A Common Mistake

I am always shocked at how some people try to lose weight. The people I am talking about are the ‘boom or bust’ dieters. The boom consists of delicious calorie-dense meals like mayonnaise-covered sandwiches for lunch and Chinese takeaways for dinner. The bust is the bland boiled chicken and cherry tomato salad with no dressing. They follow that up with the tiniest amount of turkey breast, broccoli and brown rice for dinner. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that they can and will maintain this bust diet for the duration of the weight loss.

The most disciplined people on the planet who don’t care about food would struggle to maintain this diet. If you are obese and love food, you don’t have a chance in hell of adhering to a diet like this for the amount of time you need to lose all the weight. There are two obvious issues with it. Firstly, you are probably eating way too few calories and, on top of that, you will constantly crave the calorie-dense foods that you love. Let’s finally debunk a weight loss myth here - you don’t need to be restrictive with your diet to lose weight.

Eating Too Few Calories

This is quite common. Even with people who just want to lose a few pounds. I started working with someone recently who told me that she ate just three eggs in one day. It blew my mind. I’m not saying that she wouldn’t lose weight if she could stick to this diet. Of course she would! But what happened? She fell off the wagon after a day or two.

If you only take one thing from this entire post, take this: The trick with dieting is not to starve yourself. It’s to eat as many calories as possible while still being in a calorie deficit so that you feel full and satisfied and continue to lose weight.

Restricting Your Food Choices

This is a topic I wrote about previously and would like to delve into a little more. The bust diet that I mentioned above is stereotypically healthy (i.e. a lot of micronutrients and fibre with very little unsaturated fat) but who fucking cares?! Your main health issue is that you have a serious weight problem, not that you are not getting enough vitamins. Let’s deal with one thing at a time!

In the 7 months I was losing weight, I loved every meal I ate. It was always delicious. I never felt like I was on a diet. This is so important. If you love Asian takeaways (more on this later), find a way to include a version of this into your diet. Will you be able to order it from your phone while you sit on the couch and watch TV? No. You will have to cook it yourself but it can be almost as delicious as the restaurant’s version and you will maintain your calorie deficit by eating delicious food. Most importantly, you will be one day closer to achieving your goals.

The newsletter version of this article contains a link to my favourite Asian recipe that I regularly eat for weight loss. Get my newsletter in your inbox here.