As we came into this year I had completely lost the plot. My diet was out of control. I had stopped exercising. I was drinking wine most nights. My weight had ballooned and I was very miserable about it. Sound familiar at all? I am in a much better place now, just three months later and keen to give you all the tips I can in case it helps you. No fads, no money involved….. just what I hope will help. Here is how I lost two stone in three months!
My height is 5 foot 10 inches (177 cms) and I weighed above 16 and a half stones (105kg) on 1st Jan. I was still also gaining roughly a pound per week. I decided that things needed to change. No faddy quick fix for me though. This needed to be about sustainable lifestyle changes. Follow this link if you want to know a bit more about me. Read on if you want to hear how I lost two stone in three months!
Change #1 – Giving up alcohol
Alcohol is not only ’empty’ calories, in my case certainly it is also a trigger for eating more. I figured that giving up alcohol would make me feel healthier and better about my body. In fact the impacts of this one action were enormous.
I found that when you stop drinking alcohol you sleep better. Better sleep brings all sorts of benefits. Better sleep means that I don’t crave unhealthy food!
Warning. I have no medical training. I am aware that severely and suddenly reducing the amount of alcohol you consume can bring risks to some people. Please do get advice from a professional before making any changes, if you are concerned.
I found that drinking alcohol had become a habit for me. I had become scarily attached to glass of wine at the end of the working day. Breaking this habit was key. I found that non-alcoholic beer (Beck’s Blue) or wine was a good substitute. Don’t get me wrong – I didn’t like it half as much as a glass of wine but it was ok and I got used to it. Having a glass of something that looked like wine or beer seemed to make a difference to me.
After a few weeks I found I didn’t need the substitute. I was actually fine just drinking water! I set myself the goal of being alcohol free for the first three months of the year. It helped me to have a goal. Although, I did carry on for longer once the three months were up!
Change #2 – Getting a good nights sleep
I am a night owl and the 24 hour day is about two hours too short for me. This means that left to my own devices I would stay up later and later but get up later too. Obviously this is not compatible with holding down a job! I do tend to stay up later than I should and that tendency is increased when I drink alcohol.
There is a particularly destructive cycle to do with watching catch up TV. I say to myself – “I will go to bed at the end of this episode”….. then when the end of the episode comes I still have wine left. So I say, “I will go to bed when I have finished this glass”. The end of the glass comes in the middle of the episode – so I say “I will have a little more wine and watch the end of the episode”. The end of the episode comes and I still have wine so ….. and so on it goes and I am up until the middle of the night having drunk far more than I intended!
Just giving up alcohol makes me far more likely to go to bed early! Change #1 and change #2 go hand in hand in a virtuous pairing.
Getting adequate sleep is key to everything and a massive boost to health. I find when I am sleep deprived I crave carbohydrates and am generally harder on myself. Mental health is much improved in my case by a run of good nights sleep.
Change #3 – Stop eating between meals
This is fundamental. There are many many different schools of thought on how many meals we should have. Some say little and often, five small meals a day. Some go for the standard three meals. Pick the pattern you want to follow and stick to it. Do not snack.
Change #4 – Get moving – increase calories out
I found this really helpful. My work life is desk based and very sedentary. Life post Covid-19 is even more sedentary as I have lost my commute to London which involved quite a bit of walking. Many of my hobbies are also desk based (writing) or chair based (craft).
I used to run for a patch about 10 years and wanted to restart. I didn’t think running would be a good idea at my current weight so I started with a walk round our local part every day. By the end of the three months I was back to running and although I am very slow I am loving it.
My Mum is in her 80s and walks 7000 steps per day to keep her back healthy. Her pattern is to follow the advice to move every hour and aim for at least 250 steps – I decided to try the same pattern. I don’t always manage that when I have meetings that are back to back but it has been my aim.
Change #5 – Reduce calories in and improve the quality of your diet
This is a huge subject area. There are so many bits of advice out there and a lot of this does fall into fad territory. At the start of the three months I went down the low carb route. This is an effective method for me because carbs are my downfall. I do not believe there is any meal that does not benefit from the addition of bread 🙂
If you give up carbs completely you go into this state called ketosis which is all over social media. However, I don’t think I went as far as is needed to go into ketosis. I also broke the pattern once a week – see change #6 below…. but I did go for some substitutes.
My first substitute is one that I would highly recommend. When we had pasta dishes I substituted courgette ribbons for pasta. This adds another vegetable to your count and I don’t really find I can tell the difference.
My second substitute was cauliflower rice in place of actual rice. This one I am less keen on and have since found a better alternative. I find that the cauliflower has a taste and texture that doesn’t really compare well to actual rice. Making cauliflower rice is also quite messy – just my view. The alternative we found is premade sweet potato rice. Don’t get me wrong – this doesn’t taste anything like rice either but I like it for what it is.
The final major substitute was to avoid potato and substitute in sweet potato – baked or chips/fries.
I will share some of the recipes I put together during this period in separate posts – I found a few go to recipes worked really well for me. In general, using substitutes allowed me to eat more or less the same meals as my family whilst keeping calories down.
Change #6 – Give yourself a breaks and rewards
This is my main tip. Trying to lose weight can feel like such a depressing time. Deprivation or the feeling of deprivation long term can be a motivation killer. If you slip up and fall off your wagon one way or another there is a tendency to throw in the towel and say what the heck. It feels like you are taking all the enjoyment out of life.
The problem with traditional dieting is that you feel it is ‘just for now’ or ‘until you get to a target weight or a special date/occasion. For me this was always going to be a lifestyle change. Maybe it is my age but I feel this is my last chance to get my weight sorted for good! That might sound overly dramatic (dramatic? me?… lol) but it is a source of motivation so I am not knocking it!
I decided to build in a treat day every week. My daughter calls it my cheat day but it isn’t cheating because it is allowed and planned! I told myself that on one day a week, the day I get weighed, I can eat anything I want.
The reality of this is that all week if I fancy something off plan, I tell myself I will have it on weigh day. Half the time when it gets to weigh day I no longer fancy whatever it was. There is also only so much you can eat comfortably on treat day! I find that with licence to eat as I like I am loathe to give up the healthy feeling I am getting through the better diet.
I actually find that come the first day of the new week, I am quite happy to be back on plan! Also what ever damage I do on treat day has to be undone before any new progress is made which again adds a natural brake to my temptation to over-indulge!
Change #7 – Track progress and stay honest
This one is really important to me. Track your progress. I weight myself every morning and every night. Then I built a spreadsheet to track my progress. The spreadsheet has my start weight and planned loss. It also has a forecast for my weight on key dates. If I can I will build a template for this that you can download. Let me know if you would be interested by leaving a comment below.
At the start of this journey I was using a normal set of scales but as you will read in my next post I eventually upgraded to scales that show body composition. These sorts of scales are quite pricey though – I am not sure we would have bought them if our old scales hadn’t given up and stopped working!
I do believe that you can accomplish these lifestyle changes without the need to spend money or engage with fads. Anyway that is the end of my tips for this post. Just seven things to change…. you could try making one one change per week or go big bang like I did. Just make a start – one thing is certain, if I hadn’t started this I wouldn’t be the same weight as at the start of the year. I would be about a stone heavier!
Having a hobby also helps as a great distraction. I run a sister blog to this one over at Stickytapeandstring.co.uk where you can read my articles on setting up a blog, see my crochet work or download templates to help you organise family life.
I hope you will come back here to see some of the recipes I have used and to check in on what I did next. After these first three months my weight hit a bit of a plateau and had to tweak a few things to get back to making progress. More on that next time…..
bye for now and stay safe!
Annie 🙂