Not Losing Weight? Read on…
Advice on losing weight seems to be a dime a dozen. If you Google ‘How to lose weight?’, it throws you over a billion search results! That’s a huge number — it took me forever to count the zeros (1,19,00,00,000). It is amongst the top five results in Google autocomplete.
So yes, this is yet another article on the same topic, to join the multitude. While I am no nutritionist or fitness expert, this is merely an account of my personal experience. And as large as humanity is, there have got to be people out there who relate and are going through the same cycles as myself.
Conventional wisdom says weight loss is 80% nutrition and 20% perspiration. So logic and Pareto Principle dictate that that is what one should focus on.
I did not.
Having been in the corporate world forever, I made dashboards and looked at analysis of various data to find patterns. It should have been obvious to me to go for changes in the 80%, but I did exactly the opposite. I bought myself a treadmill (I know, right!).
On a logical level, it still made sense to me. If I ate the same as I always did and yet ran for about 30 minutes every day, I had to see results. Six months later, I had nothing to show for it. Frustration started building up from the third month onwards and after the sixth month, I abandoned the model. The treadmill got relegated to the utility area and was thereafter used only to hang laundry on.
While I was running the rat race on my mill, I had no idea of where the calories were sneaking up on me. Take for example, a bag of popcorn. The kind you nuke in a microwave and simply eat mindlessly in front of TV. That was my go to dinner at least two nights a week. I told myself that I was eating ‘light’ because it felt better than eating veggies or grains at night. The bomb dropped when I scanned the barcode for the first time in my fitness app — only 500 calories! Likewise for that one extra glass of wine that you sneak in sometimes, or that bag of potato chips, or a couple of cookies. Once you start putting all of that down and see the calorie count’s meteoric rise, you will automatically become conscious of all those wasted calories — ones that add to your count but provide you with no nutrition. These being comfort food is an entire topic in itself that warrants a separate discussion.
Then I heard of my nephew using a fitness app to log in calories and macros; basically a food diary. This is also a very popular advice, been around since I was a teenager (pre-internet days). I had nothing to lose and I gave it a shot. I’ve been using it for two years now and have seen tremendous benefits.
If you’re wondering if there’s any point to my ramblings, here’s my two pennies’ worth.
Choose just one thing to change and be consistent about it. That’s it!
The more our choices, the more confused we get. If you’ve already read thousands of articles on losing weight and found all of them similar, then you know there’s no silver bullet.
For credibility, I’ll borrow from Charles Duhigg and his book — The Power of Habit. One of the things he talks about is a keystone habit. You change just the one thing and other things start to fall in place.
Or if, like me, you’re fascinated by the emerging field of Behavioural Economics, look no further than Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. In his entire explanation of choice architecture the one thing that stood out to me was that humans don’t handle too many choices very well. So take your one pick and stick by it.
The only other bit of effective change I made at the beginning of my journey was to start measuring my weight every day. To quote Peter Drucker, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. Now there is a lot of literature out there about the benefits or disadvantages of weighing yourself every day. If you already have anxiety about your weight, perhaps it may not be the best yardstick for you. Your call. You could take body measurements instead or simply let your clothes be your guide. If they fit more comfortably than before, it’s working.
While my experience has been to make the one big change in my diet, it may not work for you. You may be more of an activity oriented person who prefers exercise instead. Whatever be your choice, keep it simple. At the risk of sounding repetitive, pick one and do that consistently.
My one habit of logging in my calories led to multiple other lifestyle changes as time went by. I saw that there were cheat days where I ate more than my calorie limit for the day. So I brought out the treadmill back from hibernation (hurrah!). I started running on days following those on which I’d exceeded the count. My logic was that if I burned out the excess that I ate, I would average out by the end of the week/month that I was tracking (plenty of literature on this as well — whether we should form the reward/punish link in our brains. Your call). Slowly that became a daily habit, with or without exceeding the calorie count. I also don’t drink anything except water and hot beverages any more. They just fell by the wayside and aren’t a part of my lifestyle any more. I socialize plenty and an occasional beer/wine still brings joy, but I don’t miss it when not drinking. I have now been going to a gym regularly for 4 years. I enjoy doing a variety of things from yoga, to kick-boxing, to HIIT to some weight training. On good weather days, I run.
This is not one of those transformational stories about losing weight and becoming a different person. To put it in perspective, I only lost about 6–8 kilograms. I came down a couple of dress sizes. That in 5 years’ time is hardly inspirational. What I’m telling you is that it’s not a linear path. I’ve had plenty of holidays in these five years, where I gained back what I lost. I’ve had some injuries that stopped me from doing much physical activity for a while. I’ve had emotional setbacks where I did plenty of comfort eating. Eventually though, I kept coming back to it. And it’s been a very rewarding yet fun journey!
I’ll leave you with my two pearls of wisdom, consistency on the one goal you choose. The rest will simply fall in place on its own.