Facebook tells me it’s a year to the day tomorrow since I started to make a lifestyle change. I was just over 17 stone, which is a BMI of 43 on my 5 foot 2 inch frame, and I’d been slowly putting weight on over the last 10 years since running away screaming from calorie counting as too hard - no more than a pound a quarter, but it was relentless. More importantly, my cardiovascular health was terrible. I was basically sedentary, and any exercise at all left me out of breath. I was already heading towards trying to make a change, but a holiday in Croatia was also the kicker - I couldn’t go up bell towers to see the views and walking anywhere hurt. My joints ached most of the time, I was starting to feel actively disabled because of my weight and my lack of cardio fitness, and enough was enough.
One year on, and I’m 57 pounds down (just over 4 stone) - still overweight, in fact technically obese, but I’ve lost the equivalent of more than a fully loaded item of airline hold luggage - the weight of which really struck me when I was lugging one around on my recent trip to Canada. More importantly, I’m now a person who can comfortably run for an hour or more on the elliptical cross-trainer, and my VO2 Max is well within the healthy range for a person my age and heading towards the athlete section of the charts. My joints no longer hurt, and I can now tackle things that I would have simply not attempted before as they would have been impossible. For example, we went for a four hour hike through rough terrain when we were in the Algonquin Provincial Park, which was tiring but doable, and I thought nothing of racking up 30,000 steps one day when visiting Toronto.
It’s been quite a ride to get here. I really dove into the research and learned a lot about how to eat in a way that satisfied me and still got me towards my goals, and exercise in a way I can, if not actively enjoy, tolerate and work into my day to day life. I’ve listed out the main things I think have helped as much for myself as anything. This is very much a work in progress and probably a journey I’ll be on for the rest of my life, so I’m trying to work out a permanent lifestyle that suits me, not a once and done “diet”.
I got my shit together - a lot of my work has been to understand why I got fat and unfit in the first place, and a lot in the past has been to do with low grade depression and eating and drinking my feelings, with a side order of too little physical activity, an ex husband that ate like a toddler, and putting half of the food on my plate not a third of the food when dishing up. Wising up to the fact that I clearly suffer from SAD has helped. A daily dose of reasonably high concentration (5000 UI) D3 has been an utter game changer, and without that I probably couldn’t have even started to try to fix other things.
I am kind to myself- so many of my weight loss attempts in the past have come from a mindset of self-hatred and punishing. I grew up with a mother who clearly has undiagnosed orthorexia, my food culture was fucked up, and I’d internalised a lot of fat hatred. Weight loss attempts in the past were faddy, clearly dysfunctional starvation diets leading to reactive bingeing. A lot of work has gone into believing I’m worth taking care of, even down to simple little things such as making sure I take my vitamins every day. If I don’t achieve my goals one day, I don’t punish myself, I just get back on the horse. I think it’s also been helpful that I’ve been framing this far more in terms of cardio health and overall wellness - the number on the scales has not been the be all and end all at all.
I calorie count and track everything - when I started I made a commitment that I would track everything for one year, both the days I’m on track and the days I am very much not. This has been invaluable in understanding what’s going on when I go off the rails, and also in limiting the negative thoughts when it happens, because I can see rationally I haven’t done that much damage at all to my progress, even in my worst moments. It’s also essential for me because I’m so tiny. My caloric requirements as a sedentary apart from planned exercise 5 foot 2 45 year old woman really aren’t that high, and something as small and simple as a tablespoon of peanut butter can really put a spanner in the works! With the individual TDEE calculators that float around Reddit it’s also made it clear to me that I run cold and my actual requirements are a couple of hundred calories less a day than estimates would give. This is probably partly due to my PCOS and partly because my NEAT (non exercise activity such as fidgeting) is really low. It’s as annoying as hell and part of my journey this year has been learning to accept this. I might get frustrated when I see somebody talk about losing 100 pounds in 3 months because keto, but my journey is my journey, and a pound a week is more than acceptable for a tiny person who takes regular diet breaks. Comparison is the theft of joy, as they say, and I’ve had to learn that. Calorie tracking has also come on in leaps and bounds in the last 10 years in terms of simplicity and usability. I use the MyFitnessPal app and website, but I’ve also heard good things about Loseit and Cronometer.
I intermittent fast - I don’t like breakfast, never have done, and given my limited calorie budget I vastly prefer two slightly more luxurious meals a day versus three pathetic stingy ones. I exercise in the mornings in a fasted state, and generally find I don’t get hungry until about 2 p.m. I then eat my second meal between 6 and 7 p.m. and then stop eating. This seems to suit me very well and I don’t get very hungry. I’m more relaxed in terms of hours at weekends when my husband is home (he works away in the week).
I eat a lot of protein and limit refined carbs - there’s a reasonable body of evidence that lowish carb diets are good for PCOS and at a personal level I find refined carbs make me really hungry and crave more. I’m better off staying away altogether. I eat the odd baked potato as a treat. Most of my calories are from protein and veggies. If I’m eating out and want a dessert I will have a dessert, however! Sugary things are a rare treat though, as is bread.
I cook a lot from scratch - I think this is really helpful as I can prepare meals that go in the freezer to my requirements.
From Monday - Thursday my lunch is often a portion of chili, curry, or perhaps a bolognese on veggie noodles. I eat a lot of skyr on top of things for extra protein. Dinner is usually fish or chicken with a veggie. I use a lot of things like capers and herb vinegars for acidity and flavour. I’m super stingy with oil and butter, not because I’m scared of it, but because I can’t fit it in calorie wise. I’m a volume eater so I tend to shoehorn a lot of mushrooms and courgettes into my recipes. I also repeat meals a lot, particularly dinner, so they are logged in MyFitnessPal and logging is a single click. My Instant Pot is a godsend for meal prep.
Friday - Sunday I am more relaxed and my meals will include a roast dinner on Saturday and a cooked breakfast on Sunday - just portion controlled and I try not to generate leftovers. I’m fussy about quality over quantity for most things - one amazing sausage and one slice of bacon for a cooked brekkie beats larger amounts of poor quality products any day. I’d much rather make a burger than go to McDonald’s. I eat poussin because it’s delicious rather than skinless chicken breast. Nothing that I dislike or feel is a chore to eat goes in my mouth.
I also plan my meals on a weekly basis just before I do my shop, and I shop online, which has helped with finding good products as I can figure it out at my leisure, not grudgingly in the store, and it’s saved for next time!
I exercise every day if possible - right now I run on the elliptical and use that as my time to watch TV - in fact it is rare that I watch TV when not exercising these days. A show is usually 50-60 minutes which is perfect. Before I built up to that I did more yoga (Yoga with Adriene on YouTube is amazing) and I also signed up to Nerd Fitness to get access to their excellent bodyweight workouts. I’ll probably move more to those once I get to maintenance to tone up. Exercise obviously fits my cardio health goals, it’s a great mood enhancer, and it really helps change my caloric budget from miserable to doable. The joys of being a tiny human :)
I got a fitness tracker - my Fitbit has been invaluable to me. My caloric burn is radically different between sedentary days where it can be as little as 1600, to a busy day with exercise, which looks more like 2500, and understanding that has been really helpful.
I track my weight and my TDEE - partly because I just like spreadsheets and pretty graphs! I weigh daily and use a weight smoothing app (Happy Scale) to iron out the day to day fluctuations - I also track against my menstrual cycle to try and eliminate the fluctuations from water retention. This has really helped me trust the process. I also take photos and measurements on a monthly basis.
I use cyclical dieting and take regular maintenance breaks - there’s some evidence that this is helpful in reducing adaptive thermogenesis. Plus I’ve found it really helpful for keeping my sanity - there’s no way I could just plug away on 1,200 a day as some people do. What this means in practical terms is I eat closer to maintenance on Fridays and Saturdays and lighter in the week, and I’ve taken regular breaks of a couple of weeks or so - often to coincide with holidays. I also track my caloric deficit on a weekly basis rather than worrying too much about the daily numbers.
So there you have it.
A few people / sites I’ve found helpful along the way:
Lyall McDonald / bodyrecomposition.com - Lyall trains bodybuilders / fitness competitors and has lots of interesting things to say about fat loss, in particular female fat loss. He introduced me to the concept of the diet break, and he’s careful to show his research.
Aadam Ali / physiqonomics.com - Aadam is a mouthy no bullshit Londoner who talks a great deal of sense - I enjoy his writing style a lot. He has a mailing list you can sign up for. He shills (not unfairly) for his coaching business but it’s not obnoxious.
Reddit - mainly r/loseit for support and /r1200isplenty and r/1500isplenty for recipes and food ideas, but also, r/fatlogic, which I thought would be a hate sub when I first encountered it, but there are some incredibly supportive people, particularly within the daily threads (with the caveat that don’t go anywhere near it if you have eating disorder-y tendencies - it’s not that the subreddit promotes it, it doesn’t and actually the mods stomp hard on that stuff, but you do have some disorder-y people floating about there at times). It is also a fantastic place to rant :D
There you go. I hope that is of use to someone. I've gotten so much valuable information from this sub it seemed like time to give back :)
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