What Happens After You Diet for a Year?

For me, crash dieting was not an option. I tried fad diets and other lifestyle diets like keto but quickly found that the drawbacks outweighed the benefits for me. I don’t envy the months I spent carefully measuring spinach leaves, trying to get the most out of my 20 grams of carbs per day.

Weight loss was a reluctant necessity for me. Every doctor I saw chided me about my ridiculously high cholesterol levels and questionably rising sugar levels; especially since I have a family history of diabetes on both sides. I spent years not caring about nutrition whatsoever and it was already catching up with me, even in my early 20s.

For the last year and a half, I’ve been practicing flexible dieting at a mild caloric deficit. I’ve taken a lot of breaks where I’ve eaten at caloric maintenance to ensure I don’t accidentally damage my metabolism by dieting too aggressively. By breaks, I don’t mean wild cheat days munching on as much cheesecake as humanly possible — I mean days where I still tracked my food carefully and just made sure I was eating precisely as many calories as my body burned that day.

It’s been a slow process.

It’s a rewarding one, but there are times when the slowness of the process has been frustrating. Again, to protect my metabolism and avoid any ill side effects of sudden weight loss, I’ve been taking things at a pace that allowed continuous loss at a reasonable pace. Depending on your height and weight, between one and two pounds per week is safe, but most research-based pieces of advice suggest losing no more than 1% of your body mass per week.

It sounds like a lot of confusing math to figure out things like caloric deficits, caloric maintenance, and how much weight you can safely lose, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. With calculators to tell you precisely how much you should be eating and apps to track your food, it’s not as complicated or confusing as it was for my grandmother when she was frantically flipping through Weight Watchers booklets.

In the last 18 months, I’ve lost 47 pounds.

I started at 165 and I’m down to 118. I’m pleased to say that my doctors are no longer giving me the evil eye over my sugar and cholesterol levels. Better yet, I’m amazed at how much more energy I have to face the day. I set out wanting to lose weight for health reasons and I’m elated to find that I’ve got more energy and stamina than ever before.

Losing weight slowly and safely has helped me adapt to making permanent changes to my diet and lifestyle. Simple changes like going to yoga periodically and going for walks a little more often are a lot easier to turn into habits over a long period.

I could have lost more in the amount of time that has gone by and still been within safe parameters. I sometimes look back on last summer and wonder if I should have been stricter about caloric deficit days, but all in all, it’s been a journey that I’m still proud of.

Your palette does truly change.

I’m always reluctant to admit that my palette is changing. I find myself legitimately enjoying a wider crop of vegetables and my sweet tooth has been dramatically diminished. I can still enjoy a little dessert once in a while, but the strong desire I once had to regularly consume sugar is barely there now.

At first, I didn’t want to think that losing weight would change me in any capacity (other than my cholesterol and sugar levels, of course). I wanted to think I’d have the same capacity for sweets, especially since I am a little bit of a foodie. Even though my capacity is lessened, I don’t mind the change at all. If anything, I can enjoy the occasional dessert even more than I did in the past. When you have something all the time, it isn’t as special and enjoyable.

Smaller meal sizes, eventually, will fill you up.

One of the misconceptions about dieting is that you’re always starving. At first, for me, it did feel like that. As you lose weight — ideally at a slow, responsible pace — your body’s caloric needs change. It’s a relief for me because I can eat smaller portion sizes that are appropriate for a person of my height and I’m perfectly satiated at the end.

To make this a little less confusing sounding, let’s talk about caloric deficits again. My caloric maintenance is the number of calories my body needs to function every day. There are a lot of different calorie calculators out there, but Healthline’s caloric needs calculator is based on height, age, weight, and activity level.

Knowing how much you should be eating is transformative.

At my heaviest, 165 pounds and at my modest height of 5’0”, my caloric maintenance number was 1,692 calories per day. To lose weight at a responsible pace, I needed to eat 1,354 calories per day.

At my current weight, 118 pounds, I only need 1,436 calories per day to survive. That’s just how few calories my body burns in a day. To lose weight and go lower than 118 pounds, I’d need to only eat 1,149 calories per day.

I strongly recommend running your own numbers; it’s easy, the website does all the math for you. It can be shocking to realize how few calories per day your body burns. The “an average of 2,000 calories per day” that you always hear could be dramatically more than your body needs to maintain your current body weight.

Dieting isn’t easy, but it is worthwhile.

It’s incredibly easy to gain weight. We’re surrounded by highly processed products that pretend they’re healthy. We’re raised on misinformation and led to believe that we need to eat a lot more than our bodies need.

It’s a hard journey to lose weight, but after dieting for a year, I’m happy I tackled the hurdle. I’m happy to be lighter and not to have angry doctors breathing down my neck anymore, but that’s a small benefit in comparison to how much more energy I have every day. I’m 26 now, solidly in that mid-20s range, but I have far more energy than I had as a teenager or when I was in college. I’ve got more stamina to do the things I enjoy and spend time with the people I love. That’s the best part about losing weight to me.