Losing weight after everything else fails

Let me start off by saying I’m no nutritionist or medic, nor have I consulted one. If you can, you should always seek help professional. Nevertheless, I figured out a few things to finally start seeing the numbers decrease in the scale.

I am 1.85m high, and by 2012 I weighed 95kg for the first time. That was a big scary number for me, although I never considered myself fat (just slightly overweight). I love eating, that means I hate diets. So let’s start with food:

The miracle of food multiplication

No, this doesn’t have anything to do with religion. This is about slicing your food, the thinner the better, so that the surface area of what you’re eating will be larger. This has numerous benefits: you will swallow smaller pieces, chew more, feel more full, and food (specially fruits and vegetables) will taste better.

The reverse self-service strategy

Have you ever noticed the huge plates that await you on self-service restaurants? They do it on purpose. If you aren’t eating at restaurants, use dessert plates. You can eat three plates of food (which will feel awesome) and still not eat as much as you would from a regular one.

The meat issue

I have no scientific facts to back this one up, it comes from my observation. It started when I decided to become a vegetarian — lasted five days, I tried again and it lasted one month. Two things happened: it had a bad impact on my weight (because of the pasta), and I started feeling full with less food (which is the exact opposite of what Google told me). I ended up replacing all red meat with other sources of protein (eggs, whey, and beans).

The sleep effect

Try this: skip dinner tonight and go to sleep hungry. You will wake up full, due to something called fasting state, and it is beautiful. Don’t starve, plan your meals to stop 5 or 6 hours before you go to bed, and get a decent amount of sleep.

Multitasking while exercising

Audio books have been around for a while, and there are tons of apps that offer large collections of them. Most audio books last between eight and eleven hours, so you can “read” one per week. The point here is to do it whilst exercising, in my case, running. There are even apps that tell you stories with sound effects, in which you are the main character escaping from some evil (zombies, robots, bounty hunters…).

Eating is not a habit

Smoking is, cooking is, watching Netflix alone on Friday nights is; not eating. It may seem strange but I used to eat when I was bored, and a lot of people do this. It brings instant satisfaction (even happiness), and breaking this habit is by far the hardest thing and most important in this list. The trick is to get your satisfaction from something else . I had a water phase, in which I was drinking about 7 liters of water per day. Now I’m on a Rubik’s cube phase, not sure what will come next.