How I Learned What Weight Loss Actually Is (After Getting It Wrong for Three Years)

I was twenty two. Fresh out of college. New job, new city, new everything. My goal was to live the best life. What could have been a good starting point? Lose weight! Get the Glam!

The formula was simple- Eat less. Work out. Repeat. I did not know a single thing about how a body actually works. I just had ambition and a bathroom scale.

That combination almost broke me.

The First Plateau (2022)

I started around 76 kg. In three months I dropped to 71 kg. Fast, easy, motivating. Then nothing moved. I stayed above 71 for the rest of the year. Some days dehydration would push me to 70 for a few hours. I got scared to drink water because the number would bounce right back.

Here is what nobody told me then. A small drop in weight in the first weeks is mostly water and glycogen leaving your muscles, not fat leaving your body. Your body stores carbohydrate as glycogen, and every gram of glycogen holds about three grams of water with it (YES!).

Cut carbs or calories suddenly, and that water goes first. It looks like fast fat loss. It is mostly plumbing.

The Resolution That Did Not Survive January

New year 2023, new target. Sixty kilos. I got to 68 in two months. Then work timings, bad sleep, stress and social eating took over. By 2024 I was back to 72 kg.

I blamed my genetics. I blamed my discipline. Both explanations were more comforting than the real one, which is that a body under chronic stress and poor sleep holds onto fat more stubbornly.

Cortisol, the stress hormone, affects appetite and fat storage patterns. This is documented physiology, not an excuse. But it also does not mean you are broken. It means the plan was incomplete.

Where did I go so WRONG?

The Body Re-composition Phase

I went hard on bodyweight training. Squats, jump squats, lunges, crunches, jump rope. Every home workout video on the internet, I tried it. My body got stronger. The scale did not care.

This is the point where most people quit, because strength was improving while weight was not moving, and it felt like proof that nothing worked. It was actually proof that muscle was being built while fat was maybe still there. This is called BODY RECOMPOSITION. I wish somebody told me that strength and scale weight are two different measurements of two different things. There were days after a very serious workout that my body will hold on to water weight for recovery. But to me- IT WAS BAD. I used to be under the impression that weight is coming back and instead of eating to recover, I would starve myself.

Eventually, the very next week these accumulated fatigue would lead me to overeat under the garb of “Social Eating” with friends. Sounds so comforting no? Friends made me eat, we met after so long, how could I be so boring and ruin mood of all, hunh? Bad excuses.

Learning to Count Calories (Properly)

I found MyFitnessPal. I learned about BMR, the energy your body burns at complete rest just to keep you alive, and TDEE, your total daily energy burn including activity. I calculated my deficit of 500 calories straight off the bat. I added the calories my watch said I burned. Four months later, still 68 kg.

Turns out I was tracking wrong. A spoon of honey counts. A square of chocolate counts. A spoon of cooking oil counts more than people think, because fat has more than double the calories per gram compared to protein or carbs. Once I started weighing food properly instead of estimating, the number moved again.

The Smartwatch Problem

By 2025 I stalled again at 68 kg. I checked my math three times. Nothing was wrong with my arithmetic. The error was in my data.

Research on fitness trackers has repeatedly found that the calorie burn numbers they show can be quite inaccurate, sometimes overestimating burn by a wide margin depending on the device and the activity. I was trusting a number that was inflated, then eating back those extra calories, thinking I had earned them. I had not.

There is a second, less talked about reason. Your body adapts to repeated exercise. The same workout burns fewer calories over time as your movement becomes more efficient and your body gets better at conserving energy. This is called metabolic adaptation, and it is well documented, including in long term studies on weight loss competitors whose metabolism stayed suppressed even years after the competition ended. Your body is not trying to sabotage you. It is doing exactly what evolution built it to do, which is to survive on less.

RED-S

I stopped trusting the watch completely. I went the other way and cut hard, close to 800 calories a day. I dropped to 65 kg in three months. It felt like a win. It was not.

I lost hair. I got nauseous during workouts. I could not do a single pushup. I was out of breath climbing stairs. I needed naps every four hours just to function through a normal work day.

This is where I want to slow down, because this part matters for every woman reading this.

What I was doing has a name. It is called Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, or RED-S, and you do not need to be an athlete for it to happen to you. It happens when your body is not getting enough energy to support both daily life and the demands you are placing on it. In women this can disrupt the hormones that regulate your menstrual cycle, weaken bones over time, slow your metabolism further, and cause exactly the hair loss and fatigue I experienced. Hair loss from severe calorie restriction is called telogen effluvium. Yes, it is an actual thing. Hair follicles get pushed into a resting phase early because the body is prioritising organs over hair growth. It usually shows up two to three months after the restriction starts, which is almost exactly my timeline.

Losing weight this way is not fat loss. It is your body eating its own muscle and shutting down non essential functions to survive. You get smaller. You do not get healthier. To understand it better, you may read my other blog post on The Set Weight Point.

Rebuilding, Properly This Time

I stopped the deficit completely for a while to let my metabolism recover. 2025, I built the plan around four things.

1. Protein. Around 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight is what research supports for people doing strength training, especially while in a calorie deficit, because it protects muscle mass while fat is lost.

2. Strength training with progressive overload, meaning I kept adding a little more resistance or reps over time instead of doing the same routine forever. Muscles adapt to a fixed stimulus fast, so without progression, growth and strength gains stall.

3. Fibre, once the higher protein intake started causing bloating. Protein digestion and gut bacteria interactions can cause gas and bloating, and fibre helps regulate digestion, but too much fibre added too quickly causes its own bloating. The fix was gradual increase, not a sudden jump.

4. Milder Deficit. Instead of aggressively cutting down calories, I went a little slow. The goal was to make the deficit so mild that it never felt like I was in a deficit. I calculated my BMR, my TDEE and set a daily calorie deficit of 400kcal from my TDEE. Trust me! It was so easy to make it a lifestyle than a hard pressing goal.

Energy came back. Skin looked better. Weight went up slightly to 67 kg first, because muscle and glycogen were being restored, then started coming down again, this time along with visible strength, better posture and steadier energy through the day. By 2026, I measured 59-60kgs without passing out.

The Part Most People Do Not Talk About

Body dysmorphia does not leave when the number on the scale changes. I grew up an overweight child and I still catch myself pinching skin and feeling like all the progress reversed overnight. Around my period my weight genuinely fluctuates by about 1.5 to 2 kg, with visible bloating. This is not fat gained overnight. It is water retention driven by hormonal shifts, mainly progesterone and estrogen changes in the days before your period. It is biological, it is temporary, and it reverses within days once your cycle moves on. Knowing the mechanism does not erase the fear completely. It does make it easier to talk myself down instead of spiralling.

What I Actually Learned

1. Early rapid weight loss is mostly water, not fat. Do not build your motivation around week one numbers.
2. A stalled scale does not always mean a stalled fat loss. Muscle gain, water retention and hormonal cycles all move the number independent of fat.
3. Track your food honestly. Oils, sauces, and “just a bite” add up faster than you think, because fat is calorie dense.
4. Do not fully trust wearable calorie counts. Treat them as a rough estimate, not a precise measurement.
5. Your body adapts to repeated exercise and becomes more efficient at it, burning fewer calories for the same effort over time. This is normal, not failure.
6. Extreme calorie restriction costs you muscle, hormonal stability, hair, and energy. It is not a shortcut, it is a setback with a delay on it. Start with moderate deficit of 300-400 kcals first (TDEE – 400kcal = should be your daily calorie target).
7. Protein needs go up, not down, when you are in a deficit and training for strength. Roughly 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight is the evidence backed range.
8. Progressive overload, not repetition of the same workout, is what continues to build strength over time.
9. Fibre helps digestion but needs to be increased gradually to avoid new bloating.
10. Cycle based weight fluctuation from hormones is real and temporary. It is not fat gained or lost.
11. Being lean and being strong and healthy are not the same goal, and chasing only the first one can cost you the second.
12. Body image work does not finish when your body changes. You learn to manage it, not erase it.

Three years, several plateaus, one very unnecessary hair loss scare, and a lot of wrong turns later, I finally understand that fitness was never about hitting sixty kilos. It was about learning how my own body actually works, instead of guessing.

I still walk, play badminton, work out at home, skip rope, do yoga, dance, whatever keeps me moving that day. The number on the scale is no longer the point. It took losing my hair to figure that out, which in hindsight is a fairly dramatic way to learn a lesson I could have read in a physiology textbook.