In June 2019, I decided that my creep towards 200 pounds was going to stop. Now.

I tried to keep things simple so I decided to just count calories. I know there are better ways to lose weight and to consider nutrition as well, but this was a simple solution that involved tracking something. It appealed to my logical brain.

I made small changes. Little by little, I was going to make it easy for myself to not eat the bad things.

Brian Tracy talks about the three white poisons: salt, sugar, flour. Tim Ferriss kind of hits the same bad guys (at least the sugar and flour) in his book The Four Hour Body. Regardless of your weight loss and nutrition philosophy, it’s hard to argue that less sugar, bread, and pasta is a bad thing. So that’s where I started and that’s all I did.

I started with pop (soda). Instead of the sugar-filled soft drinks, I chose diet. Within a couple of weeks, I stopped even that and stuck with water and coffee.

Then, bit by bit, I cut out most sugary stuff and most bread. I ate less pasta and less potato chips and tortilla chips (a big weakness) as well as cheese buns, candy and chocolate.

The number one way that I was able to stop or cut down on these high calorie items was to stop buying them in the first place when I was shopping for groceries. That way, my willpower only had to last for half an hour in the grocery store instead of every five minutes for hours at home with these things in my cupboard or fridge.

The other thing that really helped was cutting down how much I ate. I had a simple formula: just eat half of what I would have eaten before. The bonus was that I would cook just as much but, by eating only half and putting the rest in the fridge, I had another meal for the next day.

Yes, I was occasionally hungry, especially the first week. But it’s amazing how your body gets used to things. I didn’t beat myself up if I decided to eat something sweet. I just stopped making a habit of it.

I weighed myself every day and tracked my food in MyFitnessPal, a calorie tracking app. Tracking things has been proven to make you more aware just by the act of tracking.

In the first few months, there was almost no effect. But by September, three months later, I started to see a gradual decline and, in December, the weight started to quickly fall off.

By mid-January, I hit my goal of losing 20 pounds. I’m now at the weight that I want to be.

20 pounds may not seem like much but, though I technically started in June, all of that weight loss happened between September and January – four months. Do that for a year and that’s 60 pounds! Try carrying 60 pounds around everywhere you go and you’ll realize what a big deal that is for your health.

I’m not suggesting to anyone that it’s easy or that willpower alone is enough to do this. Changing habits is hard, but if you can change even one little thing at a time, it can be done.