Losing weight, and gaining weight is a difficult story for anybody. Now if you think this is a story about how vegetarianism helped me lost weight, it isn't. After having my son I had went from 115lbs to 146lbs. Of course this is a normal amount of weight to gain for an expecting mother of my size but it didn't stop there. Between me and my husband we only had on car and lived in an apartment. I was staying at home taking care of my son, with nowhere to go and not much to do while my husband worked second shift. I was bored, depressed, and lazy. Less than a year later I had gained another 8lbs. I tried to eat healthier, by healthier I mean just more whole foods and less junk, however the weight would not budge. I tried eating almost exclusively fruits and veggies but that was nearly impossible to stick to. I also tried starving myself....never trying that again. Then I started to work out more regularly, about 5 times a week, I was seeing a little bit of weight lose, after about two weeks I did lose a pound, but that's not how I lost 40lbs in 9 months. How did I lose it? Good old fashioned CALORIE RESTRICTION!
I know what you're thinking. Counting calories is for body builders obsessing over there physique. Or that it requires a lot of time and carrying around journal writing down everything you eat right? NO
Counting calories is the ONLY way I was successfully able to lose weight and I will tell you why.
- It put into perspective how much I was actually eating
Now according to my BMI I should eat 1750 cals to keep my weight at bay. I cut back 500 cals to lose weight. Since there are 3500 calories in approximately 1 pound of fat I was losing about 1 pound a week eating 1250 calories a day. When I was just blindly trying to eat healthier to lose weight I would still consume around 1500-2000 calories a day which is why I wasn't seeing any significant weight loss. So forcing me to put my food into a number and limit those numbers everyday I had actual control of my diet. Realizing how little I had to eat to lose weight faster put it in an easier, more controllable
perspective for me.
perspective for me.
- Counting calories was the easiest way to stick to a diet
Don't get me wrong, dieting is hard...very hard. You really need to learn self discipline to not eat that dessert or not go through the drive thru when that little voice in your head is telling you to just do it. What was easy about counting calories is that I didn't have to restrict any more foods out of my diet, I just had to restrict how much. Having already cut out meat and fish from my diet it wouldn't be easy to go low carb. Not to mention paleo or keto. I was also dirt poor at the time I started the diet so I couldn't get too picky about what I could or couldn't eat. Also in most other diets, you have to stick to them perfectly, If you eat just a little to much of the wrong thing, it can sabotage your diet for the rest of the week. This way If I did give in to cravings and ate too much, I could make up for it the next day or next couple of days by cutting out a few more calories and still stay on track. So just plain counting calories had the least impact on my lifestyle. There wasn't a journal I had to obsessively write in. There are some great calorie counting apps for you phone. I found the best to use was My Fitness Pal from Under Armor. It has almost every food you can thank of all logged into a data base so you don't have to figure out the calories yourself.
Now, a calorie in doesn't always equal a calorie out. Any nutritionist or fitness coach will explain that to you. If that were true, diets like the atkins or keto diet would simply not work.Your body is going to treat the calories you ate from a brownie very differently that it processes the calories from an egg. There is a good article that explains it here. Which brings me to my next point...
- I ate a lot healthier
Knowing that I only had 1250 calories to spend on what I ate, I was much more reluctant to eat 200 calorie candy bar at the checkout lane, or 600 calories on fries. Limiting your meals to 300 calories doesn't leave much room for junk food. For breakfast I chose oatmeal and fruit over donuts, vegetable soup and salads became my best friends. I would fill my plate with veggies and cook more meals from home. That's why I started 30 vegetarian meals for 300 calories, because eating healthy was delicious and easy to do at home. I learned how to get better portion control and accurately eyeball measurements of food to make sure I was sticking to my diet properly. It really puts it into perspective once you realize how much a quarter cup of food really is. Fruits and veggies are low in calories, and cheap so I would fill up on them. All the fiber keeps you full for quiet a long time which made the diet easier to stick to.
- After a while it became a no brainer
Once I started to learn better portion control, I already learned how many calories were in my foods. I didn't really need my app on my phone to do all the work for me. A month or so after starting calorie restriction I was over the hump of feeling hungry and getting cravings all the time. My body adjusted to feel full from my 300 calorie meals. Then I continued to lose weight without putting nearly the amount of effort and will power I did in the beginning. Of course this is true for almost any diet you stick to. The first couple of weeks are trying to cope with cravings and hunger, this is your body trying to resist losing fat by making you feel more hungry. Once you get over that it gets much smoother but you need to learn the self discipline to not give in or give up.
Now I didn't want to get into so much of what foods are good for you and what's not, for most people I feel its just common sense. As I said in the beginning this isn't about how being a vegetarian helped me lose weight since I can still eat a lot of junk food while being a vegetarian. There are tons of weight loss diets, guides, and supplements out there. Just google "How do I lose weight?" and you will be flooded. That's why I didn't want to get too much in the science of all of it. I just wanted to tell you what actually worked for me.
Also I didn't talk much about exercise when it came to my weight loss. Exercise is great for your body, it does amazing things for your muscles, heart and bones, but when it comes to losing weight its 80%-100% diet and only 10%-20% working out. Think about it, would you rather eat a candy bar and then run 2 miles to burn it off, or just not eat that candy bar? Once is started a full time job, I couldn't find the time or energy to work out. If you want to lose pounds of fat you have to focus on what you're eating.
