120kg to 80kg. No keto. No suffering. Just a lot of rice.

I'm a 36-year-old Malaysian guy. At my heaviest I was 120kg. Not obese-on-TV heavy, but heavy enough that I was breathing hard going up two flights of stairs, heavy enough that my knees hurt on weekends, heavy enough that I was starting to get quietly worried about what my blood work was going to say.

I tried keto. It worked for about three weeks, then I went to a wedding and ate everything and never got back on it. I tried intermittent fasting. I lost maybe 4kg over two months but I was miserable and irritable by noon every day. I tried just "eating healthy" which is not an actual strategy and predictably achieved nothing.

What actually worked was embarrassingly simple: figure out how many calories you need, eat slightly less than that, make sure enough of it is protein so you don't lose muscle, go to the gym three times a week. That's the whole thing. It took 18 months to go from 120kg to 80kg and I didn't suffer once. I was full basically every day.

Why the blog

Because every time I told someone what I did, they didn't believe me. "That can't be right, you ate rice every day?" Yes, I ate rice every day. 250g cooked rice is only about 290 calories. The problem was never the rice. The problem was everything else I was eating on top of it, and the fact that I had zero idea how many calories were in anything.

Once I started tracking, I realised I was eating 3,200 calories a day without trying. Just... mamak twice a day, teh tarik, a few handfuls of nuts while working, a couple of biscuits. It adds up stupid fast when you're not paying attention.

I don't want to be a fitness influencer. I'm not selling anything. I just want to write down the stuff I wish someone had explained to me before I wasted three years on approaches that were never going to work.

The numbers, since everyone asks

Start weight: 120kg. Current weight: 80kg. Time taken: about 18 months of actually trying (after maybe two years of trying half-heartedly). Height: 173cm. Age when I started: 34. Diet: calories in vs calories out, high protein, no foods banned, just portions managed. Training: 3x full body weights per week, minimal cardio.

That's it. Everything on this blog is just the details of how I did that.

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