On Wednesday I said I would mention in today’s blog how my recent efforts in a weight loss journey I’ve been on.
Yesterday was day 75 of a 75 day programme that I’ve largely being doing.
My weight had crept up over the last couple of years to about 100 kilos.
As of this morning it is 89.4kg.
And here’s a few take homes I’ve got from this experience.
1. Losing weight can be hard in some ways
I’m sure you know this.
It’s involves doing something different to what we’ve become used to.
I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve had to reduce my intake by to lose this weight.
But that brings me to my second point;
2. It’s very easy to be consuming a lot more than we realize
I’ve roughly halved my calorie intake for the last couple of months in order to drop this weight.
Now that’s to take me from being in a surplus to being in a fairly significant deficit.
But it’s made me realise just how much I was over consuming by before.
After a couple of weeks my hunger levels adapted and I’ve largely been absolutely fine on this reduced amount which is only a little bit less than I would need for maintenance.
I’d just got into a habit of consuming more than I needed.
3. In some ways big changes can be easier
Small, maintainable changes are obviously great.
And they’ll form a good part of any approach.
But they can be easy to misjudge and lose motivation on.
If we’re intending to reduce our intake by 10% then, unless we’re accurately tracking it all the time, it’s very easy for that actually to be no different or even a 10% increase.
That’s roughly what I did for the first couple of weeks and didn’t actually lose any weight.
But since then, as I mentioned above, I’ve roughly halved my intake on the vast majority of those days.
Even if I’m somewhat out on that, I’ll still be in a 30 or 40% reduction I’m sure.
And the weight coming off relatively quickly has been motivating and encouraged me to keep going.
If I was averaging half a pound a week it’d be very easy for this to kind of just peter out.
Averaging 2.5lbs a week has kept me engaged.
4. Progress is never linear
As a little test as part of this, I have weighed myself (pretty much) every morning first thing.
After going to the toilet before getting changed, for consistency.
I’ve just checked the stats and out of the 56 times I weighed myself;
– I had lost weight 32 times
– I had gained weight 22 times
– It was the same twice
It would be very tempting to have been put off by those 22 weight gains.
But the movement was clearly overall in the right direction.
I’m not suggesting that everyone weigh themselves every day but whatever approach we use (to whatever our goal) monitoring the overall direction and not getting discouraged by natural variations is key.
5. Chucking the baby out with the bath water is never a good idea
In theory I wasn’t supposed to drink any alcohol as part of this 75 days.
So I essentially hadn’t followed the programme about three weeks in when I went to a friend’s party and ended up drinking quite a lot (and again at week 6).
The thought processes of “failure”, regret, “writing it off” and ‘having to start again at some point’ were all there.
But it’s always powerful to remember that failure is just our performance versus a set of parameters that we have defined (often very loosely at best).
In the grand scheme of things, the total number of calories consumed at those parties didn’t have to have any impact whatsoever on my ability to hit my target weight in the remainder of that time frame.
What we have done five minutes, five days or five months ago has to have no more bearing on what we’re about to do then we choose it to.
There’s probably more, but I don’t like to make these blogs to be too long so that will do for now and I hope you found it useful.
Much love,
Jon ‘Pink ribbon scars that never forget’ Hall
P.S. I get it. I get it from 23 years of doing this professionally and from 45 years of being a normal (in most ways) human who gains and loses weight. Jump in on the risk free 4 week trial at www.myrise.co.uk/apply for proven help from someone (and a team) who ‘gets it’.
