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How I plan to lose 40kg in 12 months (part 1)
I’m pretty conservative when it comes to weight loss – even though I have a lot of weight to lose, I don’t plan to lose it all that quickly. I honestly don’t see the point in sprinting to the finish and seeing how quick I can say “I’m done!”… what do you do once you get there? If you have to really push yourself to make it, then you’re obviously going to have to take a step back once that goal has been achieved, but take a step back where, how far do you dip back into your old habits and start putting the weight back on again?
My approach is to make relatively small changes to my life at any one time – I want to form new habits that I know I can maintain permanently, not ones that I have to make sacrifices to achieve and then be forced to give up once I reach my goal – I want to form new habits that will remain with me forever and to help promote a healthy and enjoyable lifestyle.
Stage 1 - Changing the way I eat
My biggest weakness I feel is portion size, I just eat way too much… especially of the wrong things! The types of food I eat are pretty good really (well, some of them), but my diet does need tweaking.
For me, this is the obvious place to start, and I think it is probably the same for most people… you can’t lose weight unless you get one basic thing right, and that’s to eat less calories than your body uses up… pretty simple stuff really, couldn’t be any easier (everything sounds easy when you write it down doesn’t it!). So in starting out, the immediate goal is to really have a look at what (and more importantly ‘how much’) you put in your mouth each day… so that’s what I’m going to do right now.
Cutting out the ‘dead’ calories
By ‘dead’ calories, I mean those foods that give you plenty of energy (calories), but often don’t do a lot to stop you from feeling hungry. One of the main topics I will explore in this blog is the concept of ‘Low GI’ and ‘High GI’ foods, and that’s part of what we need to look at here. Food like chocolate, pasta, potatoes etc. can provide a lot of energy in one hit, but they are used up by your body pretty quickly and in simplistic terms, a lot of that will be converted to fat and you’ll start to feel hungry again before you get a chance to use it.
For me personally there are a three major food items that I know I have to cut out if I want to lose weight.
- ChocolateI’ve put chocolate at the top of the list for a reason… there aren’t many people out there who don’t like chocolate, and I probably eat more than most – definitely a weakness of mine.
- Ice CreamMy kids (like any kids) love ice cream… and since they have it most nights, so do I, and more than I really should.
- Hot Chips (fries)If I’m out of the house around lunch time and close to some shops… chances are I’ll seek out some hot chips (they always smell so good don’t they), obviously a big problem.
For you it’s probably different (although I bet Chocolate at least is pretty popular!), writing them down and acknowledging them is an important first step, so if you’re trying to lose weight and haven’t done that yet, I urge you to do it now, facing the problem is half the battle… why not add them in a comment below this post? Let’s get a discussion going on this – what foods are piling on the weight for you?
I want to illustrate how easy it is to slip into some bad habits. Most Friday nights, I go out with my wife and a few friends to watch a movie. We eat dinner first right outside the cinema (I usually have Chinese), we then load up on chocolate and soft drink and basically pig out while watching the movie. Why? I’m quite full after dinner, why do I then go and chase it down with heaps of chocolate and cola? Switching to something like Subway for dinner and replacing the chocolate and cola with maybe a small amount of dark chocolate and water would be a heck of a start to cutting out those dead calories don’t you think?
Reducing Portion Size
I’m definitely one to over-eat.
I rarely leave a scrap of food on my plate, and regularly help finish off what other people leave, I tend to stack up my plate with way too much stuff, and while I do eat plenty of good healthy vegetables, the foods I usually have too much of tend to be the heavier stuff like potatoes, pasta etc.
My strategy for dealing with this is pretty simple:
1. For the first few weeks completely cut out the foods that I know I will over-eat to remove temptation, for me that means:
- Potatoes
- Pasta
- Rice
- Bread
After awhile I will introduce a small amount of bread (multi-grain), rice (basmati) and to a lesser degree pasta (whole meal if possible), but in consciously significantly smaller amounts… potatoes I will hold off on for as long as I can, I think I tend to have too many bad habits associated with those round little monsters.
The idea behind this is these are the foods that are easy to eat too much of, they are the ones that really blow the portion size of my diet and last time I lost weight I found really cutting back on these gave me a lot more freedom to eat healthier foods and reach my goals.
2. Always try to leave something on my plate at the end of the meal.
This is a simple technique that I find to be really helpful. If you’re like me and always eat whatever is put in front of you (and then some), you’ll find that by just leaving something (it doesn’t have to be much), you can start conditioning your body to stop eating once you’re full… it may sound a bit strange, but just leaving a few mouthful’s on the plate really does make you feel as though you’re making progress if you are used to eating everything.
I guess one thing that I should make clear is that when I talk about portion size, I’m mostly talking about the portion size of the foods I mentioned above. It’s really quite hard to over-eat on leafy vegetables, fruit, or anything that typically has a fair amount of fibre in it. To illustrate this point, have a think about what you’re more likely to eat – 400g (14oz) of chocolate, or 5.2kg (11.5 pounds) of grapes … both have exactly the same amount of calories!
A limited detox
Finally, I’m going to cut out some of the more harmful foods in my diet… I’m not going to give up coffee or anything as drastic as that (one step at a time remember!), but there is one thing I drink too much of that really isn’t doing me any good, and that is diet soft drink… with all the chemicals pumped into it and plenty of rumours flying around about how harmful the stuff might be, it really isn’t worth the trouble of drinking it and I’m sure my body will appreciate the extra water intake that will follow. It’s something I don’t need, now is a perfect time to get rid of it.
I hope that all makes sense, there is a lot there to absorb – you will notice that I haven’t mentioned anything about exercise yet, and that’s intentional. With the amount of weight I have to lose, just making changes to my diet should see some fairly speedy weight loss over the next few months, as that starts to slow down, that’s when I’ll look at changing my exercise habits… I’ll talk more about that in part two of this article tomorrow.
If you read all the way to the end – thanks for sticking around, there’s quite a bit of background stuff I want to get through before I get into all the fun stuff, the time you spend getting up to speed with my ramblings is definitely appreciated.
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