Let me introduce you to a new phrase: lifestyle change. You like that? Sort've rolls-off-the-tongue real quiet like. For those of you who are intellectually-challenged (aka stupid) lifestyle change means a change of how you live. In this instance, we'll be focusing on how we eat. If you've read my earlier article A weight-loss program (and if you haven't, you should), you'll recall the focus for change is 3-fold: diet, strength-training and cardio. What I want to do is focus here strictly on the diet side.
You actually will need to read my earlier article A weight-loss program simply because it provides the exact food-changes I personally made to go from 93kg down to 80kg -- a much better bodyweight for my height and size -- because I don't see the point in cutting & pasting the exact same information here. The key take-home point is that what started as a "diet" actually became a lifestyle change. I didn't follow an eating plan simply to achieve a goal, only to revert back to my normal eating practices.
Instead, I made a permanent lifestyle change in how I ate. That's why you need to read the earlier article linked above as it details the dietary changes I made. These changes are now permanent i.e. I eat this way all the time. Practically. I still splurge every now and again in fact, as I'm writing this article I'm thinking of last night's butter chicken. Divine. I still have anywhere from 1-3 beers most days with the occasional wine or vodka (vodka is something I prefer later that night when the kids are in bed and my wife and I are working away on our laptops feeling immensely grateful for the life we lead).
...I hope that doesn't sound as wanky as it reads.
CHANGING HOW WE EAT
Firstly I need to mention that what worked for me may or may not work for you BUT I strongly suspect it will. Like I said, I'm not going to repeat the same information -- read the above linked article -- what I am going to do is explain how easy it becomes to change your diet and share my own results over the first 10-week period. Dietary change is probably a piece of piss when it's just you aka Han Solo but it's a bit more complicated when it's you, your partner and children. In this second example everyone needs to buy in. My wife did and as for the kids, we just told them.
It was that or starve.
Guess what? They ate what we gave them.
...funny that.
In terms of ease of change yes, it was difficult giving things up and guess what? They were all small things yet in regular amounts for example spreads, y'know, your marmalades-vegemite-that sort of thing. Your average jam has wickedly high levels of sugar per 100ml serving. Giving some of those up or at least, eating far less of them, was surprisingly hard. Giving up ice-cream, apple-pie, chips (or "crisps" for our American friends), chocolate, all the sort of things that make life worthwhile, was surprisingly hard. Greatly reducing my passion for New Zealand beer was hard in fact, over the first few weeks I only had 2-3 beers per week if.
Are you getting the picture here? It's hard to give up things we enjoy.
On top of that I was eating far more salads in fact, I just went for the whole chicken-salad or salmon-salad scenario 3-4 times per week rather than trying to divvy-up my plate. My wife and I reduced carbs; we cut out practically all rice and rarely had potatoes and/or kumara (sweet potato). Nowadays we prefer Bulgur wheat over rice but look, having rice every now and again is fine; we just happened to have rice and/or pasta 3-4 times per week because I personally love (white) rice, but give up rice we did. I purposely went low-carb as I suspected it would help me lose weight quite fast too and yeah, it did.
...this isn't the case for everyone.
But. I needed to reduce salts and fats and often doing so really does start with apparently small and inconsequential items we think are fine. It began with things like spreads (and you could include the likes of mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup etcetera and then jump across to your sauces -- soy sauce is high as fuck when it comes to sodium -- and all the other condiments we add to our meals too), but it also included bread-type, high-fat milk, cheese and butter. Having a chart on our fridge to which we compared all food labels so as to keep an eye on bad fats (i.e. saturated fats), sodium/salt levels and sugar/fructose levels really helped.
Over time, this became normative.
Over time we not only adapted to eating this way, but didn't want to regress.
Over time this dietary-change evolved into a lifestyle change: this is how our whanau eats now.
Which is a great place to be because this is when you know the penny has well and truly fallen in fact, it's fallen so far you couldn't find it if you tried. We don't want to return to an unhealthy diet. We like eating well. We are involved with our food choices and automatically select the healthiest option. We consistently remove excess fat from meats and are willing to pay more too. We have learnt greater self-discipline in what passes through our mouths and even more importantly -- especially for moi -- we have learnt to eat smaller portions of higher quality food.
That's why you shouldn't "diet".
A diet automatically conjures up associations of a change in eating for a set amount of time to (usually) lose weight. Rolling the diet-mantra round in your head sets you up to perceive your eating habits as being on hold whilst said diet runs its course, after which you go back to the same 'ol same 'ol. It's more of a temporary change or a "food pause" than anything else. Fuck that. You want a permanent lifestyle change which in this case is Simply. Eating. Better.
You're not on a diet, you're eating better.
This always starts in the kitchen.
But soon it permeates further into your work-place meals whereby you're actively involved in what you eat on the road, in the office, out back of the warehouse. This is a really good thing. From there it impacts your entertainment/social outings and yeah, you could turn into one of those goddamn nazi health-freaks (I think you can probably tell that isn't me; if my mates were stopping in at Mac Donald's for a feed after a late night film I'm down with that), but when you find yourself choosing healthier food options 80% of the time in social settings, then you've made some really decent lifestyle changes.
Well done.
MY 10-WK RESULTS FROM ALL THE ABOVE
Remember how I said I was originally 93kg and am now 80kg? Well, that's from the changes outlined in A weight-loss program and choosing to make this a permanent lifestyle change. That's something I should probably mention: choosing. You and I always have a choice and when it's predominantly the correct one (what can I say, I'm a realist), then we're doing well in this journey called life. Sure, I look better but what's more important is I feel better physically and funnily enough, mentally. That's a positive change, one I didn't know I'd even feel.
For the first 3wks I only had three small meals per day with no snacking. When I say "small" I mean the whole meal would have fit on the flat of both my hands put together. Bloody small for me. I was permanently hungry so drank a lot of water day in and day out. This shocked the shit out of my system. I went from 93kg down to 85kg in those 3wks alone by which time I was well and truly over it. Plus my weight loss had greatly slowed. However, I was determined to go down to 80kg or at least see how far I could go.
I opted to start tracking my weight loss through a weekly average. What that means is every day I'd weigh myself first thing in the morning for the sake of consistency, then divide that by 7 to get my weekly average. I did this over a 10wk period. It was a much slower process than the earlier shock tactics and I learnt if you starve yourself, you'll lose weight fast (that was the first three weeks), but you can't function like that forever. We need a more achievable meal program. I also learnt you don't need to micro-manage and track everything, which is great news. Here's the results:
Looking back through the above I can see some weeks where there is a 1kg difference between them and some weeks (week 8 & 9 for example) where weight loss was negligible. Personally I think I reached my goal somewhere between week's 6-7 but thought what the hey, I'll keep tracking over a 10wk time span because it's a nice round number. For the record too, the above 10wks is eating exactly as outlined in A weight-loss program, just so you know. It's fair to say you can fluctuate up to 2kg/5lb between days.
The fact that my weight stabilised and I'm essentially not losing anymore says I've reached a balance between food-slash-energy-source in and exercise-slash-energy-source out. Or, in more simplistic terms, I'm eating just the right amount of food-sources to maintain my current weight. Could I lose more weight? Sure. Should I lose more weight? To be honest, I could probably lose another 2-3kg but seriously, where does it bloody end? I'm happy where I am at the mo and as long as I sit round 80kg I'm good.
...we'll see.
Besides, to lose more weight I'd either need to reduce calories further (heaven forbid) or increase my levels of exercise or possibly, possibly do both which gives me a raging soft-on. What needs to be pointed out is how slow weight loss can be even on a sensible and achievable program; it's very easy to become overly pedantic about it and I certainly found myself feeling these weird urges to keep climbing on the scales, something I've never experienced before and certainly didn't enjoy. Resist those urges. They're not helpful and are a result of becoming overly obsessive about weight loss/gain.
:: CONCLUSION
So to recap, we need to ditch the very word "diet" and start engaging with the term lifestyle change. It's more accessible, more realistic and more genuine. People don't boast about eating better, they boast about being on a diet; keep your ego in check, stop boasting and do what's best for you. Know you can starve-slash-shock your body for a time (and I'd recommend a very, very short time frame of a month or less for this), but then you need to move into sensible, achievable and beneficial eating patterns.
Lastly, know when to stop.
I didn't know that focusing on weight-loss could make me obsess about it but it was beginning too, so I understand now how people can get hung up on this shit. Don't. Mental health is equally paramount here if not more so. What do you think? I still see a lot of before-and-after photos where to be honest, quite a few people looked better before. They didn't really need to lose weight and I wonder if that "last 2-3kgs" was their obsessiveness taking over so that they now look like white famine victims. Again, don't. Don't make this your life, it's a vessel not an end. Trust it all helps. Kia ora whanau.