My Weight Loss Goal & How I Planned to Achieve It

With my motivation for losing weight becoming more urgent with every passing week I decided that I had to shed some heft.

This post shows what my weight loss goal was to be and how I planned to achieve it.

Summer had passed and I had a winter trip to Thailand to look forward to. What better way of losing weight is there when you have a clear target date in mind? My goal was simple: lose some weight.

Over the long-term it would be terrific to get to the same weight as when I arrived in Finland, back in November 1999, but when I first started the goal was purely to get under 90kg again. Gamification would play a part at setting more challenging targets.

Pie In the Sky Weight Loss Goals

• Get my BMI back into the normal range (from the obese state I was at when I started)
• Get my weight to around 73kg (to meet the above criteria)
• Fit into my kilt again (may come even sooner than goal)
• Be able to fit into my kilt 6 months after I stop dieting

As with any project I needed to make sure that I had SMART targets to reach these goals. What these targets were depended on timeliness. This would be dependent on the micro-targets being achievable and relevant.

I wanted to lose weight at a gradual rate. You hear so many stories of people losing weight very fast and then putting it back on again shortly afterwards. I didn't want to yo-yo.

I wanted to be able eat normally when I stopped dieting and not put the weight back on. This would mean that I had to change my eating habits as much as anything. There would be sacrifices that I would have to make whilst still being able to eat normally for the majority of the time.

Phase 1 Targets

Therefore I chose quite a small weekly figure. Specifically 0.5kg per week. Not too much: just a bag of sugar. Since I had around 20 weeks to my vacation I could try to lose 10kg (1,5 stone, 21lbs approx.). I will break down my targets in a future post but at that point I needed to figure out how to achieve my goal.

How I Was Going to Lose Weight?

As I already mentioned, when it comes losing weight, I think people tend to over complicate things. To me it comes down to 2 life changing habits: Eating and moving.

Eating

I had previously thought that I was eating quite healthily. I don't eat crisps too much, no fried food except for stir-fry and my guilty pleasure of bacon and eggs of a weekend. These cooked breakfasts would obviously have to go but what else would I do?

Taking care of what you eat is fundamental in the process. Therefore as well as eating less I would ensure that my food intake was balanced. I'd seen a few friends who had sort of dieted in the past. One success that really stood out for me was from a "juicing" diet. Another was from the 5/2 diet.

My method would be similar to juicing: souping. However as I got later into my diet, and there became a need to slow down the weight loss a bit, I also have a few days exclusively of "souping" similar to 5/2.

As I am in control of the food in our household, I do the cooking, I was able to replace my evening meals with soups. My lunches at work would not be affected, salads or stir-fry vegetables (with meat/fish), but the evening meal would be soup. The family could still eat as normal.

Moving

I am not a big fan of exercise. At least in gym environments. But I would have to move. The previous Christmas I got an activity band. I would make sure that I reached the daily step target, at least, so I was somewhat active at the beginning. As time went on I would try to incorporate some more strenuous activity as or if required.

I use a Polar Loop but I am sure most similar products have similar functionality. This is one of the measurements. I was able to set targets by choosing what my lifestyle was - a desk job. This means that I should do around 13 000 steps a day - how many do you do?

As I mentioned at the top of the post, I had a vacation planned at Christmas time. I wasn't intending to "diet" then, so I planned to break then. As my pie in the sky goals became more of a reality during the first 5 weeks or so I decided to set up a program for 2016 too. Another 20 weeks (currently on-going). I will let you know how this went in forthcoming posts.

So if you have gotten to the end of this post, congratulations. To recap: My goal was to lose weight by souping and walking. These goals changed a bit through time, but that will become apparent as to why in future posts also.

Have you tried souping? Did it work for you?