TL;DR: Turning exercise into a habit rather than only doing it on days I felt motivated, and tracking all my exercise data & weight every week, helped me make significant improvements to my fitness & weight loss journey over a three year period, as I dropped from 75kg -> 65kg.
Three years ago, I decided to start taking exercise more seriously because I wasn’t happy with my weight or fitness levels. I wasn’t particularly athletic, so decided to start tracking all of my runs and being more active overall. I bought a couple of free weights for home, and did a number of other sports occasionally, such as swimming, cycling, tennis, hiking, and following exercise videos on YouTube at home with my wife.
Tracking my data has helped exercise to become part of my routine, rather than something I had to constantly convince myself to do, and over time the results started to appear in my weight loss and improved running times. I'm really proud of the long-term progress, and since my wife is supportive – but not especially interested in the stats – I thought I'd share this here, with others who might enjoy it or find it motivating to build similar habits!
For reference, I am 28 years old, male, 172cm tall, living in Belgium.
Over the three years my weight slowly trended downward, and I just hit my goal weight of 65kg! Progress wasn't linear though. Notable setbacks were caused by holidays, family time, or busy periods where motivation dropped and stress went up, but keeping the long-term goal in mind helped keep me going.
Weight and fat loss were the original goals, but it's also encouraging to see progress in my running abilities. For all the distances I regularly ran in these three years, the trendlines point downwards, showing gradual fitness improvement! My time taken on the middle distances has improved the most, showing that progress is uneven, and there is still plenty of room to build up my endurance for the longest distance, which for me is still considerably slower than the others.
One thing I find striking is that I'm now running some of the longer distances faster than I used to run shorter ones 2-3 years ago, ie., I am now running the 9.2km distance in about 43-44 minutes (light blue), which is roughly what my 8km run times were when I first started (green).
Consistency is something I’m particularly proud of. Even during busy winter months, I managed at least one exercise session per week, and haven’t completely skipped an entire month since November 2023, which is a big change from how I used to approach exercise! I think this consistency definitely helped the weight-loss. For the first year or so, changes were only subtle, but once my body started adapting to greater exercise frequency, the results became much more visible.
At this point my main goal is simply to stay consistent and see where it takes me. One target I have is to further reduce my weight now from 65kg to 62kg, and would also like to complete a 5k run in 20 minutes. I have a few Stag-Dos and weddings coming up this summer though, so it'll be a bit tricky to keep progressing over the summer, but I'll try and keep going wherever possible!
I only started counting my calories in March this year, compared to all the other data sets which I have been doing for three years, but doing this has also helped to accelerate my progress. It has made me aware of how quickly my daily intake can add up, and the extra awareness is surprisingly helpful! This is definitely something I can recommend to others to help with their weight loss / fitness journeys.
Finally, if this story helps someone out there to see that meaningful change can come from small, consistent habits over a number of years, then I'll be glad I shared it!
by Lui-Lui-Lui-Luiz
1 Comment
Fantastic! Great progress and impressive that you were so diligent! Thanks for sharing!
Interesting that you did not hit a plateau!