What no one tells you about weight loss: Ten things I learned the hard way

As someone who lost more than 100 pounds (over 4 years), I consider myself someone who has gone through one of the drastic “before and after” body transformations you see on social media. While the process of how I lost the weight is another post altogether, I wanted to share with you some of the learnings from my journey which I wish someone would have told me before or during my weight loss.

If you’re trying to lose weight and have not figured out why you want to lose weight, you should stop reading right now and ask yourself — “Why do I want to lose those 15, 50, or 100 pounds?”. Your reasons could be anything: to enjoy better health or to have better sex or to rid yourself of diabetes or to look great for your wedding. But continue to ask yourself, really, Why? Dig a little deeper and try to understand some of the real emotions and desired outcomes behind wanting to change your body. It should be something that evokes desirable feelings and will get you excited about wanting to lose weight.

For me, I was tired of feeling unhappy with the way I looked in the mirror and wishing I had someone else’s body or body type. My why was:

Note your why down somewhere where it is easily accessible to you. I truly believe that your body will follow your mind, and that when you set an intention, your mind will find a way to achieve it. However, this step is more important because when the going gets tough (and trust me, there will be days where it will), you can remind yourself your why and push yourself to be a better version of yourself everyday.

Yes, weight loss is hard. But maintaining the weight loss is even harder for some people. Success in life is built from your rituals. Similarly, weight loss is about reestablishing new rituals with your body. 
As per Tony Robbins:

The only way to make the weight loss sticky is to love the rituals/process and enjoy what you’re doing. I started off at a regular gym and found it incredibly demotivating to go there regularly. I decided to try different things and ended up trying all major workout routines ranging from yoga, pilates, barre training, Crossfit, and HIIT bootcamps to calisthenics. I found that I particularly enjoyed bootcamps and I looked forward to those classes.

But if I never tried all of them, I’d never have known what I truly enjoyed. And once you figure that out, you can then modify your workout routine based on your current goals. For instance, my current weekly schedule includes 6 days of alternating HIIT bootcamp and weight training. But the entire process of taking care of my body feels a lot better because I know I enjoy a part of it.

Weight loss is not a sudden change. Doing it the right way is a slow, gradual process. You will need to learn to be patient and kind with your body. At my heaviest, I suffered from a very negative self-image. As I started losing enough weight for it to noticeable to the people around me, I started receiving a ton of compliments from people around me. However, the words I’d say to myself when I got out of the shower were still the same. I would still look at myself and see all the bulges that I did not like, despite the fact that I had made so much progress from where I started.

I had lost weight on the outside, but on the inside, I was still the same person. After a lot of research on how to change the voice inside my head, I started practicing Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

I set reminders on my bathroom mirror and bedroom wall to say “I am enough”, “I love myself”, “I am lovable”, “I am significant” and would often repeat this mantra out loud at home, during my drive to work. Heck I even set reminders on my phone in the afternoons and would say this to myself at work.

After a few days, I noticed that I started looking at the same mirror, but I was now not focusing on the bulges, but on the fact that I could now see bones in areas that I did not notice any before — maybe because they were hidden under layers of fat. This practice instilled a deeper sense of self love and self worth in me and helped me truly love myself more. I started appreciating the person I had become and looked forward to all my achievements in the process. So I cannot stress the importance of changing the way you talk to yourself

There is enough scientific research to show that you truly are the average of the five people you spend most of your time with. If you were overweight because of an unhealthy lifestyle, ask yourself how much of that was impacted by of the beliefs and habits of people around you?

My social life was changed in many different ways. I’ve lost some friends as the activity of going to the bar or eating out was more important than our actual friendship. I’ve strengthened other relationships where having common health goals helped us support each other. I’ve also made new friends who never knew the obese me and I enjoyed having a fresh start there.

Maybe the friends you had won’t serve you anymore to help you become the person you want to be. Make sure you use these changes to strengthen yourself as a person. Use this as an opportunity to learn how to strengthen your other relationships, too. I’ve stopped allowing people in my life who bring me down and don’t serve me positively anymore. By doing so, I’ve also made room for people who do treat me well and uplift me. I’m open to be more open, more And I’m still more “me” than ever before….

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my fair share of yo yo diets — some of which brought me results, some of which didn’t. However, all these “crazy diets” were unsustainable with my lifestyle. In most cases, I was back to my pre-diet weight in the few weeks following the diet. While I completely understand hacking your way to results through these diets, you have to figure out what truly works for you.

This means trying to find the foods you truly enjoy eating and the eating lifestyle that fits in with your schedule. After trying more than ten different types of diets, I started noticing the healthy meals that I truly enjoyed. I started discovering healthier foods that I found delicious. Make sure you try to change the relationship you have with food. Try to eat more of the foods that you know are good for you. Having said that, you should not punish yourself for the food you ate yesterday. Know that cheat days and guilty indulgences are totally okay.

I am currently also practicing mindful eating: the art of sitting, chewing and breathing slowly while eating. But the most profound feeling for me was practicing gratitude for the food I am eating.

You should target to not only lose fat, but also increase muscle. This is because muscle takes up less space than fat, making you look slimmer and is metabolically active — helping you burn more calories later. When you exercise, you gain muscle, raise your metabolism and lose fat, but this fat loss doesn’t always show up on the scale.

Where it will show up is in measurements, how your clothes fit and how your body looks. And all this can happen even if the scale isn’t moving. So make sure you regularly take Before and After pictures and track body measurements with a tape. This will reap rewards when you want to go back and see if you’ve really made any progress.

And consistency, day over day, can be hard at times. I knew that seeing results was what motivated me the most. You also know from the point above that the number on the scale meant nothing after a while, and what I wanted to truly measure to see if I’m moving towards my goal was my body fat %, I knew that this was a number which was slower to move and hence harder to help keep motivated over time.

So I started celebrating little, non-scale victories such as my first 60 second plank, first push-up, first squat 150 pound squat, etc. Every week, I’d log in my journal the targets that I look forward to in my workouts during the week, and if I achieved them, I’d reward myself with mini treats. These could range from my favorite cappuccino or a treat at my favorite Middle Eastern restaurant to that bodycon dress I had been eyeing for a while.

These are things I would have bought myself anyway, but knowing that I “earned” these treats just helped make it better. Tracking these activities also helped me focus on my strength, endurance, moods, and attitude. This helped me improve my overall well being, especially when the scale won’t budge but I was still making progress.

Every body is different and reacts to foods differently. The diet that works for one person might not work well for you. So please don’t simply replicate any of your social media icon or favorite celebrity’s diets. Pay close attention to how your body reacts to the different foods.

I’ve always been a vegetarian but my one of my friends who was a regular meat eater experienced drastic weight loss when she stopped eating all kinds of meat. She did not know this until later but she had sensitivities to a few popular kinds of meat. In the same vein, there will be some foods that will feel better for your body than others.

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer to figure out what works for you. You will have to experiment with different kinds of foods and notice how the different foods affect you.

One golden rule here is to forget counting calories but instead, focus on making the calories count. Put the word nutrition in your top of mind. For instance, a cupcake may have 250 calories – which is the same amount of calories as in 1.5 oz almonds. However, both foods have a very different impact on your blood sugar and insulin levels. While there is a high likelihood that in steady state metabolism, all of the carbohydrates in the cupcake will be converted into fat, the almonds will cause a very low spike in sugar levels and will take much longere to be metabolized by your body, helping you stay full longer — and the Vitamin E and antioxidants are a nice plus, too.

Change is hard. Weight loss requires you to changes something in your routine. Every time I wanted to increase the intensity of my weight loss, I started with a plan of action that was down to the T.

I often travel for work which can make it hard to maintain a consistent schedule. But every week, I figured out the time I wanted to schedule my workouts, decided on my BodySpace app my workout routines for the week and planned my meals in advance. If I wasn’t traveling that week, I would cook twice a week and that with meal preparation.

As much as possible, I try to reduce my decision fatigue by planning in advance and I truly believe this helps me build the willpower to stay on track and stray away from cheating. Even if you are not a “planner” but a “doer”, this is extremely helpful in the start once you are adjusting to a new routine. Once this routine is natural to you, you can skip the planning and listen to your body rhythm. But remember that it takes a while for your body to adjust to any new routine so it’ll be a while before your body craves those workouts and healthy meals. Until it does, remember that perseverance is key.

This was a big one for me since I had vision boards of celebrities in my dream outfits which I used as inspiration for weight loss. I dreamed that I would wear those outfits once I reached my “dream weight/BF%”. However, you should know that there is no such thing as natural spot reduction — you cannot lose weight from a particular part of your body.

The way your body will look after weight loss will depend on where you were storing the pre-weight loss weight. I carried most of my weight in my midsection, thighs and arms, and this was where my stubborn fat still lies. While I have lost a significant amount of weight from my stomach area, I still want to be more leaner before I can rock my summer crop top and dream lehenga (a traditional Indian outfit I plan to wear during my brother’s wedding).

Now if I was still hung on to the image of me in that “dream body” I envisioned, I wouldn’t have been happy and I would have totally disregarded all the progress that I did truly make. This is where my self love and self care routine helped me stay positive and stay focused on my mission. I am currently continuing to tone and define my muscles through heavy weight training.

I hope these tips help you stay empowered and continue loving yourself during your weight loss and self love journey.

PS: I’ve always felt scared+shamed to share my weight loss story and am trying to break out of it through this first post. Please be kind. I would love to know your thoughts on whether you’ve had any similar experiences or would like me to elaborate on any of these

Thank You and Much love,
Heena

What no one tells you about weight loss: Ten things I learned the hard way

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