How I Lost 20+ kg in 6- Months: The Amazing No-diet Chocolate Diet!

Some 6 months ago, I decided I needed a conversation starter, and therefore lost a bunch of weight.  It totally worked –not like a charm, as they are complete mumbo-jumbo, but like a hammer or a kick in the groin: very well; since, I’ve often been asked how I did it, effectively proving that people with worse judgement than Putin exist.  Instead of repeating myself and since it’s just after Britmas and hence season for this, let me instead write down my experiences for posterity.

The long and short of it is that I like beer, chocolate and cheese.  I combined that with my love for biking to yield the perfect diet, the amazing no-diet chocolate diet!

Don’t Diet!

I’m sure that many will be happy to know that it is possible to lose weight without dieting.  Dieting is annoying and you feel like you’re punishing yourself when you do it.  What you need to do instead is to make sustainable permanent changes.

At the core of a successful weight alteration are the number of calories consumed and the number of calories burned.  If we consume more than we burn, we gain weight, if we consume less we lose weight, and if the numbers are the same, we maintain weight.  There is no shortcut except amputation.

A traditional diet works by making consumption smaller temporarily.  Unfortunately, most people hate that: they need to cut what they like (no dessert, low-fat cheese instead of the good one, etc.).  You punish yourself whenever you eat, become aware of it, and hate it.

My math teacher in primary school once said that we don’t gain weight between Britmas and New Year’s but rather between New Year’s and Britmas.  I’ve since seen that is a common saying on the Internet, but prefer to think of it as John’s wisdom as it makes my story more personal and hence makes readers identify more with me on a personal level and therefore more likely to believe whatever gibberish I excrete.  Also, I may have retrofitted the anachronistic Britmas part.

The point of this pointless story is that unless Jabba the Hutt was literally named after you, chances are you are better off with a long-term smaller loss than a quick and faster loss.  Sure, it takes longer and despite common belief, a quick weight loss is every bit as effective as a slower one, but when you don’t force yourself to employ a diet you hate, you can lose a bit of weight without feeling like you miss out.  This also makes it more likely that you can maintain the healthier lifestyle afterwards and maintain your new-found media-sanctioned beauty.

I changed my lifestyle.  At first, I completely cut alcohol.  This yielded me around 8000 kcal/week by reducing intake.  That’s roughly 3 days of energy consumption or over 1 kg of body fat (1 kg of fat is approximately 7000 kcal).  With that cut, I have a lot of leeway to do other things.  At the same time, I found myself with a lot of free time on my hand due to my job situation at the time, so I started biking.  Quite a lot, as in going 50-100 km every other day.  This also gave me time-outs for reflecting on life, the universe, and everything.  Shortly thereafter, time was exchanged for a job 40 km from home, making me consistently bike around 300 km/week.  That’s another 10000 kcal/week by increasing calories burned.  Two relatively minor changes me 18000 kcal less every week by both reducing intake and increase use.  Compare that to a recommended intake of 15000-20000 kcal/week that’s very significant.  Of course, the changes I made are a bit larger than I make them out to be: I did drink quite a lot of beer, and biking 75 km 4 times a week is more exercise than most get.

Don’t Count Calories

As my examples show, it is possible with relatively simple instruments to change the number of calories consumed.  If you already have a weight that’s mostly stable (most just gain 1-2 kg/year), you don’t have to cut a lot of calories to lose weight in the long run.  For example, if you gain 2 kg/year and want to instead lose 5 kg in a year, you just need to cut (2 + 5) * 7000 kcal/year, or around 1000 kcal/week.  That’s roughly half a snickers bar a day.

Counting calories is boring and reminds you what you are missing out on. Instead, focus on one or two habits you can lose and keep the rest of your life the same.  Cut a candy bar a day, switch from regular to diet soda (or tea).  Don’t “reward” yourself as that negates your effort.  Don’t cut something you can’t or don’t want to be without, but it’s easier to cut one really bad habit than 5 lesser ones.

If you make a habit change that saves enough calories, there is no need to start counting calories: just continue as before except for the habit.  Be aware you don’t compensate for the habit in unhealthy ways (swapping beer for cocoa is not gonna make you lose weight, replacing it with tea or sugar free soda will).

Do the calories computation once and for all to identify where it makes sense to set in.  Make sure you understand the calorie cost of each habit and consider whether it is worth it.  Don’t cut something with relatively low cost that you enjoy.  Stay up-to-date with the calories cost of introducing a new habit, but don’t count every day.  Just focus on the calories over a year.  Divide by 7000 to see how many kilos cutting/adding the habit means a year.  Stopping alcohol for me meant a difference of 8000 * 52 / 7000 = 59 kg/year.  Of course, the actual loss is less (changed metabolism means burning less energy and energy is not necessarily burned 100% efficiently), but that is still a number that makes you think.  Biking to work is around 64 kg/year for me.

I make sure to still indulge.  That way, it doesn’t become a chore to lose weight.  I enjoy fancy tea instead of beer.  I eat a lot of chocolate. Partly because I genuinely need calories and carbs with my exercise, but also because it’s very, very tasty.  Indulging makes it easy to make the lifestyle change a change that is sustainable and not a diet I’ll shed.

Cook Yourself

I didn’t really need to change my diet.  I didn’t even plan to do so; it just happened.  I guess a large part is that my increased physical activity made it necessary to consider what I ate a bit more thoroughly.  It also counts that among my closest friends are vegetarians and others trying to eat healthier, and when dining together we’d go for something everybody could enjoy.

I’ve never really eaten terribly unhealthy, but at least in the beginning I would simply crash Thursday or Friday on the way home if I didn’t make sure to eat sort of reasonably.  I started eating fruit for the easily available sugars, more vegetables and green for fibers and protein.  I avoided food that would upset my stomach, like very fat food.  These days I can easily bike 100 km on an empty stomach, but still try maintaining a healthy diet.

I don’t eat low-carb because it tricks your body into burning fat or some bullshit (don’t forget that Atkins died of malnutrition!); I eat high-protein and low-processed food because I need that to get the last 20 km home after a long day at work.  Low-carb works because high-protein is more filling and contains less calories, not because of magic.

I started spending more time cooking, and always making a nice dinner.  I started eating salad as a main instead of as a side.  You need to add more filling ingredients than what you normally find; lettuce and tomatoes do not a salad make.  Instead ingredients like beans and root vegetables do.  I’ve become a huge fan of chickpeas and red beets, but really any will work.  Beans like chickpeas have the added advantage of being ample with proteins.

I also enjoy adding beans (chickpeas and kidney beans) to bread for a much more filling, lower-carb/higher-protein variant that’s very diet-friendly and tasty.  The result is a lot more spongy and heavy than normal bread (and my latest incarnations have diverged pretty far from bread).

A month or so ago, I realized I almost eat no meat anymore.  If not counting bacon, I can count on one hand how often I’ve had pork or beef in the past trimester.  And I’d only need two fingers combined.  A single chicken breast lasts me a week, and I’ve gone weeks without meat altogether just because I forgot to buy any or take it out of the freezer.  I’ve come so far, it’s only half-joking when I say I’ve become a vegetarian – part is also my new resolve to give anything a fair chance.

By changing my diet, it has become second nature to the point that when I cooked Britmas dinner, I went with a chickpea/beets salad, fried vegetables, zucchini pasta (a vegetarian version of this), asparagus with cranberries, and a salad with eel and shrimp, and only as an afterthought a roast of venison (which I even managed to overcook as I was focusing on the non-meat parts).

If you eat out, you probably have to go to vegetarian restaurants or very hippie/hipster places.  Other places simply cannot make a decent salad.  I was also very guilty of this previously myself, but somebody who sees the meat or even potato side-dish as the main filling part of a meal cannot make a tasty and filling salad.  It will inevitable be some iceberg hell comprising nothing but lettuce and tomatoes.

 Track Your Progress

A common advice is not to track your weight too often as it fluctuates.  I’d say screw that – there is no too often, and it is good to understand how your weight fluctuates.  I measure my weight three times a day: in the morning, when I get home from work/after exercise, and in the evening just before bed.

Our weight is lowest just after we’ve been to the toilet, and highest after the biggest meal.  Typically, this means that our weight is lowest in the morning and highest in the evening.  Exercising causes us to sweat and hence lose weight.  Make sure that you weigh yourself at well-defined times, i.e., always before or after going to the toilet and having a meal/drink.  The wall-clock time matters less than making it a fixed part of your routine.

Minute tracking made me understand the difference between my three weighings very well, to the point that by knowing my weight in the evening (my highest weigh-in), I can predict my morning weight and after-exercise weight (lowest weight as I barely eat during the day).  It also made me understand my weekly fluctuations (I exercise less during weekends and Thursday, so my weekly low is Wednesday or Friday), to the point I often can predict my weekly low weight on Monday.  I can even predict my weight months ahead with an accuracy of a few days/a few hundred grams.

Don’t put too much emphasis on individual measurements, but use frequent weighing to understand your weight.  Get an Internet-connected weight which automatically keeps track of and charts your weight.  It sounds gimmicky, but it is incredibly useful and removes a couple barriers to measuring your weight often, most importantly the need to note it.  You probably don’t need thrice a day like I do, but daily weighings at a consistent time is a must if you want to understand and track your weight.  Just remember that eating a ton of chocolate – even if not literally – is not very healthy, but it will not necessarily increase your weight a lot on the short term – there’s a lot of energy compared to weight, meaning you’ll probably eat less of other stuff, so your weight is likely lower after binging chocolate than by eating healthily.

Another bonus is that you can gamify your weight loss.  For a long time, there was nothing more satisfying than beating my weight record: lowest weight in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, …  There’s many other things you can work towards: losing multiples of 5 kg from your max, reaching weights that are multiples of 5 kg, moving down another number in BMI, just breaking another full kg, etc.  Work towards many sub-goals instead of just your ultimate weight goal to make sure you win as many times as possible.  I experienced that every win motivated me to skip more snacks and put extra energy into my exercise.  At a point I considered biking 75 km in heavy rain on just 3 hours of sleep even if it would put me in an inconvenient place after reaching my lowest weight in 10 years.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, the old advice you keep getting is the only things that work: make lifestyle changes.  Eat healthier and exercise more.  Much like for math, there is no royal road to natural weight loss.

The good news is that if you focus on making a few high-impact changes, you don’t need to think about it in your daily life.  After you do something for two months, it becomes part of your routine.  Today, I don’t even think about eating healthy.  I don’t think about exercise (except when I haven’t done it for a couple days and start getting restless).

That’s how the incredible non-diet chocolate diet works: by making a few substantial changes I can still enjoy the small things in life and make healthier changes.  As they don’t feel like chores, they become lasting lifestyle changes and hopefully lead to a lasting weight loss.

While it is not something you can really control, I have also got incredible support and encouragement throughout.  No matter how vain you my or may bot be, that really helps keeping going as well: making and especially sharing your victories.  Even if it probably becomes a bit much for friends after the 5th “I reached another milestone because I’m borderline autistic and can make patterns out of the most random numbers” Facebook post 🙂  So, thanks y’all for support and not blocking me for celebrating self-made victories like 10e = 27.2 kg lost.

While I didn’t feel it much while I was obese, I can feel today that many of the ailments I was suffering from have gone away, and I feel significantly better than 6 months ago.  I doubt it’s just losing weight, but that, eating healthier, exercising more,  stopping smoking and drinking, and a couple other factors together have landed me in a better mood and more confident.  That’s what’s the world needs: me with a bigger ego.