As I mentioned in my first post, I've been focused on losing weight for a while now. I've lost 33 pounds in the past 4.5ish months now and toned up a good bit, so, naturally, people have asked me what the heck I've been doing, and the answer is...a lot. But, I've tried to sum up the most important bits, and here are my top ten pieces of advice to anyone who decides it is time to make a change.
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| Yes, you can have a bite. |
Most of these are things I learned on my first trip to a weight loss doctor, and I still highly recommend seeing one to get started. A doctor can give you personalized advice and set up a plan that works for you specifically. It's rather expensive though, and you will probably be given a lot of the same advice I was, so, why not pass that info along for free? This is what worked well for me, and I bet it will for most other people, too.
1. Eat!!
Starvation mode is a real thing, and if you are getting too
few calories, your body is going to resist giving them up. Believe me- you can exercise your butt off,
but if you’re getting too few calories on a consistent basis, the scale isn’t
going to move…at least not very quickly.
And if you can lose weight faster by actually eating a decent amount of
food, why put yourself through this? A
good rule of thumb for anyone, I think, is don’t go below 1,000 calories a day. Which brings me to #2…
2. Reduce your calorie intake by 1/3.
Figure out how many calories you’re getting in a typical
day, and reduce it by roughly 1/3. Treat
that as your calorie limit while you are trying to lose weight. You might, however, want to first assess how
healthy your “typical” intake is and realize you might not be able to go back
to that if you want to maintain your weight loss.
3. Obey the rule of thirds with nutrition labels.
In case you went to art school, no, I don’t mean that you get to
choose food with the most aesthetically pleasing packaging. Look at the nutrition facts on everything you
pick up and compare the amount of carbs to the amount of protein. If it has more than 3 times as many carbs as
grams of protein, walk away. Protein
rich foods/drinks are miracles for losing weight quickly! And the closer you can get your carb:protein
ratio to this balance or better, the better results you will see.
4. Keep a food journal.
You can’t really keep track of what you’re doing right or
wrong unless you’re, well, keeping track of it.
I use the My Fitness Pal app. My
best friend prefers Fat Secret.
Whatevs. Just find a way that
works for you, and keep an eye on how your nutrition is adding up throughout
the day. Treat it as a puzzle that you
will need all the pieces to by the end of the day. Not near your protein needs for the day? Think about what food choices can fix that.
5. Be honest with yourself!
So, you only had a wee handful of M&Ms? Oh, it still counts. If you’re not adding even the little teeny
things up in your food journal, remember, you’re only hurting yourself and your
own progress. Hold yourself accountable
for every little snack and you will see more progress.
6. Eat small meals.
I hated the idea of this at first and never thought it would
work for me. If you’re a geek like me,
you’re totally familiar with the eating habits of Hobbits, with their notions
of Second Breakfast and Elevensies being non-negotiable everyday meals, and
turns out they were onto something. I
found it helpful to think of getting the most out of my body’s fuel the same
way I would think about getting the most out of my car’s fuel: steady doses of
energy give you the most efficiency. Your
miles per gallon suffer when you hit all those stop lights, right? All those increases and decreases in
speed? It’s the same with your
body. Give it small, steady doses of
energy, and it will give you its best performance. Give it a lot of stop and go (heavy meals
spaced far apart), and it will start dragging and retaining weight. My personal plan is 3 meals of 200-300
calories per day, with two to three 100-ish calorie snacks spaced between, no
more than 3 hours between each meal.
7. Don’t reward yourself with food.
…at least not very often.
If you’ve made a lot of progress and want to have a cheat meal at the
end of the week, go for it. Once a week
will not hurt you, so long as you don’t blow it out of the water. For me, a cheat meal is something like a
chicken tenders kids’ meal (preferably from Longhorn, with those awful,
butter-laden mashed potatoes). It’s an
unhealthy treat, but a relatively healthy portion size. Find other ways to reward yourself, such as
new clothes that you never dreamed you’d fit into! That’s a feeling of happiness that will last
much longer than any cheesecake euphoria (debatable depending on the
cheesecake, I know, but give it a chance).
8. Accept that our
society does not make healthy eating easy.
…and rise above it.
If you start putting effort into really looking at the nutritional
values of everything you consider eating, you’re going to be amazed at how
obnoxiously unhealthy most everything is.
Some of it will really make you wonder why it is legal! You’ll see your friends eating these sorts of
things, too, and that makes it harder to resist, but remind yourself every time
that you know the truth about that food now, and you’re not going to let it
fool you anymore. You’re going to be treated as though you’re being uptight and
snobby by some people, and seeing your willpower working so much harder than
theirs will make people terribly uncomfortable, but remember, that’s not a
reflection of any fault in what YOU are doing.
Bend a little if the social situation makes it necessary (business
dinners come to mind for me), but at least keep portion control in mind as your
last resort.
9. Learn some healthy
recipes, and be certain they are truly healthy.
There are tons of places to look online for recipes to start
with, but always check the nutrition for yourself, and don’t just go by what
the recipe is touting. I plop any new
recipe I’m interested in into the My Fitness Pal recipe calculator thingy, and
9 times out of 10 those “healthy” brownies are only healthy if you cut them
into pieces about the size of your thumbnail and forget that the chocolate
chips aren’t composed of air. It’s
disappointing, yes, but this goes back to rule #5 about being honest with
yourself. The good news is that even if
the recipe doesn’t check out, you can experiment with substitutions until
you’ve got some good-looking nutrition facts.
Think about what you can change- will Splenda work instead of real
sugar? Will applesauce work instead of butter?
Just egg whites instead of the whole egg? You can get pretty creative! And don’t get too pouty, thinking you’re
going to miss out on all that flavor.
Chances are, once you start eating healthier, your cravings for all that
excess sugar, butter, whatever, will start shrinking pretty quickly. I, for example, feel like I can actually TASTE
how much sugar is in things for the first time, and many sugary things I used
to scarf down nonchalantly make me super queasy.
10. Remember, if it’s
not a change you can make permanent, it won’t make a permanent change.
Obviously, right?
This is why fad diets fail when you go back to your regularly scheduled
eating habits. This is why the whole
“I’m never eating carbs again” thing doesn’t work in the end. If you love pizza something terrible, you
don’t need to exclude it from your life- just build a healthy relationship with
it and learn to resist eating the whole freakin’ thing. The fifth slice is going to taste about the
same as the first one did, I promise.
When people ask me for diet tips, many of them go on to tell me their
own plans of excluding one thing or the other, going with this new breakthrough diet trend or that, and that’s great, if it’s something you really believe in committing
yourself to for all eternity, or at least until you feel it’s ok to chub up
again. For me, I think it’s better to
just build an honest, healthy relationship with food, learn about it, know the
consequences of every lemon square, and respect those consequences. I can’t live in a world where I’m never
allowed to indulge, and I don’t think anyone should force that on themselves.
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