“I started finding support on social media, by sharing my stats and results”

United States National Arboretum

Anand: What was your strategy to start losing so much weight?

Tatiana: I wanted to maintain a 1,000 calorie deficit. My strategy was to start moving around a lot more and counting calories with Fitbit. I knew it was going to be hard, but I usually do pretty well when I have specific and measurable goals in mind.

I soon learned that the hardest part wasn’t the lack of food, or being exhausted from walking 20km a day — but people judging me for just wanting to eat salad instead of joining them for meals. Initially, rather than encouraging my efforts to get healthier, people were tempting me with high-calorie foods and unintentionally sabotaging my progress.

Finding support for your weight-loss efforts can mean the difference between success and failure, so I started finding support on social media by sharing my stats and results.

As a designer, I care a lot about the aesthetics of everything I post. Gyroscope was the only app that actually allowed me to share stats in a beautiful way. I started posting creative images of my daily steps and all my runs. The longer those runs were getting, the more people started encouraging me, which made me even more excited to run more!

Anand: What do you find useful about the Gyroscope app?

Tatiana: Most of the information available in Gyroscope you can find in other apps as well, but it never looks this good. And all the apps have different aesthetics as well.

I love how Gyroscope gathers stats from various other services and turns it into a unified experience. It makes me want to share my results with the world, which I previously was way more hesitant about.

Anand: What were the reactions when you started sharing your activities?

Tatiana: In the beginning, people weren’t that impressed, especially not by my runs. I used to run in the past as well, I just always gave up after a while. But coworkers and friends eventually started asking me about it, because they noticed I started running more frequently and longer than I used too.

People have been very impressed by my progress and a lot of friends and acquaintances have come up to me to ask me how I was able to get such fast results. I was even able to convince my best friend in Belgium to buy a Fitbit HR as well, and now we’re discussing our food and activities on a daily basis to motivate each other to keep going!

Anand: On your new diet, what do you eat on a typical day?

Tatiana:

Breakfast—The first couple of months I only had yogurt for breakfast, since I was still on a 1000 calorie deficit. But now I’m allowed to eat a little bit of granola and fruit. I usually try to keep my breakfast under 300 calories.

Lunch—The first couple of months I either had soup for lunch (because it was still cold outside) or a salad I would prepare at work with lettuce, tomato, cucumber, chicken, avocado, pepper and salt. This was usually about 450 calories! But for the last 2 months, I’ve been going to Sweetgreen almost every day. They have the most delicious salads.

Dinner—I’ve been trying to keep my dinners as normal as possible, because I don’t want to feel like I’m dieting too much. So I’ve still been eating pasta and pizza and risotto and all the things I love eating — just smaller portions and with less cheese.