Wow that’s a nice article, really re-iterates what I’ve been telling people for years (once you successfully lose some weight everybody at work that caries a few extra pounds starts asking you questions). I don’t think it’s as little as 19 calories a day because I think they over simplified the math (my big question is one pound of what exactly is 3500 calories, human fat?), but small changes really can accomplish a lot.
One of the other things I drove home is you don’t have to eliminate anything, for me that was really important, I wanted to get rid of weight as a quality of life issue, but subsequently I wasn’t willing to lose other quality of life things. Basically while I wanted to get rid of weight I didn’t want to give up my kielbasas or even switch to low fat turkey kielbasas (had one once, blech), wanted to keep my beer and my ice cream and all those other foods I enjoy. So I cut back on everything and cut out nothing. Some really unhealthy foods like snack chips I cut back on A LOT, and I rediscovered the pleasure of fresh fruits. I actually had Carnegie Deli cheesecake for desert 3 times in one week, and still lost 3 pounds, of course my non-cheesecake portions were minuscule those days because I knew what was coming at the end of the day, but it does prove you can eat really tasty really unhealthy food and lose weight.
Now since I refused to be a counter of anything I can’t really tell you how many calories I cut from my diet, but I doubt it was more than 250 a day. Big changes in your life can be accomplished with small changes in your habits.
The thing about measuring weight loss is that it can rarely be accurate lesser than a minimum of 3-4 pounds. Body weight can fluctuate upto and sometimes beyond 4 pounds, within the same day, depending on how much water the person has consumed or lost, at the time of measuring.
Tracking weight loss over short periods(between months, for example) is tricky for this very reason. The closest you can get to making reasonable measurements just to indicate if you are tending towards the direction of weight loss, is to have very rigid, near-identical routines for each day.
To that, also add the confusion of weight gain due to the gain in muscle mass, brought on by exercise.