I have a new pet peeve. It’s whenever a character in a story worries about or comments on something they just ate or are about to. A couple of years ago I probably wouldn't even haven noticed it, I have diet-quotes in my head from shows I watched growing up, not because I specifically honed in on them or internalized the message, but just because for some reason or another they decided to stick. It's just so normalized, and most of us probably don't even know better to even question it at this point. I sure didn't. Now there's plenty of reasons to take issue with diet culture in stories, all of them valid, though that isn't specifically my personal trigger point. Sure, I can definitely do without disordered eating storylines, and I would honestly be thrilled if I never again saw overweight people reduced to mere caricatures in stories. Seriously, people are far more than their body size and those caricatures are just lazy writing.
Those annoyances are nothing new though. No, my new pet peeve is when it's someone with an expected healthy-ish relationship with food, especially if they have a very active lifestyle on top of it. Because it's typically nothing outrageous, usually a simple dessert; a slice of cake, or a pastry of some kind – maybe two if they're especially «daring» – and they then act as though it's going to require this massive action to «make up for it». And it breaks my immersion, because it's not even true.
Now, before I get into any of this, I just want to put up the disclaimer that I am no dietitian, I have zero professional expertise of things like nutrition or fitness whatsoever. My experience is personal and should be taken as anecdotal. My weight issues were present in my pre-teen and teen years, though not massively so, it was more as I entered my student years that things really snowballed out of control. Having said that I have been on a diet exactly twice in my lifetime. One lasting a year and a half, where I eventually self-sabotaged and undid all my progress (and worse). The other has been going strong for two plus years and is essentially still in effect. I should probably call it lifestyle change instead considering the length of time and my intention to keep it going (with modification of course), as I’m sure most of us associate the word «diet» with the timeline of weeks or months rather than years. Also I never followed any specifically named diet, nor had any kind of programme set up for me to follow. I did my own thing (a bit blindly with my first venture) and it yielded enough results for me to be happy.
I’m not going to go too much into the specifics of my first «diet» attempt, the lessons it taught me can mainly be boiled down to a couple of things. The most important lesson was that I learned that I was indeed capable of losing the weight if I tried. I will never take that for granted as I know there are many who are battling medical or genetic conditions that make this really hard, if not downright impossible. Another thing I learned was that I did not have the right motivation, and I definitely did not have realistic expectations. If your skin has been stretched out for years on end, it’s not going to magically shrink back, it’s going to act more like a deflated balloon and I naively didn’t expect that. Another lesson I learned was that if there are other issues you have with yourself, losing weight is not going to make it all better. And in the end, lasting change is only possible if the method you achieve it with is something you can live with long-term. I had blindly made a lot of arbitrary changes to my diet that albeit effective were not things I could happily live with in perpetuity, and that was probably the biggest reason why I ultimately «fell off the wagon» and gained it all back and then some.
Fast forward to Christmas of 2020, roughly a decade later. I could crack a joke about being older and wiser, and while that would be true in some ways, it definitely did not apply to me health wise. My eating habits were terrible, and while I probably got more good nutrients in me than during my student days, that’s about the only good thing I could say about my eating habits at the time. I would eat candy with most meals, going for snacks in between meals, I would stuff myself to the degree that I nearly felt sick afterwards. Being overstuffed just felt «normal» to me. It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. I had learned to love and accept myself in the meantime. Sure, I didn’t exactly love seeing myself on video or in pictures, but I had no real issues with my reflection. I saw myself as a whole rather than honing in on the individual flaws, and found that I was «not bad». I had also concluded that I had tried the diet thing and failed, and I knew the pitfalls of yo-yo dieting and that wasn’t going to be me. I had also erroneously convinced myself that I had «plateaued» where my body wanted to be.
It was a moment of curiousity that became the catalyst for me. I did not own a scale myself at the time, so the only times I checked my weight was if it was medically necessary to give an accurate number, which hadn’t been the case for a few years at that point. My mom had just successfully lost a lot of weight and her mood and energy level just got me curious about my own situation, so one morning I stepped onto the scale and the number shocked me (the number itself isn’t important, but I was not only obese, we’re talking the second category of obesity). I had not realized just how bad I had let things get, and the main thought in my head was that if I didn’t do something about this now, I could very easily find myself with one or more lifestyle diseases in the probable near future, and that scared the living daylights out of me.
Although I was definitely motivated to make a change, my past diet attempt made me sit down and consider things practically. I knew I was capable of losing weight, it was keeping the lost weight off that was the main challenge. I needed to figure out a liveable long-term plan, so I asked my mom to tell me about what she was doing. It was far from the first time I had seen her on a diet, in her own words she has tried nearly every diet out there (she stayed clear away from things involving powders though) over the decades. I cannot say seeing her dieting growing up really affected me, because it was always just something she did on her own. Regardless of what she ate, the rest of us ate the things we normally ate. But seeing her so energetic, so bubbly (she’s always been a positive person, but here she was downright bubbly), it just got me thinking that whatever she was doing was worth at least considering.
To use her own words, she was tired of always failing after a diet, because they always consisted of swapping out the foods she normally ate with other «better» foods, and ultimately she would grow tired of it and long for the food she liked eating. So she started looking at the kinds of food she enjoyed and started looking up their calorie content, looked up what was the recommended intake for her age, activity level and desired weight loss, and started working around that number. Now, mom is very meticulous when she does something, so she would weigh up the different items in dinners so she could calculate the exact values to write down. Being very realistic, I knew there was no way I could do things exactly her way, I’m just too lazy to put in this much extra work around every single meal. So I needed to streamline the process for myself if I was to have any chance.
I decided the best approach for me would be to operate on averages. Luckily for me, this is pretty easily done as I mostly only have to cook for myself, so I can easily split dinners into roughly even portions and average the values. With bread toppings, I figured out the average numbers for the individual things and over time devised a list of all my typical meals, snacks, etc. making the process of tracking the calories super quick and easy, as it would take me just a couple of minutes a day to look up the combo values. I also figured it would be worthwhile to keep an eye on the averages rather than the day to day, so my nerdy self decided to do the tracking in a digital spreadsheet, and that taught me my first important lesson.
1) One bad day does not affect things as much as you think it does.
Sure, when you’re at the beginning of the month, the average number will be all over the place as you track the values of what you eat (and if I’m home I track as I go rather than summing up the day at the end), but get to the middle of the month and onwards, you will find that the number more or less «settles», at least if you are mostly following some kind of a routine. This goes regardless of whether you have a good or bad routine going. If you routinely snack on chips, candy, cakes or cookies throughout the month, but you do one or two days where you eat really healthily and low calorie, that average number is barely going to move down at all. Sure, any effort is still better than zero effort – but any measurable result is going to depend on your everyday habits rather than the efforts of single days.
It's the same the other way around. If you routinely stick to your desired caloric average, but have one or two proper pigging out days that month, the number is barely going to move up. You’re going to have to consume an impressive amount those two days to actually do damage, and you’ll find over time that you become less and less capable of consuming the same amounts of «junk» that you used to, so your body (as it gets used to the new portion sizes) will naturally help you limit the damage you’re capable of inflicting on yourself. At least that has been my experience.
2) Diet doesn’t have to mean depriving yourself of everything you enjoy.
Sure, that first month and a half, I more or less went cold turkey with things like candy and snacks. But I knew it was not something I could keep up long-term, I needed to figure out portions that felt enough to be a treat, but not so big that they would tilt the average. I’m not really good at doing the whole once a week limitation, so instead my best bet was to figure out small amounts that could be enjoyed any day. I found individually wrapped chocolates, ice cream bars and things like that worked best for me. I had readily made portions with known values and the knowledge that one would be enough to sate me. And I found that sticking to my very favourites, going quality over quantity actually worked out best for me financially as well, as the volume I ate was so much lower. I obviously don’t eat candy or ice cream every single day, but I will say that over the past two years I probably have more days where I’ve had some kind of candy or ice cream than not (I’ve just worked it into the calculations), and I have had what is considered normal BMI for nearly six months (I do not consider BMI to be the epitome of health, more a helpful indicator if things are too off course, like my starting point of second degree of obesity).
In fact something that really helped keep me on track was not treating any kind of food as «forbidden». If I wanted it, I had it, I just had to keep the values in mind and portion accordingly, or I had to accept that day as a «high calorie day». I never berated myself or punished myself for going overboard. I knew it was my habits that truly mattered, not what I did on one random day.
3) Time is on your side
It disgusts me how much scammy advertising preys on desperate people wanting to change their circumstances, and diet advertising is especially notorious. I don't know how many extreme before and after pictures there are promising massive changes after as little as 30 days. I’m not going to weigh in on what is and what isn’t physically possible as I’m no expert, but it just doesn’t seem feasible to do such extreme changes over short amounts of time (at least not healthily).
I think a key element when you take on the decision to try and lose weight, is to make the process liveable. I can understand the impatience of wanting to get to your goal now, but if you go about scaling a mountain only looking at how much you have left rather than occasionally reminding yourself how far you have come, you are likely to make yourself miserable and feel like a failure, regardless of how close you get. When I started my journey, I didn't even believe I would get to the point I am now. The first step was just to stop making a bad situation worse. Then as I found myself successfully losing weight, it evolved into dropping down from obesity to overweight and see where I could go from there.
It was a fairly steady process, the first ten months I averaged a 2 kg (4,4 lbs) weight loss a month, then it slowed down to half of that for the following ten months, then slowed down to half of that again in the months following. This was all done without tormenting myself. I made the process liveable, enjoyable even, as I always made sure I was full and I allowed myself treats regularly. I simply let time be on my side. And in a few short months, I will slowly increase my average intake as I prepare to maintain myself at my desired weight.
4) Your weight fluctuates, so take single results with a grain of salt.
This one I would say is extremely important to take into consideration, especially for fellow women. Weight loss is not as constant and even as we'd like to think. In the beginning I was very careful about weighing myself, and only did so on a monthly basis, because I knew from talking with my mom that close weighings meant seeing the number go up and down a lot (even if the arrow ultimately pointed downwards overall). I didn't want to focus too much on fluctuations, but more notice the bigger change over time. So I stuck with monthly weighings for many months, and I also made sure to measure key points of my body at the same time to notice in what ways my body changed with the weight loss. I knew from my first diet attempt that occasionally the weight would seem like it was at a standstill – though that was less of a thing the second time around, but I was mentally prepared for it at least.
Obviously there are going to be a lot more areas of the body that will change that you cannot directly measure, like quite a bit into my journey I was sorting through my keepsake box and came across a beloved ring from my teen years that I had to stop wearing many years ago due to it being too tight on my finger. Out of curiousity I tried it on, and not only did it fit, it fit so loosely that I was able to get it off my finger by just shaking my hand hard enough (thankfully it did not roll too far). I noticed my skin also started to clear up, not that I was especially bothered with acne. Then one day I looked in the mirror and I noticed I had dimples all of a sudden. The measurements were still interesting to do, though, because who knew it was even possible for me to lose a full inch around my wrist? That one still puzzles me.
Once I had established the pattern and knew what I could expect every month overall, I started giving into curiousity about how I would fare throughout the month (though I still only officially wrote down results on a monthly basis) and that's when I started noticing some «patterns» with the fluctuations. A big one was the way my body weight fluctuated around my cycle, I always seemed to gain a little right before my period and then drop down right after (it's just normal water retention, but I don't think most of us think about this). It wasn't a set amount of weight, just a noticeable difference between right before and right after my period. That became a helpful indicator on what my progress really was.
It wasn't the only time I noticed an odd fluctuation. There was also the summer where I went home to my parents, and swapped from a fairly fluffy type of store-bought bread to my mom's more dense grain heavy home made one. Within two days the scale claimed I had gained a full 2 kg, which made no logical sense as I had not changed my caloric intake, so I concluded that I must have had a build-up, and sure enough, within a week my body had adjusted and I found myself back to where I expected to be and saw no more oddities like that. Also, not all fluctuations are surprisingly pessimistic results, there was also that one time I was feeling dehydrated and the scale showed a more optimistic result than I expected. I didn't take that result to heart either, because I knew I hadn't consumed enough liquids, and sure enough, the following month I was right back on track. And just recently I had a bout of stomach flu and again my scale shows a lower number than what I would expect at this point, whether that one will bounce back I cannot say for sure, though I would definitely not recommend stomach flu as a dieting plan - yuck.
I'm very thankful I never did any type of group dieting or weighings. That just seems like it would discourage rather than encourage. Firstly because the weighings would be too frequent to notice real change, and there would be this shame element if the number didn't follow expectations. I think there are better ways to have a buddy on your journey, like sharing encouragement and tips, doing activities together, have someone to talk to about this so it doesn't become this all-consuming part of your other conversations. For me, my mom was the person I mainly talked to about this, shared my progress with, shared tips with, celebrated our individual accomplishments with. And I think I got all the best parts of sharing with someone, without the toxicity of group comparisons.
5) Excercise is good to do, but not strictly necessary for weight loss
To give full disclosure, before I started my diet I had a very sedentary lifestyle, and that didn’t change for the first couple of months. When I eventually started taking regular walks, my weight loss rate didn't change. And this was despite the fact that I had not adjusted my food intake for my change in activity level. That's not to say I felt no differences. They just weren't measurable on the scale. Right before I started taking walks, I felt my body urging me to get up and move around more. And I will say that while I haven't specifically been very plagued with bodily aches compared to many others, they were definitely fewer as I got more regular exercise in, not to mention my walking speed has gotten quite fast over time – not from me pushing myself, but just a natural result of walking regularly. I eventually worked up a routine where I would walk some of my commute to work (which works really well when you don't own a car).
This year I have taken up swimming in addition (I go about 2-3 times a week). It definitely has an effect on me, as in the way I feel in my body, but again my weight loss seems to be right on target so far, despite the further upped activity level. Not that my plan is to lose much more weight at this point, as my goal with this is more about strengthening my body. But whether it's intended or not, the point is that in my experience at least, the added activity, while beneficial in other ways, has not made a measurable difference on the scale.
Obviously I haven't been working out with the specific intention of weight loss, so I cannot claim it isn't possible, because again – not an expert. It's just that in my experience, the upped activity level paired with the same caloric intake made no difference for my personal results. I stuck to a fairly regular pattern.
6) Results are more than just numbers on a scale or a measuring tape
I think the final lesson is probably the most important one, and that is that there are so many ways beyond the numbers where you can notice the difference. I'm a very mathy person, I thrive with numbers. I love making spreadsheets for basically everything in my life, so obviously I love gathering all the data and presenting it for myself with all the pretty colours. But the biggest gain for me isn't the lost weight on the scale or the shrinking of the waist, it's more how I feel now compared to how I used to feel.
I didn't really pay attention to my physical health before I started doing this, not actively at least. Some things I had internalized as «normal» for me, so it wasn't until they started going away that I really noticed how «off» things had been back then. I used to get really shaky in my hand whenever I got hungry, which probably was a blood sugar type of thing. I also had a tendency to suddenly get so hungry I would feel nauseated from it. I think both of those things went away within a month or two. I used to normalize the feeling of being overstuffed, but once I paid more attention to at what point I would feel full and stop going overboard I noticed just how comfortable it felt to simply be full rather than overstuffed. It didn't take me long before I started feeling lighter on my feet, and there was even this lightness within me, like there had been a pressure I hadn't been aware of.
I didn't specifically get that burst of energy I had witnessed in my mom, but I eventually learned I had a fairly low supply of vitamin D (I'm a night worker who isn't fond of being in direct sunlight), so not exactly that surprising considering. Even with supplements I still haven't reached that level of energy, but also I don't exactly lack energy either, so I suppose there's some effect there. I thankfully felt fairly confident already when I started this, but obviously the feeling of accomplishment from this has given it a further boost. I'm very appreciative of this vessel I'm inhabiting, as imperfect as it is. There's also a newfound comfort in things that used to bother me. As a teen I downright hated any kind of tight fitting clothes, I used to refer to it as «sausage skin» and hated how they would elevate all my «flaws», now the same kind of clothing just makes me feel good, no matter how much my «pouch» of a stomach still sticks out. I no longer consider it a «flaw». The best thing, though, the very best and most important thing, is that I did manage to turn things around before those feared lifestyle diseases became a reality.
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