He looks years younger after his weight loss

A co-worker of mine had put on a fair amount of extra weight over the years. He wasn’t too happy about it, so wanted to get back to what he weighed in his 20s.

He’d mentioned this a few times in passing but never made a big deal out of it. Neither did he mention to anyone that he was actually planning to try to lose some of that weight. It seemed more of a wish than a goal.

What happened was that we started noticing that he was losing a bit of weight. Nothing dramatic. He just looked slightly slimmer, though still overweight.

This continued over quite a long period. I don’t know how long, but it was probably about a year.

Co-workers commented more and more, but he insisted he wasn’t on a diet.

Then someone found an old photo of one of our team events on their phone. What stood out was the co-worker that had lost weight. He looked so much better after losing weight than in the photo. He also looked quite a few years younger.

This meant he got even more questions about what he’d done to lose weight. He still insisted that he hadn’t been on a diet. We said he must have done something to lose so much weight. Then he mentioned one small change he’d made.

His wife always made him a packed lunch for work. It usually had sandwiches, some kind of snack, some fruit and a piece of homemade cake. His wife loved baking, so he usually had different types of cake every week.

The only change he had made is to tell his wife he no longer wanted to have any cake with his lunch. It made him feel too full. That was it.

Is that small change really enough to lose so much weight? He’d lost around 10 lbs.

We all started making some basic calculations. Assuming a piece of cake is 300 calories, that’s around 1,500 calories a week. That’s just for his Monday to Friday lunches.

Over a year that’s 78,000 calories. Surely that’s enough to drop 10 lbs.

Imagine if you ate 78,000 extra calories this year. You’d expect to put on weight. So removing those calories should have the opposite effect.

Of course, this isn’t a scientific study. This is just the result of what one person did. But if you’d been sitting in the office with us, I’m sure you’d believe that this is possible.

While some people try to follow complicated diets and exercise regimes to lose weight, it’s nice to know that there may be an easier and simpler way.

This won’t drop the pounds quickly, but slow and steady is what usually wins the race. Remember that the tortoise beat the hare in that famous race.