The Fat Tom Weight Loss Plan

I'm posting this to answer the occasional kind enquiries that come my way.

What I Did

Over three years, I reduced my weight by six stones, from a bit over nineteen stones to a bit over thirteen. I'm still letting it decline.

How I Did It

I accepted that I was eating too much. Over time I developed sheaf of technical and psychological (oooh!) strategies to adapt to eating less. Most of this post -- the Plan sections -- is about that, because that's what people want to know!

Why I Did It 

I had occasionally lost weight before, but never very much, and I think that was because I had neither strong reason nor good intellectual model of weight loss. But this time, I've found that a host of reasons, leaving me feeling that I've released a long list of concerns that had been brewing up:

• As I get older, I don't want to find that I've been de-prioritised for medical attention or processes because I'm too obese. Anaesthetic risk is not what it used to be, but if I need an op, I want to have it, and no excuses from the doctor!
• Alongside that, I would like to live longer. Mainly, I didn't want to get diabetes.
• M&S have taken advantage of online shopping to stop carrying 44" waist trousers in the shops.
• I was hoping that I could stop snoring at night, and in meetings. I'm not sure if I snore at night now, and in fact I was never aware of sleeping badly, but it turns out that the meetings were just really dull. No improvement there. 
• I was becoming aware of fat as a constraint and a presence.I couldn't touch my toes, or put my shoes on without sitting down. My arms bound against my breasts.

There are some traditional reasons which didn't really work for me:

• I didn't want to get fit. I was fit. I used the stairs, I walked, I used the public bikes, I swam a thousand metres twice a week.
• I didn't want to look better. I thought I looked OK. I was right: My face has aged ten years in the last three. And oh GOD my neck!

Plan: The Model

Every best-selling diet plan needs a simple model, and this is mine: If you are too heavy, and sustaining or increasing that weight, you are eating (or drinking) too much energy (calories).  I may patent that.

Corollaries

• To lose weight, reduce the amount of energy you swallow. If your weight does not decline, reduce the energy intake further.
• You don't, as a nineteen stone person, immediately have to adopt the diet that would just sustain you at thirteen stone. That would be painful. All that's necessary is that you reduce by enough to keep losing weight.

I started by abandoning mid-afternoon trips to the vending machine for a Double-Decker (my favourite.) Not complicated, not all that hard.

So this is how it works:

• Be clear you want to lose weight. Pick a weight in the middle of the 'healthy' region of the NHS chart. Accept it may take years.
• Review your routines. How do you eat on working days? How do you eat at the weekend?
• Weigh yourself every morning immediately after voiding your bladder. That's when the figure is most repeatable. Even so there's not much to learn from daily weighings but you will see how your body responds to fibre or alcohol. 
• Once or twice a week, at a fixed point in your routine -- perhaps after the weekend -- graph your weight. Look at the trend. Is it declining? Fine -- carry on. Is it growing (and above your target weight?) Then you need to review what you are doing and find some way to reduce your energy intake.
• Stretches, touch toes, knees bends, sit-ups, press-ups, a dozen of each, weeknights and mornings. There is a risk of wasting your muscles: You lose weight, but it's not a good outcome. Fat people have big muscles, from doing all that work, and it's worth trying to keep them.

So that's the basic cycle. Now, what do you actually do differently?

• East less food, obviously. You are gradually working your way down to the diet which will maintain the weight you want.
• Identify something to give up. Start with that afternoon snack waddle. Watch the graph to see if that starts to shift weight. As and when needed, give up something else. My list, not all at once but over the two years, looked something like:

1. Give up snacks
2. Give up second helpings and large portions
3. Give up takeaways
4. Settle for two pieces of fruit with dinner
5. Exchange porridge from the canteen for oatbran in yoghurt at home
6. Stop making pasta, risotto, x on toast -- all sorts of starch 
7. Regular lunch
8. I'd probably put boozing in here somewhere, except that I'd mostly stopped anyway. Same goes for pizza.

• Exercise may be necessary but it is certainly not sufficient. Exercise plenty to enjoy your body, and control muscle-wasting. Allow extra protein of exercise days. But don't use exercise as an alternative to eating less. When I ate what I liked, I exercised plenty and I was fat.
• Calorie counting is too much hassle, but it helps make tradeoffs and avoid surprises like hummus

Plan: Thoughts About Being Hungry

Here's a secret: It's OK to be hungry, and normal to ignore it. Be clear that I'm talking about "first-world" "I wouldn't mind a fig roll, or, indeed, steak and chips, right now" hungry. Third-world hungry is different, and one of our many blessing is that we don't know what that feels like, don't need to, and never will. I'm talking about those occasions when your internal arrangements pop up in your mind to remind you to eat.

When that happens, when you feel hungry, it's not a crisis, not a problem. You don't need to do anything. You won't die, you won't fall ill. It'll go away after a while. If you use it as an excuse for bad-tempered or deceitful behaviour, you are deluding yourself.

All that it means is that your body is moving from very immediate energy stores on to slightly less immediate ones, fat, the very situation you are trying to deal with. Hunger is, EXACTLY, what weight loss feels like. And, it goes away. Your liver cracks open a few grammes of fat, converts it to glucose in your blood, and the pang vanishes. This is a good mechanism, IF you are living close to starvation. It's like a text from the bank when you're close to overdrawing. But it's not designed to deal with people who have plenty to eat. No-one wants a text from the bank merely because they've processed a small debit on a large balance, but hunger will tell a 19-stone man that he should go and find something to eat, when that is really not something he needs.

So, yes, get used to hunger. Learn to recognise it, learn to welcome it, learn to ignore it. If you've ever wondered what's different about thin people, it's not, really not, their metabolism or inefficient digestion, or anything else. It's that they have learned or are intrinsically prone to respond to hunger much as you respond to being a bit too warm, or vague concern that you ought to fill in a tax return. They leave it to later: perhaps an opportunity to eat something good will come up, or it can wait until dinner time. It's not a big deal, nor should it be for you. This takes practice, and a few mental techniques, but there will be plenty of chances to practice, and it will get easier. Even when you are eating to maintain your current weight, you'll still get hungry sometimes because it's part of the normal cycle of nutrition.

The other side of that is that even when you are eating to shed weight, you'll still be replete, sometimes. That's necessary because a) why would you want to have a miserable life? b) you have nutritional requirements other than calories, so if you starve for long periods, you'll harm yourself, and c) as your intake declines, you get easier to satisfy. Being full of broccoli may not have the same allure as full of flapjacks, but it's still just as full.

So where does that leave us? Well if hunger is weight loss then:

• You don't need a snack. That gap between meals is a prime opportunity to be hungry.
• Plan to go to bed hungry. If you're going to be uncomfortable, you may as well be asleep. Getting used to hunger includes not being woken by it, and there's no conceivable evening meal that could entirely prevent hunger over the next ten hours, so what's the point?
• Don't make a huge effort to get all your meals. Any given meal is optional. If you run out, social arrangements fall through, or whatever, skip the meal. Just have the next meal when that falls due.

Plan: Mental Tricks

• Plan your meals, on whatever cycle is convenient. Shop to the plan.
• Plan it tight and just go hungry when it's too tight.
• Understand that you are giving up eating what you want. You are making a choice, for sound reasons, to renounce something good.
• Remain, or fall, in love with yourself. Eating more than you intended is a pleasurable inconvenience, not a sin. You are not sticking to a diet, after all. You are losing weight, which is a different thing, so it doesn't matter if you go off your plan, provided you go back, and you continue to approach your target weight.
• It's much easier to live by yourself, for as much of the week as you can. Plan your meals exactly in those periods, apply moderation in the rest.
• Shop for yourself. It's easier to be moderate in the supermarket than the kitchen.
• Eat only what's planned, social, or the best sort of its type. Practice declining routine office cake. Refrain from gluttony just because it's something you like, but don't deny yourself an opportunity for really good food.
• Have a hobby or an interest to keep you out of the kitchen.
• You need much less food than you have grown used to. Really surprisingly less. The diet to sustain nineteen stones seems to have been about three times the energy for thirteen.
• When you select something, have a plan for how you are going to use all of it, without leftovers that will need tidying up.
• Don't buy food treats -- anything that's not part of a plan --  for yourself. That's fucked up. Let other people lead you into treats, if they do.
• Farting is someone else's problem. See vegetables.
• Don't make recipes that produce more than your portion unless it's to keep for a later, planned, meal.
• Don't bake.
• It's perfectly reasonable to have no biscuits, sugar, bread, cheese or potatoes at home. Before you go shopping it's reasonable to have no food more tempting than canned tomatoes and pepper at home.
• Give away your clown suits when they get too big. Charity shops reclaim gift aid now, so it's coming out of the Chancellor's pocket. 
• Keep an eye on the savings. Give them to hunger, water or sanitation charities. Or buy socks for street people. Or buy yourself some clothes (try the charity shop you gave your clothes to, and try not to buy your old clothes back.)
• I haven't finished. I am learning that you never finish.    
• For all I know, it gets easier. I'll let you know after ten years or so.

Plan: The Food

• Breakfast is yoghurt with oatbran.
• Lunch is more optional than you might expect. Nowadays I have lunch if someone gives it to me. But I make sure of a small breakfast. And nearly always have dinner of some sort. 
• Skipping meals in a family or social context is too weird, so skip bread, potatoes, second helpings instead. 
• Have a starter before dinner. Sauerkraut. Pickled cucumbers. A boiled egg. But don't be led into having tempting open packets. (Sauerkraut jars aren't that tempting -- I can't imagine why.) 
• Be flexible and creative. Two boiled beetroot with yoghurt, two smoked mackerel fillets and a tomato salad looks odd but is a meal. The remaining beetroot and fillets aren't tempting because they're the day after tomorrow's dinner.
• Fibre needs planning. Oatbran in breakfast yoghurt. Oatbran in anything. Isphagula husk in tomato juice with soy sauce or balsamic vinegar with a celery stick makes a starter. 
• Gee up the protein. Soybean granules in anything stewy. Make yoghurt with skim milk fortified with milk powder -- put it in a coleslaw dressing. Boiled eggs in the salad. Eggs. Beans.
• Avoid 'reduced fat' and 'low calorie' stuff. (Skimmed milk is OK.) It's all horrible (and futile.) Avoid artificial sweeteners. You'll appreciate occasional sugar more.
• Avoid pure starch. Pasta with seafood sauce becomes seafood stew. Toast and jam becomes jam in your yoghurt. Mushroom risotto becomes mushroom omelette.
• Go large on vegetables. Make a meal of a broccoli head with soy sauce and rooster sauce. Grate a carrot salad with cooked mustard seeds and yoghurt & balsamic vinegar dressing. Capers cheer up a salad. (NB see Farting.) Vegetables don't stimulate the snack reflex, so you can keep them in the fridge -- and if you have reached the point where you are snacking on vegetables, you are an ADVANCED STUDENT and you needn't bother about what I say!
• Celery adds distinction to anything stewy.
• Cheese can be surprisingly satisfying. Good cheese is an actual treat. Try Borough Market -- the range is staggering, and if you explain what's happening, and pay cash, the stallholders will cut you tiny quantities so you don't have a big block in the fridge.
• Don't be afraid of frying, or butter or good oil, but don't use a speck more than you need. Sliced carrots fried in butter. Mushrooms. Onions. All excellent fried. Black pudding. Omelettes, fried eggs and scrambled eggs need butter.. 
• Eat some meat. Avoid preserved pork, generally, because there is so much salt. If you are looking at a six hundred kilocalorie steak, cut it in half and have steak twice in a week.
• Eat less sweet fruit. Eat some sweet fruit. Eat plenty of tomatoes. Don't put tomatoes in the fridge. 
• Don't have dessert. Finish your meal properly though - make a cup of tea with a cardamom. It draws a line.
• Drink tea or water. Avoid sweetened stuff. Avoid smoothies. Avoid booze. Avoid coffee shop drinks. 
• This is not the time to reduce your salt intake. Use the best brewed soy sauce - Kikkoman. 
• Find flavour: Balsamic vinegar adds energy but is good in all sorts of things. Use soy sauce instead of salt. Tamarind concentrate. Worcester sauce.