With Winter fast approaching, and picking up a little
extra work for the next three months, I’ve decided to take a break from my
diet. Given what I have learned from
eating carefully over the last little while, I have still managed to lose
weight despite reintroducing more naughtiness, just by being sensible.
AND I’m happy to say that when I weighed myself this
morning, I was pleasantly surprised to see 58.5 kilos on the screen. I’ve spent the last more than a month trying
to crack through the 59 barrier, so it felt great. Plus, I fit my jeans, which is awesome
because it’s starting to get bloody cold!
I’m still aiming for 56, but I am feeling much better about myself and
my diet so I’m happy to get to that number gradually.
So today I thought I’d share with you the ten most
important things, common sense I’ve learnt over this time:
1.
Make
your diet a lifestyle
A diet seems so
restrictive! If you just think of it as
making a few small changes to your lifestyle, you’ll have less resentment over
it. Make it into something fun and
enjoyable. I really enjoyed working out
the caloric content of my normal home cookery and making slight
adjustments. Learning new ways of
cooking, and new recipes was a lot of fun. Food math was something I enjoyed. Make a plan for yourself that is fun for you.
2. Don’t do it on your own
Talk about what you are doing
with friends and family. It is hard to
say no to food and drink offers when out at functions. The more open you are, the more people will
understand what you are doing, and can help rather than hinder your plans. Being open via this blog helped me be
accountable for my actions regarding food, health and general self-care. It made what I would have perceived as
failures, just a part of a journey. With
friends on your side, it’s harder to beat yourself up, and easier to get on
with trying to make positive changes in your life.
3.
Portion
control
It is so easy to just eat and
eat if you cook big meals at home. Being aware of how many kilojoules are in different
serving sizes of different foods made me realise how significantly portion size
affected my weight. I have a tendency
to want to eat LOTS of the high calorie carb based foods and less of the plain veges. So I’ve switched my old portions around so I
have less of the high cal carb food and more salad for dinner. It still makes me full, and not deprived of
pasta or potatoes, and helps me to get more vegetables in my diet.
4.
Eating
regular, balanced meals
It’s said you can make or
break a habit in 5 weeks. If you don’t
eat breakfast, start working on making this a habit today. I now eat about 6 meals a day: breakfast,
morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and then usually an ‘afters’ treat. Breakfast gives you the energy to sustain you
through the day. Eating small, regular
meals helps balance your metabolism and makes you less likely to snack on high
calorie, high GI foods.
5. Eating 5 plus a day
I actually found this quite a
difficult thing to do - and I’m mostly vegetarian! Thinking about one portion as fitting into
the palm of my hand made me realise that you often exaggerate the amount of
vegetables you are actually eating – or what counts as a vegetable! Once I started focusing on this I found I
lost weight more quickly. Plus you get a
whole lot more nutrients into your diet.
I try to have at least three different coloured fruit and vegetables a
day. Variety is fun, and so much better
for you.
6.
Being
organised
I work more than 40 hours a
week and spend at least four hours a week commuting to and from
work. To help ensure I didn’t eat ‘naughty’
food at work (I work in the gluten free treat shop, so that’s easy to do) I
started keeping fruit, yoghurt and corn thins at work for snacks. I also started cooking large meals regularly
to pack down into left-over lunches.
This was great, because I knew exactly what was in my food. Much better both health and cost wise than
buying lunch.
7. Being active
When I say this, I don’t mean
becoming a gym bunny. I couldn’t afford
the time or money to join a gym, but just being aware of pressing play as much
as I could within my normal routine was really helpful. Take the stairs. Walk to work.
Play at the park with your kids.
Get in the garden. Have an epic
house clean. These are all useful things
that can also burn calories.
8. Knowing what’s in your drinks
I love my wine! Finding out the size of a standard glass of
wine (125 ml) was a revelation – my normal glass of wine was much bigger than
that. I didn’t quit the wine, but cut my
consumption down and felt so much better for it. Fruit juice, sports drinks and fizzy drinks
are full of sugar and calories. I
just have water and have Coke Zero if I feel like a treat. I still have my morning cuppa (after my hot
water and lemon to kick-start my digestion), but have herbal tea at night. Licorice tea is a great way to have a sweet hot drink treat without any extra calories.
9. Don’t ban foods
Banning things just makes you
want them more. Then when you’re feeling
like being ‘bad’ you’ll have them. I haven’t
banned anything, but there are foods that I
just don't want to have after finding out what was in them. I still eat
cheese, sugar, pasta, butter and chocolate.
Just in measured moderation.
10.
Have
treats in moderation
I think it’s important to have
treats. I have a list of low cal treats
I can have to feel ‘normal’ when other people were having nice treat
foods. Make sure your treats are
real treats, and treats you actually like.
Every day foods are not treats.
Jellybeans and chocolate and ice-cream and chippies or whatever else floats your boat are treats.
I love bananas, but they are an every-day food for me. When I was on my diet properly, I had one ‘free’
meal a week, so I could eat whatever bad thing I wanted once a week. Don’t deny yourself. It’ll just make you miserable.
