So you decided to try to lose some excess weight. Good for you! You browse around on the internet and find thousands of studies and blogposts and advice on how to do so. But losing weight is a personal journey in which you need to find a balance between diet and not losing your mind.
I’ve drafted some rules that worked for me. Again, it’s a personal thing, but to me these rules made a diet manageable, measurable and effective. I used these rules to lose 15 Kg over the course of 4 months. And they helped me get rid of weight on at least 3 occasions. (We’ll talk about why it always came back at the end…) It’s a set of tips and tricks, do with it what you want, and good luck!
The key science to which all of these rules build up is simple: If you’re burning more calories than you are taking in, you lose weight. That’s it. All of these are are set up to decrease the calories you take in, so that you automatically burn more.
The rules
Let’s start of with 3 key rules:
- Key rule 1: Track you calorie intake. I’ve used MyFitnessPal for this. It has a huge database of foods and I was able to find nearly everything I ate in there. You can set a goal (mine was a calorie intake of less than 1500, which is very strict) to keep you from overeating but the main benefit you get from tracking your intake is that you create a sense of which foods are worth it to eat, and which ones aren’t. If you eat a chocolate waffle of 500 kCal, you’ve snacked your way through a third of your daily allowed intake. Is that really worth it, or do you decide to go for an apple instead? Getting a view on the food you eat is essential to get an understanding of what you can cut out of your diet. Depending on how fast you want to lose weight, you should set a different daily goal of calorie intake. 1500 kCal is an ambitious number to stay below, so see for yourself what works.
- Key rule 2: Weigh yourself daily in the morning. Weight fluctuates. Sometimes you’ve splurged with a big BBQ or your body is retaining more water for a certain reason. If you only weigh yourself once a week, and that happens to be on a morning when you’ve just had a bad day yesterday, your measurement of the full week is looking worse than reality, which is a disaster for your motivation, because it looks like a full week of dieting didn’t amount to anything! By weighing yourself every morning, you get a lot of ups and downs, but at the same time your getting more data points. It doesn’t matter if a single data point is higher than the day before, as long as the trend is going down. So every morning, first thing when you wake up, get on that scale and track it!
- Key rule 3: Drink a lot of water. Especially before dinner, if dinner is the heaviest course of the day for you. I drink 2 glasses of water before dinner. It makes me feel full faster, and prevents me from overeating and going for an additional, unnecessary second or third plate.
These 3 rules work together and form the basis of your motivation: You track your weight daily, you figure out what’s worth eating and what isn’t and you stop overeating by drinking more water. Everyday you step on the scale, and the trend goes down. This motivates you to keep on going, one day at a time.
The next rules are more concrete changes in diet:
- Rule 4: Exercise and track it. I like to run. I track all my running activities with Strava and have this connected to MyFitnessPal. So on each day that I go for a run, the calories burned are added to my allowed calorie intake of the day. This creates a margin to treat yourself, or have a cheat day. You’ve compensated the cheat day by running or working out, so you’ll feel less impact on the scale the next day.
- Rule 5: No calories from drinks. I mainly drink water, coffee (with no sugar), or diet soda. I found that calories from sugary drinks are just adding to the calorie counter without having any benefit. There are a lot of diet soda’s, so you can switch to those, or even better, to water.
- Rule 6: Small lunches and breakfast: When I limit myself to only 1500 kCal per day, you can’t have a 600 kCal breakfast and lunch. I never got into the “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” mindset, so I eat a yoghurt in the morning, and a couple of slices of bread with lean meat over lunch. This gives me some more room for a bigger dinner.
- Rule 7: No beer. Bear, and especially the heavier ones, contain a lot of calories. If you do need a glass of alcohol after a long day, have a glass of wine, or make yourself a gin and tonic with diet tonic.
- Rule 8: Ketchup instead of mayonnaise. The rule says it all. Mayonnaise, or a lot of other sauces, contain a lot more fat and calories than ketchup. No sauce is even better, but if you need something, ketchup is a good alternative.
- Rule 9: “Healthy” late night snacks. I’m addicted to crisps. Nearly every evening while watching television. These are empty calories that don’t make you feel full. I replaced this with low calorie snacks like popcorn or “water ice”. If you do need the crisps, buy small packs instead of starting from a large bag. This allows you to do some portion control.
- Rule 10: No snacks during the day. Try to stick to your 3 meals a day, and maybe a light snack in the evening. These will already fill up your daily calorie goals, so you really can’t afford sugary snacks during the day. If you need something to keep you going, go for some fruit.
Why did it come back?
I know you’re thinking: “Well great, but the weight always came back because you had to diet already 3 times!”, and you’re right. So far I’ve consistently failed to keep the weight off. Looking back at the rules, it’s easy to see what went wrong, because I started falling back into old habits after I reached my target weight.
I stopped measuring calories, but that’s ok. The process thought me what food is worth eating and what isn’t. The main issue is that I stopped weighing myself. You lose track of small changes in weight, and before you know it, next time you step unto the scale, it’s a couple of Kg’s more. So my ambition is to keep weighing myself consistently. You’ll notice smaller changes and can reflect on where these come from. I also stopped drinking water, started eating crisps and mayonnaise again and fell into all of my old habits.
But I truly believe that if I keep on weighing myself, I can keep the weight down and will be more mindful of my bad habits.
Let’s try this a 4th time and see how it goes.