Diets are rubbish and an absolute waste of your time. If you wanna lose weight and keep it off, you gotta ditch the diet!
Essentially dieting is a battle of willpower. Eliminate this, avoid that, whatever you do, do not even look at those… I’m pretty confident when I say that you and I both have a finite amount of willpower. What I mean is, depriving yourself of the things you love can only last so long. Eventually we all buckle, and more often-than-not the flood gates open and the diet is over.
Numerous studies, like this one and this one, have found that most people who lose weight by dieting, gain all the weight back and then some. So if dieting is a waste of time, what’s the answer?
It starts with changing your mindset. Yeah yeah, I know I sound like ya mum. But it can’t be a battle between you and your stomach, that’s a battle of willpower that you will lose. Your diet (what you choose to eat, not what some book tells you to eat) has to be part of your daily lifestyle. To be successful, it’s just gotta be part of who you are. Short term changes will get short term results, if you want to lose weight and keep it off, ya gotta make permanent changes.
That’s great, but how do I make permanent changes? Well, if you’re anything like me you’re gonna need to start with a little education. When I first started trying to lose weight, I had no idea how much I was eating, and I knew very little about the food itself. Sure I knew cake was bad and vegetables were good, but that’s about as far as it went. So get to know what you’re eating, I reckon the easiest way to do this is by using an app like MyFitnessPal. Once you have a better understanding of what you’re eating, start to think about what you can cut back on. Notice I said cut back. I’m not an advocate for giving up the things you love. Just recognise that some of the things you love are at least partly responsible for your current need/want to lose weight. The best example I can give you is my own self, I’ve lost 60kg and the only thing I’ve almost completely given up is milk & sugar in my coffee.
Permanent changes take time. There’s no quick solution here. Essentially what you’re doing is slowly but surely forming new habits. So, my bestest piece of advice is: Make 1 small change every 1-2 weeks. This isn’t a diet, it’s the new you, it’s just what you do now. Change out ‘chups and dup‘ for hummus and rice crackers, try dried pineapple pieces instead of that small bag of lollies for afternoon tea. Try taking your lunch to work, that made a HUGE difference for me.
Here’s an example: I started by taking just 1 sugar out of every coffee I consumed in a day. Just 1 sugar can result in a 10kg weight loss (based on the amount of coffee I drink) in a year. Crazy but true! I just did the math.
Don’t hate what you eat. Eat what you want, just recognise the things you need to moderate. If you’ve taken the time to learn a bit more about food, you’ll know what’s good for you and what’s not. Use your new food knowledge to experiment with what you cook and the snacks you choose to eat. Find new, healthier things that you love and use those to replace some of the things you know you should be eating less of. Slowly but surely, get to a place where you’re eating healthy because that’s just the way you live. Don’t eat things because a book told you to, or because it’s the latest diet fad.
-Shane
Photo source: LollyKnit: Preparing Vegetable Stock, Sarah Macmillan: Piece of Cake
