Losing 20 Pounds

Updated Sun 2026-09-06 | 1827 words

Since this past January, I've lost about 19lbs (yes I rounded up for the title :D). This has been very intentional, so I want to take some time to reflect on it. I'm rambling a little bit, so I'll include a summary at the bottom :)

It started around the end of 2022, when at a physical my doctor told me I was pre-diabetic (just barely: 5.7 A1c). I was kind of shaken by this, since my family has a history of diabetes and I hate needles, so I started attending my work's gym classes more frequently and sort of watching my diet. I didn't really get much worse, but I also didn't get better until THIS year (2026), when my A1c is finally 5.6 and I'm 19lbs lighter.

Gym Classes

What changed? By the beginning of this year, I had been going to the gym classes (a mix of boot camp, pilates, kickboxing, zumba, yoga) fairly regularly, as well as doing a lot of walking, but it hadn't really been doing more than keeping the status quo - my A1c hadn't improved and I was actually gaining weight (though I'm sure some of this was muscle). This work was still useful - I had never established a regular exercise habit and now I have one! Side note: I actually hurt my knee doing these classes at the start, and I finally "fixed" it by kneeling each morning- turns out my knees build up gas bubbles after exercise and I can pop out the bubbles by kneeling. It took me like 8 months to figure that out by accident...

CGM

Around the beginning of 2026 (this year), my wife convinced me to try a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), despite my loathing of needles. I think this helped in a few ways:

  • Obviously, it let me see the effects of food on my weight -at 5.7 A1c, my blood sugar still didn't spike high enough to see what a cookie did to my sugar.
  • It also let me see when my blood sugar was NOT high - I have a history of feeling listless and cold at times and, attributing that to low blood sugar, I would eat to "fix" it. The CGM assured me that whatever the cold feeling was, it wasn't blood sugar. Even when the sugar level did drop, I could usually attribute it to a false alarm due to exercise (when the body pulls sugar from the skin) and wait a bit for it to recover. NOTE: YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO RISK THIS IF YOU ARE ON INSULIN!!
  • The final way it helped was more pychological - insurance declined to pay for it so I was paying a few hundred dollars a month out of pocket. This made me get quite serious about benefitting from it and trying new things.

Health Coach

I set up a recurring virtual meeting with a health coach from my clinic, and we chatted on Zoom once a month to go over progress and get advice. She asked me to start a food journal and helped me realize that there's no easy fix for this - I needed to (and continue to need to) become the kind of person with habits and hobbies that are healthy.

Brainwashing Myself

I think this is maybe the most important and subtle set of things I've changed (though somewhat obvious in hindsight) - the person I was last year had pre-diabetes, so the person this year has to be a different person - I have to BE a person who's fit. Some things that helped:

  • Getting the right motivation: I listened to a YouTube video with Dr. John Deloney and someone else I can't quite remember (will update the post if I can find the video), and one of the things that was said that really resonated with me was that you can't long-term lose weight out of self-hatred; you have to lose weight because you love yourself and you deserve to be healthy. I don't think I have a lot of self-hatred, but I do keep telling myself I deserve to have a healthy life, and that's inspired me to make the changes I need to.
  • Telling myself that even if diabetes was inevitable (due to family history and not making any progress on the A1c for 3 years), I would feel a lot better knowing I had tried as hard as I could to avoid it.
  • Convincing myself that taking the time to exercise is something I push other things out of the way for, instead of pushing exercise out when life/work gets busy.
    • A few of gym classes happen during work hours, so I stay late to make up the time at work and go in on weekends (many thanks to my wife for watching our son while I do this).
    • This is very hard when work gets stressful and I feel internal/external pressure to skip a class or work late without a class to meet a deadline. I cope with this somewhat by reminding myself that I do better work when I'm well exercised.
  • Healthy hobbies
    • When I wake up before the family (I'm an early riser), I try to take a walk or go for a bike ride instead of reading Reddit or watching YouTube or even programming stuff on the side.
    • Doing active things with my son! I have a four year old and he loves to run and play - I'm taking notes! This is really great, because its a fun way to bond with him and tire us both out.
      • Taking him to the park and running around with him (or doing pushups/situp/stretches while he's on the playground equipment),
      • Jogging along while he's on his little bike
      • Dancing with him to YouTube music in the evenings
      • Tossing him up and spinning him as he screams in delight
    • My neighbor helped me start a garden - super relaxing, but also physical to plant and weed the garden, and it provides delicious vegetables (I planted basil, peppers, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, and an artichoke).
  • Focusing really heavily on the importance of the changes I'm making. At first, my wife said I was focusing too heavily on this; and it looked like that, but as I got more used to being careful with portions and always walking after eating, I've been able to "do the right thing" (more) automatically. Also, there is a balance here I don't always get right; at one point I had a panic attack on a date with her in a restaurant where I didn't see healthy options... which really is not helpful. Overall though, I'm really glad I've spent so much effort working on this.

Diet

As mentioned before, with the CGM to guide me, I started a food journal. Some things that work for me:

  • Fiber at the start of every meal I can, usually salad or some kind of root vegetable. At work they have cafes, so this is easy, and at home I mix spinach with olive or avocado oil, sesame oil and soy sauce for a dressing
  • Skipping most desserts
  • A walk after most meals to help digest everything more smoothly
  • A food journal! I'm using (TODO: get name), which is nothing fancy, it just a way to arrange pictures and notes on a timeline. I originally planned to use AI to analyze calories, but its been sufficient to take a picture of each meal (which helps me consider portion size), post it, and, at the end of the day, take a picture of my blood sugar that day and think about why it looked the way it did. This has helped me practice "mindful eating"
  • I haven't needed to formally count calories
  • In the last 3 months or so I've started intermittent fasting, restricting food times to between 10AM and 7PM. This is not very extreme, but it means I can eat before my gym classes, including the lunch ones.
  • More psychological, but I'm explicitly trying to shift from the mindset of "food is really good, I should enjoy it when I have it" to "being healthy is really good, I will take satisfaction from being trimmer instead of food". This is hard for me as I grew up somewhat "competing" for food with my two siblings and developed the habit of grabbing food first without thinking too much as it wouldn't be there if I waited.
  • I re-organized our kitchen to make it easier to cook, clearing counter spaces, tossing stuff we were never going to use, getting more shelving, and dividing the fridge into "sections" - leftovers, meats/cheeses, and veggies.

Hume Scale

My wife Jenny also got us a Hume scale! This thing is great because it measure more than just weight - by sending pulses though your body while you stand on it, it can measure fat percentage, muscle percentage, etc. I try to do this measurement every weekend after drinking a lot of water (dehydration throws off the measurements) but before I eat. It's been really motivating to watch the numbers go in the direction I want (and also motivating when they don't).

Garage Gym

I find the group workouts more motivating, but I also cleaned out our garage (which was a real project) and put a rowing machine and mat in there. It's nice to use the rowing machine in the evening if I didn't get a chance to exercise that day or on the weekends; especially because I can watch Netflix while rowing. I'm using the mat for body exercises like pushups and stretches, and I also have a kettlebell, but I haven't really worked that into my routine yet. As noted above, I also keep my bike in the garage where it's easy to take it for a ride (usually early morning before the family gets up).

Results / Final Thoughts

I've been losing about a pound a week while mostly maintaining muscle mass! Overall, I think the largest thing that changed was my diet (since the exercise has been fairly constant for the last few years), but I wouldn't have been able to change my diet without the other changes - mindset shift, CGM, health coach, etc.

I've had periods where I'm more motivated do more and others where I'm less motivated and do less, but the overall trend is great.

Now that I've lost this weight, my sugar average is much lower and its easier to keep it lower - it's like there was a weight "threshold" - below the threshold, its easier to control sugars; and above the threshold, its much harder. I just asked Gemini about this and it says that's a reasonable theory and pointed me to this study. I'm going to keep trying to be an active person (went biking this morning!), but only use a CGM occasionally, as they're so expensive. I'd still like to lose 10 lbs to match my pre-wedding weight.