Repeat after me: "I will stop eating like I'm still in high school."

Want to lose 10 lbs in 2025? Do this one thing.

Happy New Year! I’m so grateful for my readers and wish you and yours the absolute best in 2025. May your goals be grand, your steps sure, and may your heart be full this year.

Thanks for reading along. God bless!

~ AK

Last year my wife and I both dropped close to 20 lbs each. Whenever we’re with friends who’ve noticed our sharper jaw lines and trimmer physiques, we have the same conversation. And it's triggered by the same question: What did you do?

So I thought I’d share the secret to our success if it can help my online readers. We both dropped weight in the span of a few months in the second half of 2024. And we’ve, kept it off. It wasn't all that hard.

We didn’t do a daily body-punishing routine. We didn’t pay thousands of dollars for a personal trainer. We didn’t sign up for a complicated eating program that required scales, supplements, or a nutrition certificate.

We had one simple secret to our success. Are you ready for it?

We stopped eating like we are in high school.

Seriously. That’s all. We started to track our macros.

The backstory

I come from a family of four boys. Eating big is hardwired into my brain. A meal isn't so much about sustenance, it's more like a competition. If food is left over, you're a loser. If food is left on your wife or your child's plate, you eat it. This is your service to humanity. This, somehow, guarantees their survival.

How many plates you eat at Christmas dinner is a flex. How many dinner rolls you can stuff with turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and gravy is an annual legend-making family experience.

Counting calories sounded like a curse.

But I kept hearing fitness bros on X talk about tracking their macros. And I got curious. I admit, I had to Google what the word meant.

I lost my first 10 lbs because I was going to a beach wedding in February. I used Tim Ferris’ 4-Hour Body as a guide. I like the plan, but there’s too many beans and limitations of food types doesn’t fit my life as a busy dad, or my inner foodie leanings. In a word, it wasn’t sustainable. But it helped me hit a first milestone.

This feels like an overshare, but here’s a chart I kept to track the progress. It was motivating! I don’t know what happened in September (I was busy, so missed a week). What you see is a consistent drop simply by tracking macros.

As you’ll see in the chart above, I dropped the next 13 pounds to hit my goal weight by tracking my macros, and I’ve pretty much sustained the weight (I let myself feast at Christmas, so it’s currently in flux by a few pounds. Thank you Toblerone).

So just macros, that’s it?

Yes and no. We didn’t change much else. But it wasn't just eating. We are active, too. Because Petra and I both work from home, we walk a lot. I tend to put in about 10 K steps each day and on many work day we do a 10 minute Pilates set together at 3 pm to fight the afternoon doldrums.

But, even though we already exercised pretty regularly, we were carrying unnecessary pounds. The culprit? Our beloved Vector cereal. Which has close to 700 calories per bowl!

Most nights, we’d have a bowl of cereal if we watched a show. It was another eating habit hardwired into our routine.

Yes, we were eating the equivalent of a Big Mac every night before bed with a “healthy” bowl of cereal.

Here’s the nutrition facts for Vector. 55g is 1/4 cup. Who eats a mere 1/4 cup of cereal at a time. We measured the small bowls we were eating out of and it amounted to 639 calories in a bowl (and who doesn’t add a bit more cereal to finish the milk. Am I right?

This was a lightbulb moment for us. We laughed so hard about it, because it was perfectly hilarious and depressing at the same time.

I'm gonna go to bed, let's have a cheeseburger!

This simple new approach to eating has really helped Petra and I. It's created an easy framework to help us prioritize our health.

It hasn't been drastic or invasive. It's taken a little bit of discipline for some very real gains (or should I say, losses).

If you’ve set a goal to drop some weight in 2025, but don't know where to start, I hope this encourages you.

Our son Will took this photo of us before church. We’re both about 5 lbs in to our macro journey at this point.

Give it a try in 4 easy steps

If you want to test it out, here's what we did:

• We set a goal weight.

• Determined what our macro intake should be to get there (we used IIFYM).

• We used this spreadsheet.

  • Note: I created it to track the macros of the foods we tend to eat, mostly purchased at Costco. We fill it out daily (Petra’s way more consistent than I). This was the game changer. You can use an app like MyFitnessPal to make it even easier, but I needed to go a bit more analog to actually do my own math and get closer to the calories (in the same way using cash rather than a credit card to spend makes you realize the cost of a thing).

  • Copy the spreadsheet with all the existing formulas and make it your own.

• We walked a lot, chased our kids around, stayed active in the way that fits our lives.

Summary:

If you want to focus on health in 2025 and don’t know where to start, this may be a great point of entry for you. You can start today and don’t need anything attention to the nutrition labels and a bit of self control.

And you have a handy little spreadsheet to give it a go! No matter what goal you set for your health this year, I’m here to cheer you on.

You can do it, friend!

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I’m no fitness guru or health expert, but in 2025 I plan to incorporate some health and fitness content into this newsletter, as a practical way to keep my health and wellness priorities in front of me.

Let me know what your health goals are in 2025 and what you're doing to go after them.