________________________________________________________________
JAMIE THONG
Let’s start something
Ever since I posted that success pic, a number of my friends have been asking me either to help them lose weight or give them some tips on how to start.
I’ve decided to put together some easy pointers and tips over the next few weeks, at a rate of one per week, that my friends can follow. They won’t be very hard, but each of these steps were integral in my own journey.
These tips will focus mostly on sustainable and incremental behavioral change over a significant period of time. There’s a good reason why it took me 2 whole years to achieve my own success: I wanted to change in a way that would be lasting, with very little chance giving up completely because it was too hard.
My friends, if you decide to make use of these tips, you can expect to see results after a few months. While it may take a while, if you stick with it you’ll definitely find that not only is your weight going to different, your behavior and lifestyle will be different as well.
So let’s start with Week #1.
—
Week #1: Eat just a little bit less each meal
Try this: Leave one mouthful of food uneaten every meal for the whole of this week. After this week, try leaving 2 mouthfuls uneaten. After 3 weeks, go for 3 mouthfuls uneaten every meal.
Feel too uncomfortable doing it for every meal? Try it for every other meal. Even leaving it for just one meal a day is enough. The important thing is to practice not finishing your food.
Don’t worry about things like wastage, or hungry children in Africa (we’ll eventually resolve the problem of wastage, just not yet).
Remember this: Whatever’s left on your plate either goes to waste, or to your waist.
Easy enough right? That’s it for the first week. Give it a try and let me know how it goes.
Why?
What we’re trying to do is make your body and mind used to the idea of eating less than you normally do. Doing it in small little bits like this makes it much, much easier for your body to handle the stress of a changing routine, and it’ll be easier for your mind to accept as well.
The important thing is not to try and make too many changes, or change too fast. Change will stress you out, even if you don’t notice it, and eventually you’ll crash and revert to the previous behavior.
By the way, don’t underestimate the effect of eating just one mouthful less than normal.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s take 1 table spoon of rice to be 10 calories. If you eat 3 meals of rice a day, that’s 30 calories less that you eat per day. In a week, that’s 210 calories. Now move on to 2 table spoons less per meal. 420 calories per week. 3rd week; 3 table spoons less per meal. 630 calories. 4th week; 840 calories less than usual.
In order to lose 1 kg of weight, we need a deficit of 7,700 calories.
If we add up together all the calories not taken in over the 4 weeks, it amounts to 2100 calories. That’s roughly 1/4 of a kg lost over 1 month.
And we’re not stopping there. The long term goal is to each a deficit of roughly 3850 calories per week, resulting in a loss of 1 kg every 2 weeks.
—
Week #2: Give yourself one day a week and eat as much of whatever you want
If you’ve been following along, by this week you should be starting to leave 2 mouthfuls uneaten every meal. As we progress on to Week #3 and above, your body will start to feel the change in food intake more and more.
Let’s add a little something into the mix. Choose a day in the week and set it aside. For what? To eat whatever you want to eat. Give yourself permission to eat as much as you want to, no matter how unhealthy it is (or how unhealthy you feel it is) without letting yourself feel guilty.
Is this going to undo all the progress you’ve made over the past one week? At this point, most likely. But that’s not what we’re going to worry about right now. Remember, we’re in this for the long term. Though it looks like we’re going backwards, this is actually helping to lay the foundation for the changes we’ll make in the future. As we start to reduce our food intake even more over the coming weeks, the effects will outweigh the extra calories we take in due to this Day of Indulgence.
Remember this: Your Day of Indulgence will be what keeps you moving forward when it starts getting tougher.
Why?
There are a few good reasons for this week’s goal.
Firstly, we’re trying to build it into a habit. I’m sure you’ve heard of the phrase “Humans are creatures of habit”. It’s always much easier to stick to something if it’s habitual. Once the habit has been formed, we’re going to be tweaking it a little to make it more aligned to our weight loss goals. Not yet though; everything will become clearer in the weeks to come.
The second reason is that we all have limited willpower. Any act of self-control uses up our willpower reserves. When everything is used up, we won’t be able to make ourselves do something that requires self-control (like eating less), no matter how much we know it’s good for us. As we progress along and start to reduce the amount we eat by more and more each week, we’ll hit a point where the calorie deficit is large enough for your body to notice. At this point, your body will start feeling a little stressed, and as each day passes you’ll find that it uses more and more willpower to keep up your habit of eating less.
How do we restore our willpower reserves? By doing things we enjoy, having fun, making ourselves feel good. That’s where the Day of Indulgence comes in. Eating what we love, and not setting ourselves any limits will make us feel much better and fill up our willpower stores. It’s also something we can look forward to in the week when it feels tough to eat less.
The final reason is somewhat debatable. Some experts say that when our bodies don’t get enough calories and start losing weight, we are evolutionarily programmed to slow down our metabolic rates automatically. Our bodies enter “starvation mode”, and our resting metabolic rates get reduced significantly as our bodies try to conserve as much energy as possible in preparation for the “famine” situation that it thinks we’re facing. By eating more than usual and taking in extra calories, we’re trying to reset the body’s meters and convince it that we’re not actually starving so that our resting metabolic rates don’t get reduced and our weight-loss measures become less effective.
So there you have it. I’m personally not fully convinced that reaosn #3 is applicable for everyone of us, but reasons #1 and #2 should be good enough for everyone.
—
Week #3: Measure your weight every morning
Week #3 is upon us! We’re still building our habits of leaving mouthfuls uneaten every meal (we’re up to 3 mouthfuls this week) and giving ourself one day for a break where we can eat whatever we want. This week, we’re going to practice a little behavioural psychology.
Every morning after you’ve woken up and emptied your bladder, measure your weight with minimal clothing on. If you don’t have a reliable weighing scale, go get one! They aren’t that expensive (I prefer digital scales, analog ones need tuning and can be less accurate), and this is a very important exercise.
Go get a weighing scale and weigh yourself every morning after you’re done in the toilet/bathroom. Pay attention to what your weight is every day, and at the end of the week do a quick calculation of your average weight. It doesn’t matter if you see your weight staying the same or changing every day. What matters is what your average weight is every week, and that you see the number with your own two eyes.
We want to avoid getting discouraged by the numbers we see in the weighing scale, and measuring your weight every day will help to achieve that. Also, as you start doing it you’ll quickly notice something: your weight goes up and down every day even when you haven’t done anything different. This is true even if last night we stuffed ourselves at a buffet or if we had to skipp one or two meals. It’s not our daily body weight changes that should matter to us, it’s the average weekly/bi-weekly change in weight that should matter in our long term mission of slow but sustainable transformation of our lifestyles.
Remember this: It’s your average weekly weight that matters because your weight will go up and down every day even when you’re not doing anything differently.
Why?
Our daily body weight is less dependent on what you ate/did not eat yesterday, and very much more dependent on things such as:
1) the weight of the clothes we’re wearing
2) whether our bladders are empty or full
3) whether we’ve recently passed motion or not
4) how much water we’ve just had to drink
Sounds silly, but give this a try: Measure your weight before you empty a full bladder and after it’s empty. Congratulations! Your weight has just gone down by 0.5 to 1.0 kg. You can do the same test for the rest of the reasons.
Instant weight loss? Yes. Real weight loss? No. What we need to focus on is the change in average weight every week. Our bodies just don’t gain and lose weight that quickly.
When we measure our weight every morning, we can see with our own eyes and understand that small changes in weight happen daily. Only measuring your weight once in a while will make you miss this. You may think you’ve gained 0.5 kg when you’ve actually lost 1 kg. The only way to know for sure is to be familiar with the pattern of your weight changes every day.
We want to move away from thinking that eating too much on one day will jack up our weight. In fact, you may not even see your weight increase at all, but even decrease! I once measured myself after a steamboat dinner the night before. My weight was actually 0.1 kg lower than it was the day before.
When we understand this, we’ll no longer freak out, feel bad or get discouraged when we see that we’re 1 kg heavier than yesterday. Once we understand that it’s our average weekly weight that matters, we’ll no longer be slaves to the weighing scale.
—
Week #4: Add snacks in between meals
Welcome to Week #4! How’s everyone doing? This is the point where your body should start feeling the lowered calorie intake, so stay focused and do your best.
This week, we’re going to make a slightly more dramatic change to our eating habits. We’re going to add a snack (or two) in between each meal. Yup, that’s right, you’re going to start snacking.
Go for 1-2 snack in between breakfast and lunch, and 2 snacks in between lunch and dinner. For me, I go by timing; on average I eat a meal or snack every 1.5 to 2 hours.
What sort of snacks should you eat? Initially, go for whatever you like. The beginning is just building the habit, and it’s important to make it stick from the outset. Once you’ve made this into a habit, start to switch out 1-2 snacks with something healthier like apples, roasted almonds, a cup of low fat milk, etc. The eventual goal is to make all your snacks healthy in nature.
Remember this: Your snacking will sustain you in this journey in the months to come.
Why?
Think about the time in between an average person’s breakfast and lunch. If you have breakfast at 7.30 am and lunch at 12.30, that’s 5 hours between each meal. At lunchtime, you’ll probably be pretty hungry and tempted to eat a lot. If your dinner is at 7.30pm, that’s 7 hours between lunch and dinner! Now that we’ve started eating less during each meal, it’s going to be much harder to wait so long in between meals.
Eating a snack in between the main meals will help to do three things. Firstly, it’ll help to keep your body in a state of elevated metabolism, since the body’s got work to do (digesting the snack you ate). Secondly, it’ll help fill you up a little before your next meal. As the weeks progress further and you start leaving 8-10 mouthfuls left each meal, taking snacks in between meals will help keep you sane. You’ll also have a little more motivation since the time between each meal will be less. Finally, depending on what you eat, the snacks will also make it slightly easier for you to leave food on your plate since you’ll feel fuller than if you didn’t eat anything.
An additional benefit: If you are prone to gastric pains, this will also help greatly in reducing your gastric attacks since your stomach won’t be so empty in between meals.
—
Week #5: Start setting small and easily achievable weight loss goals
It’s already Week #5! How are we doing? I know the going isn’t easy, and cutting down on how much you eat is going to get tougher over the coming weeks. If it feels too tough, just remember that it’s okay to stay at a level you’re comfortable with until you feel ready to take up the challenge of reducing your food intake further. We’re in this for lifestyle change, and slow and steady always beats fast and sudden.
This week we’re on to setting weight goals for ourselves. Not just any goals mind you, but small goals that we can easily achieve within 3-4 weeks time.
Let’s start out with something small and simple: a 0.2 kg to 0.5 kg reduction in our weekly average weight within 3-4 weeks. If you feel that you need more time, make it 5-6 weeks.
Once you’ve hit that goal, set another small goal with the same time frame. In fact, if you want you can set the same goal and just work your numbers slowly down the weighing scale.
Remember this: Set small weight loss goals that are achievable within a few weeks time and keep doing it
Why?
I want to emphasize again that we’re going for slow and steady reductions in our weight, NOT fast and sudden weight loss. Setting small goals that you can achieve over a month or so is all part of the process. There are a number of advantages in setting these small goals compared to if you set up a big goal of losing X number of kg in a year.
1) These small goals are much easier to achieve and faster too. You’ll hit them in a much shorter timeframe
2) These small goals will keep giving you motivational boosts every time you achieve them. This will help keep you going
3) Breaking down a big goal into small goals makes it less difficult to face psychologically since we aren’t focusing on something so large (and distant in the future)
4) Consistently achieving these small weight loss goals will add up over time. Before you know it, you’ll have lost quite a bit of weight over a few months. Example: Setting a small goal of losing 0.4 kg every 3 weeks will result in a overall weight loss of 1.6 kg over 3 months, and add up to 6.4 kg lost in a year.
I also want to emphasize that you must keep the goals small, or you’ll just be demoralizing yourself. There’s no point in making a goal like losing 2 kg in 3 weeks if the only way to do it is to starve yourself. Stick with small, easily achievable goals. The whole reason we set the bar low in our constant goal setting is to make it so that we can achieve these goals and keep moving forward. This will keep us motivated and have a significant effect on our weight loss over time.
—
Week #6: Have an image of what you want to look like
In Week #5 we focused on setting small, short term goals that we can achieve regularly. This week, what we’ll focus on setting a long term goal that your short term goals point towards, and seeing it mentally and visually. At this point, because the road is getting tougher we need to stay focused on the right things and keep ourselves motivated.
Think about the ideal look for your body that you’d really want in your wildest dreams. What do you want to look like when you reach your desired weight? Picture it as clearly as you can in your mind. Got it? Now go and look for a picture of someone with that sort of body. It can be a celebrity, person you admire, even a friend of yours. As long as that person has a body that you really want to yours to look like at the end of the journey, it’s good enough (Google Image Search is very useful for this exercise). Now use that image as a reference and re-imagine yourself looking like that. Lock the final image in your mind and set that as the destination.
As you continue working on the things we put into place for Weeks #1-5, keep this image in mind. Use it to remind yourself of what you’re aiming for, and where you want to end up at the end of the journey. Every time you start to wonder why you’re “torturing” your body with what you’re doing, think of that image. If you need to, look at it the picture again and imagine yourself looking like that. Remind yourself that that’s where you want to end up and that’s where you’ll get to if you stick with it, no matter how slowly you’re moving forward.
Remember this: Have an image of what you want to look like at the end of the journey
Why?
The whole point of this exercise in imagining ourselves in our ideal bodies is to keep ourselves motivated and inspired, and to remind ourselves why we started out on this journey in the first place. Plus, we all need to know where we’re headed in order to know which direction forward is.
Why bother finding an image and imagining ourselves like that? For one thing, it will really help those of us who are not so good at imagining things, and those who have no clear idea what they want to look like at the end. The picture will be a useful starting point that we can reference for imagining ourselves. It’s also something that we can keep coming back to again and again whenever we lose sight of the end point, or when the image in our minds starts to become less clear with the passage of time. It will also help those who are more used to processing information visually.
A final point: You can even combine this with what we’ve learnt in Week #5. There’s no harm in having a series of images of yourself to aim for as you progress through this journey. When one milestone is reached, repeat this exercise and imagine your next goal.
——————————————————————–
weehingthong 