The 5 small changes that helped me lose weight - and keep it off!
And there was no restrictive dieting involved...
For years I thought the only way to lose weight was to hammer the gym daily and eat a diet of salads and black coffee. And so, for many years, that’s the groove I’d crave to find myself in, where I’d muster the focus and resolve to fit the gym into my day no matter how busy I was and consume as abstemiously as possible.
Annoyingly, it worked. So, when I eventually ran out of steam, the weight would pile back on and this led to a cycle of losing and gaining the same 50 lbs until I decided enough was enough and it was time to try a different strategy.
The behaviour changes I will outline below were instrumental in helping me maintain the 50 lb weight loss I’d always hoped for, but they taught me principles I’ve been able to apply in all areas of my life. So, whether professional, personal or any number of things, leaning on these five behaviours has been life-changing.
1. Stop rushing your results.
Sounds odd when the whole point of the exercise is to see results but, as the old saying goes, ‘A watched pot never boils’ and if you’re constantly looking in the distance for your destination, you’re not going to enjoy the journey.
While it might be that you want to lose weight as quickly as possible, focusing on the speed over the method is a fool’s errand. Taking note along the way to what works, how you feel, what creates the biggest change etc is all data you can gather and use in the future, but only if you’re paying attention.
I’ll give you an example of something that worked for me that was so simple but made a huge difference: intermittent fasting.
I roughly follow a protocol of 16 hours of fasting with an eight-hour eating window, mainly because I realised that my eating habits previously had been to graze constantly. I never gave my digestive system a rest and as well as weight gain I was also bothered by various symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. As soon as I decided to add a fasting window into my day all of my IBS symptoms disappeared, I felt more energetic and it helped limit not only when but also how much I ate.
It made me realise that I’d spent years waking up hungry but also full from the day before and by spotting that and making a change to when I ate, not what I ate, I implemented a change with a huge long-term benefit.