A few weight loss tips and Christmas cheer.
Its that festive time of year....! Happy Christmas to you all...!
Right, thats all my Christmas cheer done and dusted! :-)
As promised, in this post I will be telling you how I have lost the best part of 5 kg with very limited exercise. I have heard of many many diets, all of which I have never really paid any attention to. Most sound like they work for a while but then after a few weeks the novel idea gets lost and people go back to their old habits and put the weight back on, and sometimes gain a bit more for good measure.
I am sure a lot of you are keen to lose weight, weather for your health, to look good, fit into your latest bikini on holiday or as it is for me, to be able to climb a mountain faster by being lighter. I do believe you have to not only have a reason to lose weight, but also change the bad habits of the past.
I always have issues with when to weigh myself and weather the scales I use are accurate. I can only advise to use the same scales but not to weigh yourself all day every day, you do not like weight that fast, weekly is good. Just to give you a rough estimate, I was 68kg (morning weight) and 70kg (evening weight). Obviously morning weight you are a little (or a lot in my case) dehydrated, in the evening you are more than likely well hydrated and full of food. As you can see by the below picture I am now just below 62kg morning weight. Roughly 6kg lost. So how have I got here and how can you do the same. I will list below my tips on what I believe works and what probably does not. Some things may not work for everyone but hopefully there will be some useful ideas.
Get yourself an App for your phone to log your food.
I use the App “MyFitnessPal”, its the most commonly used by the looks of it. I have found it very useful. 95% of all foods you can barcode scan, then enter the weight of your food and you have all the nutrition, calories, fats etc etc. I find it fast and really useful to control my portions, the best example, porridge! Those who know me know I am an addict of porridge and would have a huge bowl full every morning (and sometimes in the afternoon too as a snack). Once I weighed my usual bowl I found I was eating between 500 and 600 calories each morning, add on brown sugar (30 calories), sultanas (80 calories) and milk (100 calories). So as soon as I woke I was piling in 700-800 calories, yes this is decent calories. porridge is an awesome breakfast but in a slightly smaller portion size.
Making a choice.
What I mean by this, I try to give myself a choice of what to eat. Instead of eating an easy bar of chocolate of packet of crisps, give yourself the choice of chocolate or fruit say... Fruit has sugar but way less of the saturated fats. So just before you have something bad for you (or high calories), just have a quick think “Shall I eat this or eat an apple?” If you are determined you will make the right choice.
Substitute foods.
Another good part of using the App, you will start to notice what foods are high in calories. So I found Rice and Pasta pretty high in calories, so I now either eat a smaller portion of these foods or eat something else. I have really got on well with Couscous, I tend to have plenty of good vegetables at meal time. Usually I boil these and end up with water from the Veg, as you only have to add water to Couscous I simply have that instead of the much high calorie foods like Pasta and Rice and use the usually wasted veg water to make the Couscous. Win win situation, more nutrition and less calories.
I have in the last days heard people simply drink the veg water. I had a little sip of last nights Carrot and Kale water and it was alright. Maybe you will not look that cool drinking it at the table if you are hosting a come dine with me style dinner party, but something to try on your own.
Eat low GI foods.
I am sure a lot of people reading this will know all the complicated science and be correcting me left right and centre, apologises in advance for my lack of 100% correct info.
From my knowledge, If you eat for example a white french baguette (which is very high GI (glycemic index)) your bodies blood sugar goes shooting up. Shortly after you finish eating your blood sugar will drop, and as it was super high with the baguette it then drops super low too. This (I think) means you get a sugar low, the by product of this is you feel hungry again. This is bad news clearly.
We are kind of going back to choices, make low GI choices when you eat. Your staples, Rice, Pasta and Bread in white are high GI but lower in brown. A high % of vegetables are low GI, from memory parsnips are high and some veg will be higher depending on how you cook them and in what.
Fruits are also generally pretty low GI, Dates are very high and also watermelon.
Legumes or beans are really good for GI, I am having a lot of lentils recently as they are low GI and a good load of protein.
Food which have a good chunk of protein will also lower the GI of a meal.
Helping lower the GI of my breakfast I have changed the sultanas/dates for prunes. The Prunes still have the sweetness but much much lower GI.
Soups
I have found a soup at lunch is great for lowering my daily calorie count for the day. I often make a big veg soup with all my left overs. With soup being mostly water too it will fill you up nicely and keep you feeling full for a good few hours.
I will leave it there for now as it seems Christmas dinner is coming fast and I need to drive there!.... I will continue with this subject in the next day or two.
(Christmas lunch tips I will be soon using, less roast potatoes and roast veg in general, more boiled veg, turkey is low fat, lean and good protein so i will fill on that. I will also go light on gravy, and I am afraid to say it no dessert)....!
Enjoy your day..!
