Only determined minds lose weight , here is how!

Students corner

Contributed by

Mr Abdul Rouf

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When I was 15 years old I had the hard realisation that I needed to lose weight, I was 140kg, yes you read it correctly I was 140kg.

My entire childhood went by ,without me coming to this conclusion, however, I did know that I was obese .

I just never knew how bad it was until by chance I saw myself in the mirror at an angle , I could barely recognise myself.

This was  the first step of my weight loss journey , it doesn’t matter how many times your parents, friends or partner tells you that “you’re getting a bit chubby” or “maybe you should think about getting a gym membership” what really matters is you telling yourself “now’s the time”. 

Everyone else giving their opinion does nothing but make you feel worse and sometimes demoralise you from actually wanting to get started.

The second step was  figuring out what to do?

I was fortunate enough that at 15 , I found a gym that had a very good trainer who gave me great  advice regarding  exercises and diet. 

At the time I had no idea how his diet plan would work. 

I just ate what he told me to and from there I lost weight. 

I was able to get all the way down to around 80 kgm  with his training and diet plan. 

But, a few years later I was diagnosed with  depression and gained back all of the weight that I had lost, partly due to medicine and partly due to overeating & inactivity. 

To my good luck I got into University and my depressive symptoms started getting better.

I was ready to get back to losing weight.

I did the routine and followed the diet that the trainer had given me but after a month I had realised that I didn’t lose any weight and wasn’t feeling any better physically. 

What was wrong? 

Why isn’t it working? 

These questions kept running through my head, I had wanted to just throw in the towel, no matter what I did I couldn’t seem to lose any weight even though this routine worked for me in the past. 

I then had my second epiphany.

Due to the fact that I was in university, I didn’t have the time to go to the gym as often as I used to (6 times a week) or have the ability of being fine with eating bland food anymore (hard boiled eggs for breakfast, boiled chicken for lunch and dinner).

I had to make changes to match my lifestyle.

I sat down and did some research for about a 2 weeks and made a plan that suited  me, these deceivingly simple changes was all I needed:

1. Figure out my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). There are many BMR calculators online and all of them are good, all you need to know beforehand is your age, height and weight. After putting all of them into a BMR calculator it will tell you how many calories your body burns by just existing. I recommend the calculator on calculator.net as it has a handy graph which tells you how many calories your body is burning based on your activity.

For example, take my example . At the time I started losing weight again I was 130kg, 183cm, 22 years old and exercising 4 times a week. According to calculator.net my BMR was 3426 calories. 

From information I found on multiple health websites, I needed to be in a 500 calorie deficit to lose half a KG a week so with this in mind and having known my BMR, I should eat a maximum of 2900 calories a day in order to lose half a kg a week.

1. Counting calories. Knowing how many calories you need to eat is all well and good but without knowing how much you’re actually eating, it’s all useless. I recommend using a calorie counting app like MyFitnessPal. MyFitnessPal has the advantage of scanning a barcode of a snack or an ingredient and it’ll tell you how many calories it is per unit mass. For example if you scan a jar of peanut butter it’ll tell you how many calories is in 40g of that specific peanut butter. However, this feature is a paid feature, however I believe it’s very much worth it.
2. Get a kitchen scale. This is by far the most useful thing that I have bought. Knowing exactly how many grams of chicken, rice, milk, cereal etc. that I’m eating and because of MyFitnessPal, counting my calories and knowing exactly how much I can eat per day has made losing weight almost too easily.
3. The final part, what to eat. This may seem to be the hardest part but in reality it’s the easiest. In the grand scheme of things there is no such thing as “healthy” and “unhealthy” food; the only thing that makes it healthy or unhealthy is how much of it you eat.  I started avoiding processed food .

I ,for example, have chocolate every single day after every meal and I’m still losing half a kg to 1kg a week, this is because I eat it after weighing it and only having just enough to not put me over my daily calorie limit.

Now if you’re like me and want to gain muscle then you need to make sure you’re eating enough protein (1.6 multiplied by your body weight in kg) but apart from that don’t worry about fat or carb intake. The only thing that matters in losing weight is keeping under your calorie limit, make sure you don’t go over your limit. Burn your calories by brisk exercise .

Weigh every aspect of your diet and you’ll very easily stay under your limit.

All of these tips that I have laid has helped me lose over 15kg in just a couple months and I hope that they can help you in your weight loss journey. Do try and give your feedback.

Sources:

1. Caloric Deficit: What to Know
2. How to safely and effectively create a calorie deficit for weight loss
3. Sean Nalewanyj – YouTube
4. BMR Calculator
5. Calorie counting made easy – Harvard Health.

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