It is time: the eating must change...

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is time.

I'm going to ramble a bit here - this is going to be a bit of a critique of myself - trying to be impartial but reasonable - I'm putting it up here so I can get some feedback. I'm also putting it out here as the idea that other people will see my rambling makes me formalise it better than me simply making a list to myself - it is a way to convince myself rather than other people, and who knows - it might even help somebody in a similar situation to me.

It is time that I lost some weight. I have let myself slide - I was good for a bit during the summer, and then some **** went down, and I learned lots of bad habits - junk food abound, and not being offset from exercise - and now, I have a paunch - yes I'm looking at you, belly!)

I was lucky when I was younger - I could eat pretty much whatever I wanted, and my metabolism was high enough that I didn't put on much weight, if any. I never really learned to eat healthily - I just ate... whatever, really.

Now I simply don't have that luxury - I was good for a while, as I mentioned, and then one of my friends died, another friend had a nervous breakdown (and I moved in with them for a few months), another friend took seriously ill, and then I broke up with my GF (wow - now that I've listed that out, that's quite a run of bad luck! Ha! Glad I'm not a pessimist ).

Things have calmed down a bit now at least - but the bad habits remain: lets analyse them for a moment...

• "I can't be bothered cooking" - auch jeez, really? - takeaway ordered - 3000 calories, easily.
• "I feel bad so I'll have something greasy and fatty" - takeaway ordered - 3000 calories, easily.
• "I feel bad and I need some basic groceries so I'll get some chocolate when I'm out" - junk food purchased - 500 calories.
• "I can't be bothered preparing sandwiches in advance" - 2x bacon and potato scone rolls ordered at work - 500 calories, maybe more...
• "I'm hungry!" - GIANT portion of food because eating is fun - 2x the portion size that's actually needed - 500-1000 calories extra

Well - right away, we can see some things that can easily be reduced, or maybe even eliminated. Just as Rome wasn't built in a day, studies (which studies? I can't remember - I'll look them out again if anybody is interested - they were all on pubmed) have indicated that abruptly trying to change a person's lifestyle... does not work. You can't just force a change to happen - if you do, it may work for a bit, but then the majority of time, patients relapse. Sure, it may work in some people - but not the majority. Thanks to survivorship bias, if you only listen to the people it worked for (anecdotal evidence) you won't get the bigger picture. I am a scientist (nice appeal to authority there ) and I'm trained at assessing data - and the data suggests that small, consistent changes are the most effective - we're trying to alter a lifestyle for the better - not turn it on it's head and ram vegetables down it.




Let's break our earlier list down: we can summarise that list as: "Psychology" - which isn't actually that helpful, so we'll break it down a little again.

• Association - feeling bad? Clearly a takeaway is the answer!
• Laziness - can't bothered cooking? Takeaway. Can't be bothered making sandwiches for work? BACON!
• Portion control - want food? Well more food is better, obviously!

We'll tackle these one at a time:

• Ease - let's make takeaways harder to get - goodbye Just-Eat.co.uk! We'll close the account, and place a block on the router so I just can't get onto it. Now if I want junk food, I'll need to go out and get it.
• Association - well, this one is a little difficult to attack - how do you break a mental association? Well, it turns out that it's hard - low mood happens - bad day at work? Soaked on the way home? Sheesh - how can we make ourselves feel better without eating crap? Let's associate it with something else! Um... okay... let's focus on a pastime instead of eating - there's no reason we can't enjoy food - but lets not use it as a panacea (because it's not!). I have an electronics lab in my house - let's build something after a bad day - a creative outlet. Alternatively, we could do something else we enjoy - in my case, it'd need to be something involved like playing a game or creating something or just working on something like DIY - passive entertainment where you sit and do nothing while watching something (like, watching TV or sitting and listening to music) just doesn't cut it for me - I must be doing something while I entertain myself - but that's just me!
• Laziness (dinner) - which ties into the "ease" problem: we've made it harder to get food by blocking just-eat, now let's make it easy to get healthy food. Well, to start with, just food that's not terribly unhealthy. Premade and batch meals that are frozen would be a good idea (like a big pot of soup - at least ten portions in there. Curry, again, four or five portions - eat one and freeze the excess. Sorted. Make it in advance, maybe once a month, and stock up. We can also have some processed food in there - chips, a few breaded chicken breasts, that sort of thing - but that musn't be the mainstay of the food - just something for when time is short and I cannot be bothered doing anything else - we'll ensure this by only allowing for maybe 4-8 portions a month (1-2 times a week).
• Laziness (lunch/breakfast) - as I mentioned, I'm terrible for going into work and saying "hmmm! Bacon and potato scone roll please! Two of 'em! Ooh, yeah, that's the stuff" - let's cut that out. How? Well, we'll make sandwhiches in advance and freeze them! I know what you're thinking - "Ew" - well there are many sandwhich-materials that can readily be frozen - my favourites are peanutbutter and jam, and ham - to avoid making them super-soggy, freeze the bread first - and then make the sandwhich out of the frozen bread - this way the bread remains frozen. On the day, take it out of the freezer and it's defrosted by the time you're at work. I know this because I've done it before, but fell out the habit.
• Portion control - this, I know, is a big problem for a lot of people. We eat too much even when we don't eat often. "Dinner plates" from a few centuries back are what we'd call "side plates" nowadays. Yeah. Seriously. We have too much food! So - to start with - let's dial back the portion size, while making it look bigger - muahahha! Psychology to the rescue! Studies (again I can't remember which ones, but I'll look them out if anybody wishes - all on pubmed and the BJM) suggest that something very simple - like cutting things up into smaller pieces - increases satiety. Likewise, making them into a soup/broth/hotpot does the same. Decreasing the size of the plate (less empty space visible) shows some promise too. So - let's use side plates instead of dinner plates, and use half-sized baking trays when cooking to avoid accidentally making too much (except when we want to deliberately make too much in order to make extra portions and freeze them.

But how can we track progress? Well, simple - we'll log all our food! By logging we become aware of just how much crap is being consumed - I've done it before with relative success - and I'll do it again. Track everything. Consistency is key!


Penultimately, we come across the biggest factor in weight loss - exercise. If you exercise enough, you can in principle eat as much as you want and not gain any weight. In practice, this is hard, unless you're an athlete and regularly exercise for 8 hours a day... but most people dont. I walk 25 miles a week - roughly 2.5 miles, twice a day - which isn't bad. It accounts for around 400 calories according to various calculators - and usually takes me 40 minutes to complete - but not everybody has this luxury of being able to walk to work; so I can't really advise on this matter for others - there are lots of little tricks you can use (taking stairs instead of the elevator/escalator, getting off the bus a stop or two early, cycling instead of driving, etc) to exercise without really trying - and if you want to explicitly dedicate part of your day to exercise, then the gym or swimming pool, going for a run/job, etc is probably right up your alley (and you probably already knew this!). I will probably not be explicitly exercising - as in going out of my way to do it - but with my 5-miles of walking per day I might be able to get away with it.

And finally - we have the crux of the entire endeavour - motivation. I am going to walk the west highland way next year - 108 miles (in five days) - I've done it before - but I weighed less then; my goal is to lose 10-15kg by mid June next year - which works out to 38 weeks - roughly 0.4-0.5kg a week - which is readily accomplishable - IF - and ONLY if I make some serious lifestyle changes - starting with dumping that habit of eating takeaways

So what are your opinions of this? Any suggestions or hints? Does anybody else have this problem? How did you tackle it?