The easiest 12kg (26lb) I ever lost
When you look back on it, it’s amazing how many things you have tried over the years. At one point I was eating exclusively cabbage soup, another time my diet consisted of only flavoured oats. Then there was the — numerous — times I ate nothing but salad for a calendar month. I could be “cutting out the evil food” — bread, chocolate, rice, vegetarianism, or being a carnivore. I almost forgot the time I was trying to chew food more, or do nothing but sit in a quiet room and look at what you were eating… slowly.
Of course I have also tried calorie counting — a number of times — using the well known app My Fitness Pal to track and weigh each and every little ingredient that went into my meals. Did it work? Yes, I dropped about 15kg pretty rapidly. Was I happy? No. I had terrible anxiety of not hitting my goal each day, and then sometimes I would get to the end of the day, unable to sleep, wondering if I should be eating a single weetbix (or bic?) with a very thin 3g of butter to make it low GI. How could I possibly eat food that I didn’t cook for myself? How could I go out and socialise?
All of these strategies work, but none of them are sustainable long term. None of them are a true lifestyle change. They are just a quick band-aid for a greater underlying problem.
The reality was that I worked at home, in a job that was very sedentary, in a busy household with 3 kids. Work was rewarding but often high stress, and the fridge was only a few steps away. With so much else I was responsible for, there was very little time or energy left in my day to meticulously measure out ingredients or be able to stick to a diet that left me unable to perform at my best in the short term.
Searching for a solution
I have been trying to come up with an answer that ticks all the boxes for a long time. I tried so many different strategies that when I came up with this one I didn’t even bother to let anyone know I was trying it. I was just going to quietly test it out and if it doesn’t work I didn’t need to answer to anyone why. It would just be another thing added to my long list of other attempts and subsequent failures.
My criteria was fairly complex. The solution needed to be easy to start, easy to stick with, and get long term results. It needed to take up little time. I needed to still be able to socialise and stick with the plan.
Any new strategy also needed to be easy to get back on the wagon if something went wrong — so many times you slip up and say “oh well, my day is ruined” and so begins the slide back to where you were — but this time even heavier!
Reading the forums — so often someone asks “how do you stay motivated” and they say, “its not motivation that gets you there, its discipline” of course without motivation to be disciplined all of this is moot. What I was really looking for was something that required not much of either — it needed to just be how I lived my life now. A lifestyle change.
So in summary whatever was going to work needed to do the following:
- Not cause anxiety
- Not be prescriptive on the food
- Be simple to follow
- Be easy to stick with
- Get results
I have also been obsessed with trying to work out just what went wrong in recent history that led to the obesity epidemic we have now. Obviously something changed in the late 60s early 70s, which is before my time. But what I can use as a reference is my own life.
I was a skinny kid, like, a really skinny kid. I was also very active and fit. Toward the end of high school I started to gain weight, and as my lifestyle changed into adulthood it gradually kept packing on the kilograms.
At first I thought maybe it was sugar. Then maybe processed food. But, what if it wasn’t what we were eating, but how we ate?
When I was young, the kitchen was a foreign place I would find my Mum or Nanna in. In the late afternoon I would come in and say “I am hungry!” and the response would always be “Dinner will be ready soon” then I would go back and keep playing until it was time.
As I grew into my tweens I would be out with my friends from 9am until 6pm doing heavens knows what — and some things I do know but wouldn’t dare repeat! I would skip breakfast, probably skipped lunch most days and then came back home for dinner.
In early high school my parents’ marriage ended. They still got along well and the breakup didn’t affect me emotionally, but with two households to support my Mum went to work. This meant that many days after school my sister and I would be home alone until she finished, and I would now be in charge of cooking dinner on those nights. I got very good at cooking spaghetti bolognese during that time.
As I grew older the kitchen became a more comfortable place for me. I enjoy cooking, and enjoy trying to master different cuisines. Right now I have a wok burner in my backyard with a metre high flame — it has to live in the backyard because it’s too dangerous to have in the house. I have become proficient at cooking Chinese, Thai, Indian, Japanese, Steak, Bread, Italian, American (stuffed burger patties anyone?) and most traditional western food. I have a good quality pasta roller, a decent collection of chef knives and a KitchenAid. Cooking well is something I have invested a lot of time and money into.
Where am I going with this? As a man in his mid 30s, the preceding paragraph would sound foreign and just downright weird in the 60s. With traditional gender roles, the woman of the house would take care of the diet of the family. The kitchen was hers. If you wanted something, she would be the one to fetch it for you. You might know how to make toast, but that was really something that should left to the experts unless you were desperate.
There is a great TV series from the BBC called “Back in time for Dinner” (there is also an Australian edition too) which puts a family into each decade starting around the 30s and explores the foods they would eat and the gender roles of the house. They say the obesity epidemic started in the 70s, which is also when the traditional gender roles started to break down. Women began going back to work and convenience food was born.
It’s the convenience food that gets all the blame, but maybe it’s the other half of that shift, the change in how we were fed. The breakdown of the traditional female role in the household meant that we were left to our own devices. And, being left to our own devices meant that we just ate what we wanted, when we wanted. It’s this whatever, whenever attitude towards eating that sees us all gaining weight — many of us simply didn’t have the structure in place when the training wheels came off.
I’m not lobbying for things to go back to how they were, society has changed and the labour required to keep the household running isn’t what it used to be. Mothers should have the same chance to fulfil the dreams and goals as everyone else in society. It’s not their fault. We just need to do what they were doing for us all along. We need the structure they created for us.
So what does that structure look like? Well there were only three meals a day. The cook had other things to do and couldn’t spend their lives just cooking. So there was breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sometimes you got dessert (my Nanna called it sweets) if you were lucky. Because there were strict meal times, and you weren’t allowed in the kitchen, there was no snacking. Finally, if you were getting a little round in the middle, they would adjust your meal. This might mean you get no sweets, or they just mix less butter into your mashed potato. You also didn’t get seconds.
So in summary:
- Three meals a day at regular times
- No snacking
- If you are overweight: no dessert, and no seconds.
So that’s the plan, but the kitchen is just there with nobody guarding the fridge. How do I keep myself on track? How do I stick with this, and how long it’s going to take? How do I even know that I am doing it correctly?
What about if I give myself a score for doing the right thing?
So I set about coming up with a scoring system that tells me if I am sticking to the structure. By getting an extra point towards my goal, I could see my progress, and it felt good. However keeping track of this in my head meant I quickly lost track of where I was at.
Gamifying weight loss
Being an app developer, people are always coming at me asking for the latest way to “gamify” something (game-if-y). The idea of gamifying something is to turn a common task into a game. This doesn’t need to be just in the high-flying digital world, we gamify things all the time when we make a game of something and try to beat it. An example would be seeing how fast you can clean the sharp knives when washing dishes in the sink.
The underlying purpose of gamifying something is to give you small dopamine hits by accomplishing goals. It’s the reason addictive mobile games are addictive — you are always chasing the next accomplishment and high score.
If you have to work really hard for something though, the dopamine hit doesn’t outweigh the effort and you move on.
This is where traditional weight loss goes awry for many people. People make a game of weight loss by trying really hard to be good, then jumping on the scales the next day. If you lost some weight, as you almost always do at the beginning of a diet, you get that dopamine hit and do it again the next day.
But after some time one of two things happens:
- You cheat, and still lose some weight
- You do everything perfectly and lose none or very little weight.
The contract of hard work for reward has been broken.
Weight loss communities tell you to just stick with it. It will come. They are also right. However that doesn’t help that you just lost a little bit of motivation. What’s the point? you say to yourself. You start to think about just how hard the last day was (or how you got away with cheating).
What you need is something that gives a guaranteed linear reward for doing the hard work. Something to track the actual progress towards your goal and cuts through the noise of water weight, the time of day you weigh yourself and how poor your digestion is today because of all that cheese you ate a couple of nights ago. Plus you also need more immediate rewards — you are “rewarded” by eating multiple times a day, but you only get rewarded by your progress once a day or once a week — when you step on the scales. What if you could have a small reward every time you made progress towards your goal?
What if there was a way to keep a score of all the small decisions that add up to reaching your goal?
A lifestyle change not a diet
It’s a bit cliche to talk about making a lifestyle change, don’t change your diet. Everyone preaches this, but the reality is — you have a lot of inertia in your life that has led you to where you are today. This is not to say you can’t look at your current situation and do something about it, but sometimes some things are out of your hands.
For example, I would love to sleep all I wanted and “listen to my body”, but when your two young children (and sometimes your teenager) crawl into your bed many nights, you have sleep apnoea, need to support your family emotionally and financially and your career is quite sedentary — making a knee jerk change to get out, live more and sleep whenever just isn’t a possibility.
What I needed was some simple rules to live by. You would think simple rules are easy to come up with but it’s something I had been trying to define for a long time. Most rules are either too prescriptive or too have too many ways of cheating. The classic example is “Only one glass” and suddenly you are challenging Bob Hawke for a world record:
The inspiration again came from the past. What were the rules? Well you ate breakfast, lunch and dinner. You didn’t eat out of those times or you would “spoil your appetite”. Another rule is don’t eat if you aren’t hungry. When you are a kid and have poor forward planning skills, you eat until you no longer want to, because you want to go and play with something far more interesting than eating. You aren’t worried about cramming enough calories so you can get through to the next meal without starvation. That’s Mum’s problem. As you grow older you eat to ensure you aren’t starving for your next meal. “Better fill up!” you say.
“Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner” and “Don’t eat if you aren’t hungry” seem diametrically opposed. I hear you screaming “I thought you told me to do one or the other?” Well there is a way you can do both — portion control. I know this is a scary word for many of you, but again there is a very simple way to know if your portions are right, it just takes a bit of practise.
If you are hungry for about 30 minutes before you eat, your portions are spot on. This small hunger period is actually when you are burning fat, so it’s really important that you have it.
So if you start eating your meals and you breeze through to the next mealtime, you need to reduce your portion slightly. On the other hand if you are starving for an hour or so leading into the next meal, you are more likely to lose control and need to increase your intake.
Notice how none of this is telling you what you have to eat for x days, or some crazy unsustainable routine like spritzing yourself three times before smelling your food. It’s about defining sensible rules to live by.
Tying it all together
All this sounds sensible, right? But I’m sure you are asking yourself how are you going to take action and do anything about it?
Well the good news is, being an app developer, I have done what I do with all my problems… write an app! And the even better news is, the app is free. My goal was to test the app for longer to make sure I could give some more perspective on the progression of using it, but with the COVID-19 outbreak I finally had the time to clean it all up and make it available for others. The crazy thing is — so far it has worked, the even crazier thing is; it’s been the easiest weight loss I have ever performed. I’ve finally found a program that I can easily stick to — because it’s how you should be living. You aren’t punishing yourself, you are just being sensible and reasonable.
The other thing is this — it won’t make you skinnier than you should be. If you are trying to set a new record for waif-ness, this isn’t the program for you. What it will do is take you to your goal weight, and keep you there. There is no distinction between diet and maintenance.
How does it all work?
Well its pretty simple.
First you setup the app and enter your current and goal weight. This is used to calculate your “goal score” and an estimated time it will take to reach this weight.
Then three times a day you get a notification to jump on the app.
When you open it up, you select a meal or a snack time. The app will then ask you a few questions about your portion size or even if you ate at all. Each response adjusts your score.
This score adds up and you can see your progress throughout the day and your total progress towards the goal score. If you make positive progress you will get an encouraging pop up.
That’s it. You can now get on with your day.
Why does it work?
The questions and score take into account all the considerations discussed so far.
By answering the questions, it reinforces being mindful about the choices you need to make. You will find yourself reaching for the fridge or a chocolate less and less (i’m writing this part on the day after easter!). The encouragement reminds you why you are doing this, and it gives you those little happy hits you need to stay on track. The reminders throughout the day keep you going, and because its on your phone and only takes a few seconds, there is no reason not to do it.
The science and math behind it
First of all the math. If you have ever counted calories you will know that you generally want to hit about 6000kj or 1500 calories per day. Anything less and you will burn out and binge eat or cause health complications, anything more and you wont get any results.
The questions are designed to reward you for roughly that intake, which in turn leads to weight loss. Specifically you should be seeing a deficit of about 2000kj a day. There are 37000kj in a kg of fat so you should be losing a kilogram about every 18.5 days or a pound every 8.5 days.
But I hear you screaming in frustration — “I have lost weight faster than this before!” Maybe. Maybe you have. But if you are following the pretty standard calorie reduction values listed above, you probably haven’t. You were probably just losing weight from your bowel as you consumed less, and you often drop a fair bit of water quickly as you reduce your sodium from twice a day KFC two-piece-feeds to salads with no dressing. For many people they will have results on the scale that far exceed the math above, but in time that will stall and the only real speed of weight loss is using the math above… and thats why we use a score instead of the scales and calories.
Secondly the science.
We are treading the line between a continuous diet and intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting has been shown to reduce appetite, but also slows the metabolism. By having short hungry periods we are delivering the best of both worlds.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0303720715300800
Snacking has a high correlation with obesity and increased energy intake — (particularly French women it would seem)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195666383710330
And the app aims to break peoples snacking habits through mindfulness:
Apple rejected the first review of the app as they wouldn’t allow it on the app store if it was fake news. So I needed to justify the app. All along I figured I could find some further studies that supported it, but the more I researched the more support I found for the methodology. It turns out there are actually a few clinical trials on right now that are testing the strategy and some good work to back up that it will have a positive effect. Nothing is exactly like Skinny Score, but in separate parts each element actually has a pretty strong scientific backing.
This is what I submitted to the app review:
The app works by promoting mindfulness and self compassion through attention bias modification. It also focuses on reducing food related anxiety by rewarding good behaviour and not fixating on calories, preventing food cravings in between meals (snacking), and encouraging mindful portion control. As you can see below, the literature shows that this method not only works but can achieve lasting effects.
Alberts et. al 2010 — Coping with food cravings. Investigating the potential of a mindfulness-based intervention shows that mindful interventions are effective at reducing food cravings for a long period of time.
Mantazios et al. 2013 — Making concrete construals mindful: A novel approach for developing mindfulness and self-compassion to assist weight loss shows that mindfulness and self-compassion positively predict weight loss, while negative automatic thoughts and cognitive-behavioural avoidance inversely predict weight loss. Thus decreasing food related anxiety and increasing mindfulness and self compassion are positively correlated with weight loss.
Boutelle et. al. 2016 — An open trial evaluating an attention bias modification program for overweight adults who binge eat shows that using a computer program to target adults who are overweight or obese and who binge eat was able to enact positive changes in attention bias to food cues with minimal intervention.
Rogers et. al 2016 — Mindfulness-based interventions for adults who are overweight or obese: a meta-analysis of physical and psychological health outcomes undertook a wider meta study of the literature on mindfulness in relation to physical and psychological health outcomes and concluded that mindful interventions had large effects on improving eating behaviours and positive therapeutic effects for BMI.
Mason et. al. 2017 — Testing a mobile mindful eating intervention targeting craving-related eating: feasibility and proof of concept performed a study using smart phones to deliver mindful interventions to overweight and obese patients and determined that a smartphone-delivered mindful eating intervention can effectively retain and engage participants, that it is associated with reductions in craving-related eating, and that changes in self-reported craving-related eating are associated with reductions in weight
Dounavi et. al. 2019 — Mobile Health Applications in Weight Management: A Systematic Literature Review undertook a meta study and concluded that Mobile health apps are widely considered as satisfactory, easy to use, and helpful in the pursuit of weight loss goals by patients. The potential of mobile health apps in facilitating weight loss lies in their ability to increase treatment adherence through strategies such as self-monitoring. These findings indicate that satisfactory treatment adherence and consequent weight loss and maintenance are achieved in the presence of high levels of engagement with a mobile health app.
Finally Lattimore 2019 — Mindfulness-based emotional eating awareness training: taking the emotional out of eating shows that an emotional eating-specific mindfulness intervention revealed significant improvements in food-cue reactivity, intuitive eating, emotional impulse regulation, inhibitory control and stress
If you want to view in full any of the articles, you can use SciHub (its like the pirate bay of academic articles) and download the original. This collection only scratches the surface of what is coming out, but it is good evidence that it’s not just anecdotal results we are getting.
Pitfalls & challenges
That’s right. Unlike every other weight loss strategy I will be upfront about the pitfalls and challenges you will face. As the title says — this is still the easiest weight I have ever lost. However I have discovered a few traps that I have fallen into from time to time:
- The first two weeks
With most diets these are the hardest, and this is no exception. It is particularly difficult with this one if you are prone to snacking in between. Your body will get used to it and I call it “getting over the hump” - Cheating
Don’t cheat on your score, you can make it up in the next meal, or just accept that by cheating you are adding more time being heavy. It’s a good learning to be honest about where you stand and what you have done. If you just have to eat something, eat something healthy — you get penalised less. - Don’t let it go too long
At the beginning of the COVID outbreak I knew I needed a new phone soon, as did my wife. So we rushed out and grabbed what we could before the supply chains were disrupted. Turns out we could still obtain electronics a few months later, but I didn’t throw the app back on the new phone immediately. At first I stuck with the diet but as time progressed I slipped back into my old habits and had to get over the hump again.
So if you want to give it a try, you can download the app. Its called Skinny Score and is available for Android and iOS
