In 2013 I made 3 chance discoveries that changed my life and got me into shape like never before:
- I saw what it looked like when a party-hard friend got serious about eating and working out.
- I came across a weight loss strategy that fitted my analytical approach to life (technically it was a promotional excerpt from this book, posted online).
- And I found a way to order groceries online (read on to find out why that mattered).
Oh, and I’m a vegetarian. People somehow think vegetarians don’t get fat. Except when they say that, they think of straight-edge vegans. As a vegetarian, there’s plenty of options: Pizza, Vegetarian Burgers, Beer, 500 calorie Mocha Frappuccinos. Producers of unhealthy, fatty foods (naturally, packed with processed sugar and simple carbohydrate) have long since caught on to the vegetarian market.
So how did I do it?
I Chose a Battle Worth Winning
The only times I ever managed to lose weight was when the fight was worth winning. In 2009 I managed to follow a diet of no alcohol, sweet sodas, caffeine or processed sugar when I wanted to give moral support to a friend who was fighting a battle for his own health. Once that goal was gone, my discipline faltered and I quickly went back to my old weight.
For these 100 days I picked a battle that was worth winning. I picked a proper fight. I was not only going to lose weight. I was going to get absolutely ripped. I saw the red stubble on my face in the mirror and made up my mind. I was going to look like a viking.
This mental image made it worthwhile fighting. No longer was it about an abstract number on the scale. Now it was about the mental image of seeing myself the way I’ve never seen myself before. I might succumb to a piece of cake if it was just about some extra fat tissue. But now it was about a complete transformation. Not something I was going to risk for a piece of cake.
I Trusted My Strategy
If you lose trust in your battle strategy, would you follow through on it? Probably not. Weight loss can work the same way. If you don’t trust your plan or you lose your trust, you won’t stick to it. You don’t need to find the perfect strategy, just one that can work and in which you won’t lose trust.
For me it was calorie counting. I used an app called MyFitnessPal and made sure every day I ate less than 1500 calories. If I ate more, I had to exercise and burn enough calories to be back below 1500 again. Is that the perfect strategy? Maybe, maybe not, but it works. And I trusted it would. I knew if I stuck to it, I would lose weight eventually, no matter what my scale said.
Very quickly I noticed that going for high protein foods over empty carbohydrates or fat-soaked snacks was a much more pleasant way to reach that calorie goal. Cutting out ‘white’ carbs, going low-fat and low-sugar with all my dairy products were among the fastest wins. I read labels of soy meat and pretty much everything else – discovering just how much fat went into them. The average soy-based mock meat has more than half of its calories coming from fat. Compare that with wheat-based Seitan – where it’s virtually zero. Ironically, there is a current anti-Seitan trend that makes people avoid it – even though it’s actually one of the healthiest mock meat choices out there. Never heard of a war on Seiten? That’s because they use a different name in that context: Gluten.
It took a lot of time. 100 days is more than 3 months. But I believed that if I followed a strategy for good, I’d eventually succeed. This trust allowed me to keep going.
I Made the Battlefield Win My Fights
In the 15th century a small English force annihilated a much larger French army. In the now famous Battle of Agincourt, English longbows laid waste to French knights who got stuck in field of mud. The battlefield fought and won the fight for the English.
In my weight loss battles, I try to create an everyday battlefield that fights my battles for me. I remove all snacks and sweets from my apartment. I avoid super markets and their sweet isles by ordering groceries online. I remove obstacles to working out by learning home workouts and getting memberships to nearby gyms. I manipulate my environment to help my fight my battles.
The sad truth is that once you try to lose weight as a vegetarian, you notice that food options in a lot of restaurants are reduced to the house salad. My way of dealing with that is to actually eat at home before meeting friends for dinner. Much easier to load up on proteins with eggs (try them boiled for 6 minutes on whole wheat bread with mustard) and then just have a light salad than trying (and failing) to get full at a restaurant in a healthy way.
I don’t have the mental energy necessary to emerge victorious in every battle of discipline. But if the odds are tilted in my favour, I got a realistic chance even when confronted with an otherwise overwhelming force.
Could You Do It?
Finding a battle worth winning took me a long time. Coming across a strategy I could believe in was a a chance encounter. Creating an everyday environment that made winning possible required prior work on improving my discipline.
It might have been vanity, thinking of how impressed my friends would be when I posted my before and after pictures on Facebook. It might have been support from my girlfriend, helping me a lot with her diet advice. It might have been narcissism, making me confident in my own ability for adherence.
Your own mileage may vary. But being a vegetarian shouldn’t be an excuse. Yes, a low-carb diet is super hard. However, if you can compensate for that by eating smarter – reducing fat and sugar as well, rather than being on an all-out anti-carb war, you can lose weight without going hungry.
One of the hard to avoid downsides of going for a high protein diet as a vegetarian, is that it’s ultimately more expensive than most other diets (unless you’re really willing to give up on variety and only stick with eggs, 0% fat milk/yogurt, vegetables, fruit and whole wheat products). Since posting this article I’ve published my own living expenses and while they might be different in your home country, it gives you an idea what I spend on food. At least, while on a diet, you won’t have to buy so much of it 😉
So yes, this might not work for you. But you won’t know until you try.
Did I manage to keep my weight?
I set out on this journey in November 2013 and am happy to report that I have stuck with it since then. I experimented a bit with exercise and nutrition since then, aiming for a diet and a work-out routine that I feel comfortable in keeping up for an indefinite amount of time. Here’s a comparison how I looked when I started out and how I look as of March 2015.
What about yourself? What weight loss strategies have you tried and how have they worked out for you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
Hey Karsten, thanks for sharing. I have had major struggles with my weight for as long as I can remember. Although I am now down 25+kg from my high, I have recently started pushing for the last 15kg so thanks for the inspiration!
I also find cutting the drinking and sugars is key. Instead of calories, I focus on eating a paleo diet but that tends to naturally = low cal. I’ve also done multi-day fasts (with lots of supplements, talk to your dr. etc) to break through psychological plateaus like the 100kg level.
Hey Oliver, congratulations on your progress!
Yup, avoiding liquid calories makes a big difference. Satiation from them is very low and it ends up being pure extra calories. If it’s something alcoholic, you not only face extra calories from alcohol, but more hunger and less discipline when it comes to other food choices.
Something I didn’t mention in the post is sleep and stress. I’ve tracked my calorie intake over a long period and usually managed to stick to it quite well. Exceptions being alcohol and days when I didn’t get enough sleep or had a lot of stress. You can really see how it costs you mental energy and you stop caring about what you eat. In case you haven’t tried it, I’d give sleeping more a try.
Hey Oliver, congratulations on your progress!
Yup, avoiding liquid calories makes a big difference. Satiation from them is very low and it ends up being pure extra calories. If it’s something alcoholic, you not only face extra calories from alcohol, but more hunger and less discipline when it comes to other food choices.
Something I didn’t mention in the post is sleep and stress. I’ve tracked my calorie intake over a long period and usually managed to stick to it quite well. Exceptions being alcohol and days when I didn’t get enough sleep or had a lot of stress. You can really see how it costs you mental energy and you stop caring about what you eat. In case you haven’t tried it, I’d give sleeping more a try.
hmm – I’ll work on the sleep, maybe that will do it. It definitely gets harder as I get closer
Hey Oliver – how did things go?
Still stalled out , but I think it’s stress and alcohol. If I cut alcohol completely for a month+ it very slowly comes off. I haven’t given it the attention I should as I got sidetracked on the trading (which is also high stress).
Yeah, it’s a huge attention drain, regardless which route you go. That and having to set aside time to go through with it (e.g. for exercise, to pack food, to look up healthy eating options).
Alcohol is also pretty big. What I found helps a bit there is switching to more ‘efficient’ alcohol – red wine (e.g. Pinot Noir), scotch, lean cocktails (vodka, soda, slice of lime), light beer (San Miguel Light).
Cool – doing some travel and will reboot my efforts in Nov. I’ll be going back to lifting weights then, too. Definitely true on the alcohol though even red wine seems to be too much.
Dr Keifer has an interesting comment on alcohol. He claims when you have it, your body switches to burning that alone so everything else gets stored. So it may not be the drinks themselves so much as what you ate around that time that would’ve been burned. But he is a physicist – not a medical dr.
Hey Karsten, thanks for sharing your strategy, along with tips on how to do that. A few things really ring a bell in me, like when you say your efforts have positive impacts on your life (that you can actually measure), rather than you turning into someone you resent.
To a certain degree, I also resent the belly-inactive guy I have become, and after letting the idea of doing something about it grow in me for some time, now it has sprouted, time has come for action!
Looking like a vicking is definitely not something I’d identify with, to each his own! I find pictures to be a good way to measure transformation, one way or another. Now, I’ll do what I never thought I’d do, and take pictures of me, like you did. Facing everyday the option of becoming a bit more of someone I loathe day after day, surely is a great motivation to go the other way: exert freewill and determination, the gift of thinking for ourselves and choosing the way we want to live our lives, that was bestowed upon us from birth.
Time to take the challenge! Woo-Hoo ! 😀
I think the ability to experience the journey itself as something desirable rather than just the destination is a big part in increasing the chances of success.
From what I recall from looking into this myself, ‘before pictures’ alone have been shown to improve chances of losing weight already – so definitely a good starting point.
Thanks for sharing Karsten. Well done
Hey man,
This is exactly to the letter the same strategy I used to lose weight when I lived in BKK. 1500/2000 cals a day depending on if I worked out or not. I also added intermittent fasting most days, meaning I had some nuts and lunch but nothing else before dinner. I also tried to stay away from carbs and had a lot of low cal carb stuff. 1 cheat day a week.
Worked excellent, Myfitnesspal is definitely the best. Tesco delivery is a game changer, I used it in Prague too.
Very impressive! Congratulations on making that work! I can put up with a lot of things – but (intermittent) fasting is not really in the cards for me. I just need something in my stomach or I get really grumpy 🙂
How much did you lose over what time-frame? Any specific reason?
I lost 6 kgs in about 1.5 month, then I kind of levelled off and maintained. Lost weight because I was tired of being a fatass, quite simple and a girlfriend might have said something to that effect 🙂 Extra bulk is better for cold Scandinavia than the tropics. I also had way less back pain after getting in shape which was a real problem before when working a lot of hours on the computer.
IM is probably not for everyone. It’s much easier to do if you go low carb to begin with. Not a long term strategy for me either, but great for a quick burst. It’s good if you don’t want to count calories, because it’s very difficult to eat more than 2000 cals in one meal if you don’t buy pizza or similar.