Healthy living

This post is about health, weight management in particular. Friends have been asking me to write up my experiences so here it is. It is a personal story and offers no social analysis other than to acknowledge that living healthy is by far not the cheapest option out there, which is of course a problem.

A little over a year ago, my doctor told me that I was pre-diabetic. I had been steadily gaining weight for several years. I didn’t feel good in my body anymore, but wasn’t managing to do much about it. Knowing that my weight gain was having medical repercussions was the final push I needed to start making significant changes. I set out to lose 25* lbs (~11 kg) in three months and eventually lost 30 in four (for illustrative purposes, the books on the right equal that weight). I know many people struggle with similar issues and several friends have asked me to tell them how I did it so I decided to write up some details. I purposefully waited a year to do so as I only wanted to report back if I managed sustained change. I did. I started on June 21, 2019 and I’m 28 lbs below what I was then consistently hovering between that and 30 lbs down (such fluctuation or even a bit more is common).

As a caveat to this post, I want to say that this is not meant as weight-shaming or body-shaming. Everyone has their own story and their own health, this is mine.

Note that being pre-diabetic does not have to be related to weight. I have a friend who loses weight when she’s stressed and due to some life circumstances she’s been stressed for a long time. She’s very thin and it turns out she, too, was diagnosed as pre-diabetic around the same time I was. Again, this is just my story. I wanted to lose weight, but I also knew weight was not the only issue, it’s what I was taking into my body that needed to change.

I think it’s important to acknowledge that what I did was hard despite what many will try to tell you. It required willpower I never knew I had. Having done quite a bit of reading on the topic, I don’t believe that there is a magic bullet out there for this and it takes willpower plus time. But if you give yourself enough time and learn about what works, it should work.

Important note: if you do it right, you do not have to be hungry along the way. If you’re hungry, it’s not going to be sustainable long-term, and long-term is the right goal or you’ll just have to start all over again, which I don’t want to have to do.

Reduce carbs

The first thing I did was cut out major carbs. I stopped eating bread, baked goods, pasta, potatoes, and rice. I also stopped eating processed sugars, indeed, for the summer most processed foods. This was crazy difficult as I love bread and baked goods. And I mean LOVE. The good thing is that after several months, it wasn’t that difficult anymore. Do I still look longingly at certain bread products? Sure. But it’s no longer hard to pass them by. To this day, I eat almost none of the above although I have reintroduced some sugary things and definitely have chocolate regularly now (within reason, see more about portion control below). And I certainly eat processed foods again. I will also have the occasional pastry on special occasions so it’s not a forever good-bye to anything. Again, I will absolutely have a cake now and then if the occasion or location (hello awesome pastry shop in Budapest) calls for it. And I eat ice cream almost daily now. In small portions.

Subscribe to Noom

After a week of not eating carb-heavy foods (have I mentioned how hard that was?) I noticed that I had lost some weight, but I also noticed that I was plateauing. I didn’t want to be hungry so I was eating all sorts of veggies, fruits, nuts and dairly products left and right. In retrospect it’s obvious why this wasn’t going to work for weight loss (e.g., things like avocados have a ton of calories as do lots of nuts), but I hadn’t learned enough yet to know better. A friend recommended that I sign up for the Noom app. This was a game-changer. It’s not cheap, but it was absolutely worth it. I found the social component 98% useless so don’t be disappointed if that’s not doing anything for you. The key was the logging of weight, food AND the readings. The readings were super helpful. Every day you get some science-based material in tiny digestible chunks about why you do what you do, what approaches work, how to avoid foods that are unhelpful, how to avoid mindless snacking, etc. I paired this with other readings. I read some books and read lots of online articles. I’m not linking to any as other than Noom, nothing stood out per se. But I did do a lot of reading about health and foods.

Log everything you eat and drink

Noom has a very helpful food/drink logging tool. When you first sign up, it’ll ask you for your current weight and goal weight plus how quickly you want to proceed. Then it’ll give you your daily calorie allocation in order to meet your goal. For me this was 1,200 calories a day. Yeah, not a lot. But with enough knowledge and willpower, possible.

Keep track of your weight daily and get a good scale

I liked following my weight in lbs since the numbers decrease quicker than kg even though I’m obviously not losing any more weight. :) I found it helpful to have a scale that reported to the decimal point. I used to have one that reported only even decimal digits and I wanted more nuance. You do not want to obsess over daily fluctuations (it will sometimes go up, and sometimes it’ll just stall for days despite your continued efforts), but you do want to track it regularly. Noom has a nice chart for this, you enter your weight daily and you can see your progress over time.

Be active, but rigorous exercise is optional

Major exercise does not have to be part of your weight-loss regime. Yes, exercise is healthy. No, it is not necessary for weight management. Movement is, however. My preferred movement is walking. So I did a lot of walking. I walked daily and Noom kept track of this. It would then give extra calories to consume for the day, which I could take in increased consumption or just use toward meeting my weight loss goal quicker. It was a nice buffer to have. And again, while heavier exercise could be helpful, often it leads people to consume more thereby knocking out its benefits.

Use substitutes

Some of what you learn through Noom is that you want to be eating voluminous foods that are mostly large due to their water content (water fills you up, but includes zero calories). For example, grapes are good, raisins not so much. Substituting vegetables as sides is helpful. I started eating a lot of cauliflower, it’s a great substitute for sides like rice and if you’re lucky, your supermarket sells it in riced form. There are various noodle-substites that are excellent and are extremely low in calories such as Shirataki Noodles or the Better Than Noodles brand in the US. Kohlrabi is a great alternative to potatoes. I basically started cooking a ton of veggie dishes.

Focus on protein-rich foods

I didn’t give up meats, but basically kept to the occasional chicken breast or fish. Salmon and tuna are easy to include and are high in protein. Protein is essential for not feeling hungry. I had 2-3 eggs a day, but never more than two at once so I could benefit from it throughout the day. Dairy is also good for protein, but most cheeses are high in calories so you have to be careful there. Almond milk, especially the unsweetened version, is lower in calories than milk, but still has plenty of protein.

Avoid processed foods of all types during the first months, same goes for eating out

While I am now back to eating food out of a bag, last summer I did a lot of my cooking and avoided most processed foods. To be fair, this was not a rule and I definitely ate things that came pre-packaged, but I minimized it. Summer is a good time for cooking much of your own food since fresh fruits and veggies are easiest to come by during this season and at least for academics, it’s also when we have more time to do our own cooking. This also helps with staying away from restaurants (including take-out in Covid times). Although they may have healthy options, you never know how much oil they’re using when they prepare their foods (usually quite a bit) and what other additives they use that may mess with your calorie count. Certainly now I eat out again (well, I did before Covid), but I very much prioritized eating in during the weight-loss phase of my new regime (when invited to a friend’s place, I’d offer to make some food).

Control portions

You’ll get very good at reading the nutritional info box of every product to figure out how much you can have of each food (or for things not packaged, Noom will have the info). Never eat out of a box, always put your food on a plate or even just in a small bowl. Have it in front of you. Focus on it. And then stop when you’ve had what you’d portioned out. No going back for more unless you are logging that extra just like you logged the original portion.

Consider getting a food scale

This is not essential, but I found it helpful to be able to figure out serving sizes. Most calorie information on US products is by serving size, which is a certain amount of food (e.g., 1 oz) and I have no idea what that looks like in terms of number of food items to consume. In Europe, the reporting requirement or certainly practice seems to be 100g, which is equally unhelpful for portioning. The food scale then comes in handy. For what it’s worth, American packages will often say things like “approximately 12 pieces”, but when you put 12 pieces on the scale, they’re more than 1 oz so it’s definitely worth double-checking.

No screen-eating, no distracted eating

Whenever you eat, even if it’s just a small snack of six almonds and six baby carrots, do it with full focus. Don’t do it in front of your computer screen or while watching television or even reading a book. Sit down comfortably and enjoy the moment. Your daily calorie allocation will only let you eat so often so you might as well give it your full attention. One of the Noom readings mentioned that there is evidence that the more people are eating together, the more people consume. This doesn’t mean that you should stop eating with your family or give up on all social life, but it’s helpful to keep it in mind. I basically moved most of my social engagement to other types of activities like going on walks with friends instead of eating out together.

Water and coffee/tea

What about drinks? I mostly just had water although did drink some almond or soy milk. Drinking lots of water is helpful generally since it fills you up. Since I don’t like either beer or wine, that was not a sacrifice for me. Alcoholic drinks often have a lot of calories so not liking them helps, although for me this wasn’t a change in my diet since it’s not something that was ever part of my diet in the first place. Eventually I trained myself to like coffee without sugar and that became a nice alternative to water. Tea without any sweeteners is another obvious option. A note on sweeteners. I have always hated them so switching to them was not the way for me. My readings suggest they are not a helpful substitute if weight loss is a goal as they make you crave things that are not heplful for weight management so I’d say stay away from diet drinks as well. If you cannot/don’t want to cut out alcohol, you just need to plan for it to be part of your daily calorie intake.

The 12-hour fast

I don’t recall the science behind it, but it can be helpful to give your body 12 hours of rest from food intake. This sounds way more challenging than it is in reality. If you stop eating around 7pm and then have breakfast at 7am, you’ve met the goal. And you should stop eating around 7 or 8pm anyway as evening eating is not good for weight management in general.

Get enough sleep

Getting 7-8 hours of sleep is generally important for health, but with the 12-hour fast approach, it’s also helpful as those are hours when you are not awake to eat or to crave to eat. :-) Various readings I did suggested that getting enough sleep is important for the body to process our food intake so it’s specifically helpful for weight management.

Those are my tips. This is what worked for me. Obviously bodies are different and the same may not work for you although overall I would think this is a good approach. It’s a lot to digest and implement especially depending on your starting point. Noom really helped. A lot. (No, I have no financial incentive to keep mentioning it.) For me, the hardest moments were in the evenings. I realized that I just love snacking in the evening. Eventually I figured out that I needed to leave some calories for the evening and went with things like high volume popcorn (no butter!) to meet my cravings. Or I used that good old willpower I keep mentioning.

If you have questions about the above or something related to all this that I didn’t cover, please feel free to ask. And if you have your own tips, please share.

[*] The weight goal I had set was related to a weight I knew I had had years earlier, although not in a long time. It was also something within the “normal” range for BMI. I should mention that I find BMI numbers very iffy (as do others). I could lose an additional 30 (!) lbs and still be considered within normal range, which I don’t believe would be healthy in my case (i.e., way too thin).