You won't believe what I did to start losing weight. Hint: it's only one thing.
Around August 2015, I started to feel uncomfortable with my own weight. I've moved one year before to The Netherlands and was eating consistently more than before, mainly because my wife cooks amazingly.
For a time I blamed all the bread they eat here, but my case wouldn't hold much. Yes, Dutch people have a romantic relationship with their pieces of bread, and they could eat tons of that stuff, although you don't see many fat people in the streets. On the contrary, they're quite tall and slim. Which I blamed their romantic relationship with bikes.
But in truth, I was above 89 kilos and my Body Mass Index was over the recommended limit. Worst of all, I felt overweight for the first time in my life but still didn't feel like there was anything I was willing to do to fix it.
So, I did the easiest thing possible. I started measuring my weight every day.
And nothing more. Nothing else. No diet, no goals, no calories count. Nothing. Every morning, I'd take my cell phone with me, jump on the scale and note the little magic number on iHealth.
I did that for two months, until I got a nice graph, with value points for every day. And only from the data there, I could start taking control of my weight and my food habits.
I finally understood how much eating that third hamburger at my friend Roberto's house would cost in terms of weight gain.
I knew how much I weighed before going to sleep and the next morning.
I knew what difference would it make if I hate just a half-foot long Subway instead of a foot long.
I had the data, and the data was talking to me. I wasn't doing anything yet, at all, but only getting the information on the output of my decisions, was already empowering.
So, after the third month, I already started noticing a decline in weight. And still, I wasn't dieting at all. I noticed how I already started doing some unconscious decisions now that I could predict the outcome.
It wasn't until this moment that I started trying new stuff. As you can imagine, you can't A/B test weight loss or dietary habits, but I tried them anyway.
The first change was to stop drinking so much coffee during the mornings. I missed it for a couple of days, but then it was gone.
Next, trying to reduce the amount of food I took at lunch, I hacked it the brute-force way: just ate 3 apples in the morning, so I was full by lunch time. And guess what? It also worked. By this time, in late October, I was already 2 kilos down, at 87, by changing two little things.
Around this time I bought a Bluetooth scale (people in my home country would think of this as an eccentricity, but it works) so I was jumping on it, getting the number, and the scale would automatically upload it to my phone.
My wife, cook extraordinaire, started to pick up my attempt to lose weight and proposed Salad Mondays™. We would eat a magnificent salad, with all kind of stuff in it, as much as we wanted… but still a salad. Hey, no complaints there.
On November we moved to the house we bought here, and I started cycling to work more often, at minimum 2 days a week, 20km a day. I know, it's not much, but I could see the benefits immediately. By New Year, I was already averaging 86 kilos.
Comes January, my son is born, we take it home and start sleeping way less. To the exercise I'm doing with the bike, I add holding the baby in my arms for most of the day and sleeping less. No one tells you to have a baby to lose weight.
March… I better forget March. Going on vacations back to Buenos Aires never helps to any effort on losing weight. Too many pizzas, milanesas, asados, dulce de leche, etc. I was doing great, so I didn't bother much.
By late May, we switched Salad Mondays™ for Chicken Breast Mondays™ and we introduce Fish Wednesdays™. By this time, I'm again at January's level, meaning that I've beaten the vacations, averaging 85.5 kilos.
And I already started noticing how I was usually less hungry than before, which brings some tension to our marriage: my wife, incredible cook as she is, only knows how to cook for his always-starving-89-kilos husband.
There's nothing that brings more pressure to a relationship, than this conversation:
She: What do you want to dine today?
Me: I don't know really…
She: But are you hungry?
Me: …
So recipes and quantities need to change. I'm no longer eating three apples before lunch. Now I need to remember to take one during the morning, and sometimes I even forget that.
We're saluting July goodbye, tomorrow, and I'm now on a clear average of 83 kilos, with most of the days actually weighing less than that. That means that by now, I already lost six and a half kilos in a year, without actively doing any diet (I've never restricted myself consciously), and everything started when I took control of that little number.
That simple action gave me all the power back. Before that, gaining or losing weight was something that happened to me. Now I was in control, and I knew precisely what caused what.
Take control of situations. Stop playing the main acting role in your life and for a moment, take the Director's chair. Small things can create huge results over time. If knowing your weight every day helped starting on this path, I can't even imagine what you're going to be able to do if you:
- Write every day the things you've learned.
- The people you've met or helped.
- Your daily accomplishments.
- The places you want to visit.
- The people you miss.
And so on. Just imagine.
My plan now is to get up to a healthy BMI ratio, and that will happen around 81 kilos, which I plan to reach in a month and a half.
Only if I don't go on vacations first.
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