There’s an undeniable truth about weight-loss and it’s this…..
We get fat when we eat too much. I wish I could offer you some solace like, it’s s’okay you can still eat as much as you like and lose weight. You can still pop tart through breakfast, milkshake it up at lunch and as long as you have a cup of greens with your evening meal you’ll be fine! Dig in! But I can’t. If you want to be smaller than you are now then you have to eat less than you do now.
That’s not to say I only have bad news in my sack however. I also bring with me a solution. It’s a routine of eating that makes so much more sense than how we’re typically told to eat that you can’t help but shovel in less on a daily basis. All it takes is a willingness to buck the trend of eating breakfast, lunch and supper because who the fuck decided they’re the rules anyway?
I mean seriously, who is genuinely hungry upon waking? No one. We’re eating at 7am as a preventative measure at best, ie to stop us getting hungry later. But get this — it doesn’t work. A bowl of cornflakes before dawn won’t keep a flea sustained until lunch time let alone an adult human. So we sit and suffer all through the morning, watching the clock, praying for those hands to tick round to anywhere approaching midday when we can, in all good conscience, eat again. But because we’re on a diet and we’ve been conditioned to think that lunches are supposed to be “light”, when we go to relieve our lunch-time starvation we do with a salad and an apple.
This fills us up for ooh, roughly 45 minutes and then it’s back to watching the clock again, feeling all depressed and frankly anxious because we’ve got to wait another 6 hours or so until supper. Then of course we’ve got the whole 5pm if-I-don’t-eat-something-in-the-next-five-minutes-I’m-going-to-eat-this-stapler situation. But because we’re soooo incredibly famished we don’t go for the six almonds like we probably should (if we’re to maintain an appetite for our evening meal), we tuck into something substantial like toast or some of last night’s leftovers.
So what happens? Now we’re not hungry for our evening meal anymore. We’ve ruined our appetite because we “pigged-out” though sheer desperation at tea time. Do we skip the evening’s chicken kievs however? Do we fuck. Come 9 pm we’re bloated and full and about ready to heave our mashed potato belly up to bed where it lies prostrate for 8 hours on the other side of which, we’ll eat again.
No, no, no, not for me. It’s crazy. We rely on one small salad to give us the energy to sustain us throughout the workday, fuelling up for sleep and the one and only time during the day when we’re actually not at all hungry – first thing while we’re still in our pyjamas and wiping sleepy dust from our eyes.
Let me tell you something, you are an adult human and as such you can make your own rules about when and how you’re going to eat. So ditch this nonsense. It’s going to keep you fat. It was a happy day in my world when I realised I could do just that, let me tell you. I did it instantly. I adjusted my timings on the spot and am happy to say my whole daily battle with what I’m eating and when and how much I can eat and is that too much? and oh oops, now I’ve snacked and ruined my appetite et cetera et cetera, fell away. I automatically began eating less whilst being less hungry. It’s all a question of timings and working with your body’s rhythms you see.
So, my unconventional daily eating routine now looks like this:
Breakfast: between 1100 and 1200. I have breakfast when I feel hungry and not a minute before. No preventative eating in this camp. Waiting until lunch is too long, but eating early is pointless, I’m starving by 11am whether I’ve had anything or not.
Lunch: between 1400 and 1500. I let my body use up my breakfast calories before I eat again. I wait for those tell tale pangs and I munch on some of last night’s leftovers usually, so there’s no cooking, or faff, required – and now I sail through the usual 5pm starvation time without so much as a “ooh I fancy a biscuit”.
And supper? There’s no 8 hour wait for me between meals. I eat anytime between 1800 and 1900 depending on how hungry I am.
Then an hour or so later I have some yummy fruit, some dark chocolate and a cup of green tea because I can.
It’s an eating routine that gives me the most bang for my buck. Nothing is skipped, my energy levels remain high throughout the day when I actually need them and overeating becomes nigh-on impossible because well, when you know you’re going to be eating again in a few hours, what’s the point?
Just with a simple change of routine, food stops being an issue. There are no decisions to be made about whether or not to snack, if I do will be hungry later? Yawn, yawn, yawn. The battle ends and I get to concentrate on what really matters, like posting on Instagram, without constantly worrying about when and where my next mouthful is coming from.
So, the takeaway from this? Eat less and eat often because when you do? You can’t help but eat well.
Photo by Daniel Roe on Unsplash