Why smaller portions was the best weight loss program for me. This might sound a little strange and go against the status quo, but I lost weight without doing any excessive exercise and I carried on eating exactly the same food I’ve always eaten. No silly fad diets, no exhausting exercise, no sacrifices on what […]
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The Not So Secret, Secrets to Weight Loss
I don’t understand the concept of Secrets to Weight Loss, suggests some sort of trick or magic pill to loose weight.
There are no secrets to weight loss, if you consume more energy than you use in a day AND that energy is converted to fat, you get fat.
Loosing weight isn’t rocket science.
The simple fact is to loose weight you have to consumes less energy than you use in a day so your body is forced to use it’s fat reserves.
It’s not a secret, it’s always worked this way and until a magic weight loss pill is developed it will always work this way.
There are basic physiological and psychological techniques to make reducing energy intake easier, for example;
We used smaller plates, since the plates are smaller when you add less food than you’d have on a normal size plate it looks like a lot of food: filling a small bowl to the top looks like you have a large meal. Could be half what you used to eat, but your brain sees a full plate/bowl (big meal).
We consumed a lot of full fat milk, we slowly (over months) watered the milk down. Started with about 10% of water and overtime increased to 50%: we now drink milk that’s 50% water and other than when drinking milk on it’s own we can’t tell the difference in cereals/tea/coffee.
We stopped buying treats we didn’t LOVE. Rather than buying different types of chocolate etc… that we’d eat, but aren’t our favorite we ONLY bought our favorite treats (chocolate with hazelnuts for us- that’s delicious). If it’s not your favorite treat, don’t eat it.
If you’ve put weight on with your current dietary habits that won’t reverse without changing those habits. Making large dramatic dietary changes is difficult: I used to eat snacks like doughnuts and used to dislike nuts and fish, now I love nuts and fish and not so keen on doughnuts (too much sugar). Over the course of about a year we slowly improved our diet: small changes so we barely noticed the difference, but over the course of months/years it makes a huge difference.
It took years to put the weight on, we were happy for it to take years to take it off.
We read the labels of processed foods, for example a ‘healthy’ high bran cereal with fruit I was buying had around 20% added sugar, that’s on top of the sugars from fruit etc…!!!! That’s not a healthy cereal!!! I slowly switched to a home made cereal mix. Started with an Alpen (Alpen is quite high sugar, but better than most cereals)/Wheatbix (low sugar) mix (which I liked a lot) and slowly added things like rolled oats (low sugar), shredded wheat (low sugar), sultanas (high natural sugar) and walnuts (protein and taste) and slowly reduced the higher sugar processed Alpen.
Marie used to eat processed cereals coated in chocolate etc… she’s now addicted to the above mix. It’s about small changes you barely notice, before you know it your diet has completely changed and you love it because it’s the new norm.
On exercise, exercise plays a minor roll in weight loss, if you can exercise like an Olympic athlete you’ll loose weight. I’m disabled and can’t exercise much (my only exercise is walking) yet lost several stone just making minor dietary changes overtime. If you are like most people the extra exercise you do to loose weight will be similar to eating one less slice of bread a day (if that). Easier to just eat one less slice of bread than kill yourself exercising. Then there’s the “I just did an hour Zumba, time for a treat” approach: that’s consuming more energy that will be converted to fat :-)
The funny thing is not one person reading this will make the sort of changes above, because the weight loss industry has convinced you there’s a secret to weight loss and you just have to follow the next celebrity endorsed diet or super food for a few weeks for instant results.
Good luck staying overweight because you are trapped in the mistaken belief there’s a secret to weight loss :-(
David Law
The Not So Secret, Secrets to Weight Loss