Why I followed a diet for the first time
Although this has little to do with the topics I usually write about, I want to share something I’ve done in the past few months that I’m fairly proud of: losing weight!
I’ve been meaning to lose weight for some time now, but I did not know where to start, what to do and how to feel motivated to do so. But now that (I believe) I cracked this problem, I will try to address those points here and share what worked well for me.
Since I’m not a trained professional I would not suggest you take my advice for granted and instead try to understand what works for you. You might also want to seek help from a dietitian or a registered nutritionist, especially if you are heavily overweight or obese.
Calories based diet: how it works
What I did was pretty simple: I first understood how many calories I was eating a day. Then, based on my body mass index (BMI), I set a target for how many calories I would have eaten in a day.
This was also helped by increasing exercise and consuming “better” food.
It was important to track my weight every day so I could make adjustments to my plan (and also for morale boost!).
In the next sections I will go into details of each step.
First: check your BMI
If you want to go on a diet it must mean you feel your weight is above what it should be. But what should it really be?
A good way to understand if and roughly how much weight you should lose is by checking your BMI. This is a simple index that normalises your weight by your height so that you can compare it with a reference number. It is by no mean perfect, but can give you a good idea of where you start from.
I suggest to try the NHS BMI calculator: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-weight/bmi-calculator/
This was my result when I started:
Tracking your calories
The second thing to do is to understand your current calories intake. It is important, at this stage, that you do not start any diet or modify your habits at all.
You can use one of many popular apps to track your calories consumption, I’ve used MyFitnessPal. It’s a fairly good app (though the UX is a bit rough on the edges in my opinion) and has some nice features, above all you can scan a bar code and it usually recognise the ingredient/meal that you are consuming and adds the calories to your daily count. It also has a good-sized database of calories in different food.
Another important thing to do at this stage is to understand what are the most caloric foods that you’re eating. You will be surprised to discover that a simple croissant can have 400 kcal!
Setting a daily goal
Once you’ve tracked your calorie intake for a couple of weeks, you can then set a daily target for the maximum amount of calories you should get.
Both the NHS BMI calculator and MyFitnessPal can give you an idea of what range of calories you should be in if you want to lose a certain amount of weight in a certain time. You can compare that with the calories you actually ingest in a day from your previous experiment and come up with a number yourself. I was between 1700 and 2000 kcal a day (I’m not very tall!), and since both the NHS and MyFitnessPal were telling me to be around 1500 to 1700 I’ve decided to aim for 1500, which is around 200 kcal less than my best day, and around 500 kcal less than my worst day. This was a tough goal and I knew that.
Exercise
Exercise is good and there’s no doubt about it. But even in a moderate amount, you can easily burn those excessive calories that you got by eating the extra snack.
I started exercising at home doing some weight lifting and some weight-free workouts a couple of times a week for 30-40min. I was walking at least 40 min every day (part of my daily commute) and I was going to swing dancing once per week, sometimes twice. That was taking off quite a few calories from the list. Consider that just a simple half an hour walk can burn more than 100 kcal (but it heavily depends on your weight and your pace).
These days I’ve started using an app called 8Fit which gives you a series of short weight-free workouts to do daily in 15-20min which amounts to burning around 150 to 200 kcal per day. The app is simple and the workouts are well explained, it also gives you a sense of progression so I’m enjoying it more than I thought I would.
I always thought working out was boring and I’m still of that idea. I much prefer partner dancing, but when I can’t, putting some good music in the background helps me coping.
Drinking alcohol
This is a tricky point. Alcohol is highly caloric so it might throw your efforts out of the window.
This nice infographic shows you that a gin and tonic (double measure for those of you in the UK) adds up to 160 kcal. You can find the UK measures here: https://www.finder.com/uk/alcohol-calories
A pint of beer is around 230 kcal. That is something!
I suggest drinking diet options of mixers when possible (e.g. diet coke, diet gin). A double gin with diet tonic is “only” 107 kcal.
Track your weight
Don’t forget to keep track of your weight, so that you can adjust your diet accordingly. MyFitnessPal lets you insert your daily weight, but there are other options: smart scales these days come with software that automatically syncs with your phone and uploads other measurements too.
Another idea you can try is one of the many apps out there that let you bet on your weight loss. It might be a strong enough incentive for some 🙂
It is important to weigh yourself at the same time of the day, so that the variation is minimized. I was doing it before going to bed, but you can even try doing it a couple of times per day to average out the noise.
As you can notice, there is still a lot of variation in the graph, sometimes even more than half a kilo! This is completely normal: it is almost impossible to weigh yourself in perfectly comparable moments in two different days. Imagine that just drinking two glasses of water can instantly give you an extra 300 grams that you will eventually lose throughout the day.
Another important thing to notice is that this is not a linear process: the more weight you have, the faster you will lose weight. But over time the weight loss becomes slower. You can readjust your calorie intake, but I would not recommend to lower it much further than what you’ve set at the beginning.
Saving a picture of your progress can also motivate you more since it’s easier to forget how you used to look with five kilos more 🙂
Some tips
Obviously, following a diet based on calories intake does not mean you can eat chocolate all day, even if it is within the range you set. Trying to eat “healthy” food should always be kept in mind.
Having said that, there are some little things I found particularly useful in my journey:
- Try eating smaller portions. You might feel hungry when you stop, but if you resist to the temptaion of refilling your plate for 10 min your hunger will go away (this is because it takes some time for the body to send the stimulus of being full to the brain)
- Vegetables are great: you can eat lots of them and feel very full, but you will have eaten very little calories
- Proteins also trick your mind into thinking you’ve eaten “more” than you actually did
- Bread is very caloric (around 250 kcal per slice!). When you eat it, always prefer brown to white one
- Nuts are also incredibly caloric and don’t fill you at all!
- Potatoes on the other hand can make you feel full quite quickly and they don’t have many calories. This is a good trick with pasta: if you eat potato gnocchi instead, you’ll be eating fewer calories
- Eat carbs before exercising and proteins after
Results
I went from 70kg down to 62kg in the space of two months:
This not only helped me feel healthier, but also helped me feel happier since I managed to achieve my goal.
It is important not to push yourself too hard though: especially when you’re dealing with other tough situations in your life, a diet can also be psychologically challenging. I suggest you don’t deprive yourself of that ice cream. Just add it to the count, and if you can make up for it during the day, then good. Otherwise, well, sometimes that’s fine too 🙂
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