So what a difference 11 days can make!

When I last wrote, I was in the midst of a plateau. It was angering, depressing, and motivating all at the same time!

It was depressing because even though I was doing the same things, I wasn’t seeing any weekly improvement. It was depressing because mathematically it meant that was goal seemed to be out of reach and I was resigning myself to the fact that I would miss my goal by 3-4 kilos. It was motivating because I thought it didn’t have to be that way if I didn’t want to it be. So 11 days later, the good news is that the scale has started to move definitively down again. I am 1kg lighter than when I last wrote. It sounds like it is a small thing, but it is a big achievement to me. And I owe it to a couple of things:

• Increasing the intensity of my exercise
• I started adding morning and evening routines to my exercise schedule
• I re-grounded myself in the “Psycho” mentality (it’s really CICO, but it feels more fun to say psycho)

CICO basically means that when it comes to weight loss, it’s no more complicated than Calories In / Calories Out. At the end of every day, I need to be at a caloric deficit in order to lose weight. And on the days when I know that I will take in more calories than I use, I simply need to plan to create larger deficits on the other days. I of course will not starve myself, but I can make better, more thoughtful choices with the other meals that I have available.

Note here that I am not talking about nutrition, although that is important too. For weight loss purposes, a calorie is a calorie, whether it is a bowl of ice cream or a bowl of salad. For nutritional purposes (the vitamins and nutrients your body gets out of eating both), you of course go for the salad more than you do for the ice cream.

So now I have the 11 weeks to lose 12kg, to meet the original goal of losing this weight by my birthday. I think that it is amazingly tough to lose 1kg a week. I am basically telling myself to go one step further and lose 1.1kg a week. I have to think about how to do this. It might be that I can’t do this myself and that it is time to bring in a personal trainer.

Throughout this journey so far, I have told myself that I wanted to lose weight and do it in a natural way as possible. That means that I didn’t want to start using supplements (like whey powders for example), nor did I want to want to swap out ‘regular’ foods for ‘diet versions’ of food (e.g. low-fat, fat-free, etc). I wanted to eat naturally, and just make better food choices and natural substitutions. I also didn’t want to fully embrace Intermittent Fasting just yet, and I haven’t fully embraced Stronglifts 5×5 yet (I did it a few times, but I feel like that is for Phase 2 of my journey). My actions so far have carried me to 58% of my goal. I am hoping that this approach can carry me the last 42%.