In my last post, Waking Up to Weight Gain, I talked about my “alarm clock” moment. That’s when I finally realized it was time to control of my weight instead of letting it control me. Now, it was time to figure out how to do that.
This is the fourth post in my Losing 100 Pounds series, and it discusses the third of the five phases I went through. As a quick recap, here are the 5 phases I’ve identified:
- Gain the weight.
- Understand the impacts.
- Get on the path to weight loss.
- Learn what works in losing weight.
- Find a new way of living.
Before I go any further, I should give you a warning. Many of the methods I used may fly in the face of some popular thinking about diets and weight loss. However, I don’t think I ever did anything that might be considered particularly extreme or weird.
I’m not here to sell you a magic milkshake or “fool-proof” diet plan. If you want something like that, you’ll need to look somewhere else. I’m sure you can find lots of places to take your money.
Instead of looking for a miracle answer, I just used my own common sense, feeling my way along one step at a time. At first, I didn’t even follow a specific diet plan. I didn’t think I would be able to stick to a plan in which someone told me exactly what to eat. Besides, I had enough bad habits that changing some of those would have a big impact.
To start my weight loss journey, I made three changes. Each was fairly simple to understand and remember. And because they were simple, cheating was pretty obvious. My new determination, and my fear for my health, made it easy to stick with them. Here are my first three changes:
- walking
- changing drinks
- logging my food and exercise
Walking is an easy exercise for most people to start with. All I had to do was get a pair of walking shoes and head out the door.
At first, I could barely walk a quarter-mile. At that time, I worked in downtown Washington, DC. It seemed like everyone, including both young and old tourists, passed me. But I kept remembering what my nurse practitioner had told me about diabetes and stroke, and I kept going. I walked during lunch at work, and I walked up and down my street at home on the weekends. I kept increasing the time, distance, and speed. After a few weeks, I was able to walk a whole mile without stopping. I remember how thrilled how I was.
Changing drinks had a big impact on my calorie counts. It meant changing ingrained habits, but it wasn’t really all that difficult once I thought about it. I don’t like coffee, but I did like some caffeine in the morning. So, every morning when I got to work, I drank a full can of Coke–usually Cherry Coke. Of course, I’d then have some at lunch or other times during the day as well. I didn’t drink as much Coke as some people I knew, so I figured I was fine–but I wasn’t. That habit cost me hundreds of extra calories each day. I switched from soft drinks to water and tea. Surprisingly, that soft drink habit was easier to break than I thought. Soon I didn’t miss it at all. After being off Coke for a couple of months, I tried one again as a test. I couldn’t believe how awful it tasted to me.
Logging my food and exercise helped to cement the other two changes. I made up a chart with blocks on it for each day of the week. I had blocks for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and exercise. I started writing down everything I ate or drank and all my walking. At first, I just wrote it down. Later, I started adding in calorie information, but I didn’t do that until I was more comfortable with the idea. Remember, one step at a time. Just knowing that I had to write it down made me much more mindful of what I was eating. I found it naturally much easier to avoid chomping on a cookie or munching on potato chips, because it made me stop and think first. Writing down my exercise also encouraged me to do more of that. I could see the progress I was making.
Many people find writing down food and exercise like this really difficult. However, it helped me so much that I kept it up. It was and still is a huge contributor to my effectiveness at weight loss. I kept it very simple. For a long time, I just used pencil and paper because it’s very portable. You can write down things immediately and not have to rely on memory.
You can also use computer programs and online services for tracking your food,. They can provide more information but can also be more difficult to use. I use one of those now, but I just carried around a piece of paper for a long time. I tracked food (and eventually calories), but I didn’t worry about things such as grams of carbohydrates or the ratios of protein, carbs, and fats.
Over time, I added a lot of other techniques and learned a lot of other things. But these three are what really got me started on the path back to good health. Once I got them down, I never looked back. Having that “alarm clock” moment that made my problem become all too real to me is what gave me the courage to do something. Starting with some relatively simple steps made it easier for me to find that something to do.
Does any of this make sense to you? What simple steps can you think of to take? Let us know in the comments.
Robyn
photo credit: prakhar
Articles in the Series:
Losing 100 Pounds – The 5 Phases
Losing 100 Pounds – Gain It First
Losing 100 Pounds – Waking Up to Weight Gain
Losing 100 Pounds – On the Path to Weight Loss
Losing 100 Pounds – Learning What Works
Losing 100 Pounds – Finding a New Way of Living