

Filling the bucket.

One other eye-widening number that I came to discover was the total calories that a person should be eating every day to maintain their current state. This will obviously vary based on your current weight, the amount of muscle you have and how active you are.

It turns out that most humans really don’t need to eat that much. For me it is roughly 2,100 calories per day, just to maintain how I am now, without counting any exercise.

Let’s look at a common fast-food item, the McDonald’s Big Mac. This comes in at 550 calories by itself. Then maybe we’ll have a glass of red wine, which turns out to be about 200 calories. The calories in alcohol are often referred to as “empty calories” because they provide little nutritional benefit. Then perhaps let’s add that Mars bar for about 220 more calories.

So you can see that if you deviate from good eating habits over the course of a day, it would be very easy to fill your daily calorie bucket… and have your bucket quickly overflowing. Our buckets really are quite shallow after all, especially if you’re smaller than I am.

That was the input side of the equation. So let’s take a look at the output.

Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.

Obviously the more activity you do, the more calories you’ll burn. Do an hour of light walking and I’ll burn about 160 calories – nowhere near enough to make a dent in that Big Mac.

When I play basketball I wear a chest strap which helps to measure my calorie burn, and in a tough game I’ll expend about 750 calories including my warm-up. Just enough to get rid of the Big Mac and the Mars bar. Unless I can play demanding games of basketball every single day without my body breaking, it’s pretty clear – it’s hard to just exercise our way to weight loss… reducing the input really matters.

What’s fascinating about this for me is the impact of becoming aware of the data. In previous years (in fact for my whole life), I had no idea how many calories were in anything I ate, and I had no sense of how much energy I burned exercising.

But now once I’ve seen it – I find that it’s very hard to unsee it.

When I find myself reaching for that delicious treat, it makes me think twice and I start to notice my thought patterns. It becomes a constant battle between temptation and achieving the goal I have set for myself, which is to lose weight.

I found myself thinking:

“Are you really prepared to compromise your goal, just for that short-term sugar hit?”

At first this is quite powerful, because the answer is fairly clear. No, that donut is not worth compromising my goal for. But over time, I found that this constant awareness of the data could become quite draining.

The tradeoff.

I find a similar pattern exists when it comes to sleep data. Many devices allow recording of “sleep scores”, which I find useful when it comes to finding out what harms or supports my sleep.

One factor I noticed that seems to destroy my sleep scores is drinking alcohol, which won’t surprise many people anymore. Even one drink anywhere near bedtime has a detrimental impact on the data. And the same as with the calorie data – once I’d noticed it – it became hard not to be aware of it.

Then, as with the calories, everything became a tradeoff. Trading off that glass of wine for a good sleep. Trading off that donut with potential weight gain. At the end of the day it became obvious to me that what I was really trading off against was enjoyment. Should I relax and enjoy myself a little, or stick to my plan?

I can tell you that after a while, it all begins to feel a little bleak when you start to feel as if you are actively damaging your health by choosing to eat that donut, or have that glass of red wine. It can really suck the enjoyment out of it, because you know the numbers and can see the data.

There definitely seems to be a fine line when it comes to maintaining awareness of the available information, without becoming a slave to it.

A life based on assumptions.

All that I’ve covered so far may not come as much of a surprise. But it was a surprise to me – and for me, that is a surprise in itself. As a generally healthy active person with health-conscious parents, I still hadn’t really been aware of the composition of the foods I was eating for pretty much my whole life. I’d assumed food was healthy, when it often wasn’t quite the case.

I’d also been making a bunch of assumptions about myself too. I have Dutch heritage, and I remember growing up, our Dutch relatives were all heavyset, broad-shouldered folk. That’s not to say they were all overweight – they just had heavier builds. As such, I realise now that I’d come to believe that being lighter just wasn’t really on the cards – being a little bit heavier was the way I was built.

If you had told me back then that I was going to eventually weigh 78 kilograms instead of 88, I simply wouldn’t have believed it was possible for me.

That’s when discovering the numbers became really valuable. The numbers showed me what was possible, and – more importantly – they showed me that the current state of my body made sense. I was eating slightly too much of the wrong things, so I gradually put on weight. It was logical.

But saying that is one thing – and really accepting it as true is another. And that’s where the numbers made a big difference. Seeing the calculations made it seem more factual, rather than just wishful thinking. It also depersonalised the situation a little for me, which helped me to accept it.

Instead of feeling like a failure, it became more like my body was simply following the science:

Fuel in – Activity = Surplus / Deficit

This is much more than just a vibe, and feels more factual than a criticism.

You need to be ready to see the numbers.

The numbers help provide evidence to reinforce what we’re noticing. But sometimes we aren’t ready to see the numbers.

The negative impacts of smoking are well researched. Drinking alcohol is bad for you, and the research shows that, too. Obesity is known to cause many health challenges, and research now shows clear issues arising from a failure to get proper sleep.

But people still smoke, drink, eat too much of the wrong things and sleep badly. The research about these topics is widely and publicly available – and many of us know about it.

But we all have a story to justify sticking with our existing patterns:

“My uncle drank a bottle of whisky a day and he lived until he was ninety-five.”

“Ronald Reagan slept only four hours per night.”

The story I was telling myself about my Dutch heritage was similar – I’m different from the norm. The normal rules don’t apply to me.

But you’re probably not as unique and special as you think you are – and neither am I. So what stories are you telling yourself?