Three months ago, I was borderline obese according to my BMI. I live a sedentary lifestyle, have little time to exercise, and that’s the exact question I asked. Then I learned this one neat trick to burning belly fat:
Just f*ing eat less and exercise more. There are no magic pills, no miracle diets, only hard work, persistence, and an understanding of how your body and mind works when it comes to food.
Over this time period, I lost 1.5lb per week, and went from not being able to run for more than 1 minute without being out of breath, to being able run 5k. Yes, I’m still overweight (it’s only been three months, what were you expecting?); and I still live a mostly sedentary lifestyle (look, becoming active is so much hard work, there’s only so much you can expect one man to do), but with the weight loss, and increase in stamina, I feel great.
I tried a lot of things, here’s what worked:
1. I didn’t bother cutting things from my diet. I like food. I like it a lot. There is no way I was prepared to give up or restrict myself in any way: vegetarion/vegan? No way, I like meat too much. No carbs? Hell no, I want to be able to eat pizza. No sugar? gimme a break! No dairy? What do I put on my pizza or in my cereal then. Paleo? Too complicated. I don’t want to have to take a history of food just to know what to eat, and besides, it’s absurd to suggest that we’re to ignore the entire history of human agricultural development. You might as well claim that we should all be wearing furs and hunting with dogs for a living.
Diets are annoying. Such a massive change in what I could eat and what I couldn’t would have weighed me down. The decision to eat less and exercise more was hard enough to sustain without being constantly worrying about exactly what you need to eat.
2. Eat less, but a still reasonable amount. I never tried severe calorie restriction, I already knew instinctively that it was unhealthy to eat too little. I also knew that it would be impossible for me because I like food too much. After doing some research, it seemed that medical professionals recommend loosing no more than 2lb per week. This worked out to be about 1650 net calories daily. I knew that my 20 minute walk to work each way would already account for about 170 calories loss per day, boosting my daily calorie intake up to a bit over 1800 calories.
That’s a good amount of calories. Think about it: you could eat a 1200 calorie super burrito and still have enough allowance for a medium-sized meal. That sat very well with me. I like super burritos. Any diet that still allowed me to consume them was surely one that I can work with.
3. Have breakfast. I never used to have breakfast as I didn’t feel hungry until noon. I didn’t feel that I needed it to get up and get going. In fact, when I did have breakfast, I would get hungry earlier.
People say that eating breakfast will make you less hungry at noon. Here’s the problem: those are thin people talking, and they eat moderately. To fat people like us, what happens is that we eat breakfast, get hungry earlier, and then eat lunch (which may indeed be smaller than we would have otherwise), but then have to eat dinner earlier too, and snack in the evening.
Here’s the key: the benefits of eating breakfast can only be realized by first being able to stave off hunger until lunch to avoid eating too early. That was the key that finally unlocked the secrets of breakfast for me.
So now I eat breakfast of either a cereal bar, or an apple or banana – something convenient that I can eat without having to sit down to do it. Eating so little for a meal goes so much against my innate fattness, but breakfast is the one meal I seem to have no problems eating little of, and that in turn frees up calorie allowance while letting me feel satisfied with a smaller lunch. You know what that means? Big dinners. This is perhaps the sole reason I am able to continue with this diet: I can still have a hearty dinner and enjoy that warm feeling of satiation that only a truly fat person can understand. It’s like the food is giving you a hug from the inside.
4. Learn how to ignore hunger. The thing that blew my mind was reading that hunger pangs would go away in 15 minutes if you can ignore them. I can recall instances in the past where I’ve ignored hunger because I was otherwise occupied, but had never given it much thought. Holy sh*t! I can make hunger go away by simply ignoring it rather than cramming my maw with food? This may seem obvious to thin people, but let me tell you: this was one big piece of news to this fat person.
I tried it, and it turned out to be true, but difficult at first. If I ignore hunger pangs, it will indeed go away after 15 minutes if I can distract myself that long. Sure it’ll come back later, but I can always ignore it again, and since I’m not in the business of actually starving myself, I know that it’ll be mealtime sooner or later, it was like: “still your excitement, my dear stomach, it’ll be mealtime soon, and then we shall feast and engorge ourselves upon a reasonably-sized meal”
Now, knowing that hunger will go away by itself, all I needed to do was to develop distraction techniques to help ignore it. At first I found that sparking water helped. I never understood sparkling water. It’s…textured water. But it somehow gives the illusion of having consumed something. I guess it’s close enough to the soda or sparkling juice I might have other wise have had, and so it’s just a psychological zero-calorie trick that seems to work for me.
Then I discovered coffee. This was probably my biggest discovery. I know that others have mentioned coffee’s hunger preventing effects, but it took trying it to believe it: if I drank coffee when I got my my first hunger pang after a meal, I wouldn’t be hungry at all for the next several hours.
5. Exercise. Since my goal wasn’t just to lose weight, but to also get fitter, I incorporated running into my routine. Being a non-runner, I had always had the impression that running regularly was an extremely time-consuming activity. But it turns out that it’s not: 30 minutes three times a week. That’s easily manageable.
I was fully aware of my total lack of stamina, but I also knew that I was fitter in my teenage years, having played sport regularly, so I wasn’t starting totally from scratch, but trying to get back what I had before. Knowing that was a big psychological boost for me – a return to glory was a lot easier to imagine than reaching those heights for the first time.
I knew that I could only run about a minute before being out of breath, so I started looking at “couch to 5k” running apps on my phone, which seemed to start at about my level – most programs started off with alternating 1 minute jogging and 1 minute walking. My initial thoughts was that the “5k” part seemed daunting – I had serious doubts whether I would ever be physically able to run that far in one go.
My first run was a challenge: I literally could not run for more than a minute at a time, but I struggled through the repetitions and made it out alive, not feeling too bad. My second run went worse. The app I used pushed me to 1.5 minute jogs, and that was more difficult, and I barely made it.
At this point, I was disheartened – I had managed to run a few 1.5 minute jogs with great difficulty, I just couldn’t see myself ever doing 5k.
I thought I’d continue, anyway, the exercise was good for me, but the indignity of not being able to run for much was grating. The third and fourth runs were similarly difficult. Each time I’d finish at great discomfort. But then I realized that while the difficulty wasn’t getting any easier, the distances and times were getting longer. I had just done 3-minute run intervals. I felt like crap afterwards, but I didn’t feel more crap than I did a week ago when I was doing 1 minute intervals.
That’s when thing started looking up. My progress was faster than I had imagined possible, I began trusting the “couch to 5k” program more, since I seemed to be keeping up with the program. It didn’t get easier, but I was achieving more, and that’s what mattered.
I hit a plateau at some point – I could run two 10 minute stretches, with a 3 minute break between without too many issues, but I couldn’t seem to do 20 minutes in one go. But I did some research on the internet and concluded that I should adjust my pace and go much slower. It worked. I did it. I was euphoric: It was a major milestone for me, going from not being able to run for more than a minute without getting out of breath, to going 20 minutes in one go. Admittedly the pace was slow, but that didn’t matter: as long as I could run for 20 minutes in one go, I can gradually work on my pace.
A few weeks after that, during a run, my running app crashed while I was running and I didn’t realize. I had meant to be running for 20 minutes, and somewhere around the 25 minute mark, I started wondering why my running app hadn’t told me to stop yet (I run with my phone in my pocket, and headphones in, the running app will play voice messages at me to tell me to warm up, run, cool down, or stop). I looked at my phone to discover the app had crashed, but looking at the time, I realized I had run for about 25 minutes. I was struggling at that point, I had never run for more than 20 minutes before, but I decided to keep pushing and see what I could do.
Eventually it got to 35 minutes before I called it quits. I could have perhaps been able to go on another 5 minutes, but I didn’t want to push my luck, I was already light-headed, and legs felt like jello. This was another revelation: I had pushed through a mental barrier. Two months ago I couldn’t run for 1 minute, not believing that 5k was ever going to be physically possible, and now I had just done a 35 minute run, covering 4.5k.
That was last week.
Over the three month duration, I have gone from a couch potato, not having done any exercise in the last 5 years, to losing an average of 1.5lb per week (I know my target was supposed to be 2lb loss per week, I guess my calculations aren’t accurate, but I’m happy with the result); I still eat what I want, just less of it at an amount that I feel is easily sustainable on the long-term, and I don’t feel the need to take “cheat days” since I simply don’t feel like I need to eat more than I do already. I’ve improved my stamina enough to usefully work out. Most importantly of all, I have gained the knowledge that these improvements are readily achievable: I’ve seen the improvements over a short amount of time, and that’s important physiologically for me to see this through.
There you go: weight loss. No pills, no fasting, no surgery. Just cold hard sweat and determination, and a handful of psychological tricks. If you want to do the same, don’t just follow what I did, experiment yourself and see what works, everybody is different.
I’m posting this anonymously because I feel that my dieting and weight-loss are a very personal thing to me that I don’t necessarily want people around me to know so much in detail. But I do want to share them to others who may be in the same position that I was in.
Linda Ikeji 