New Year, new plans, right? We startet a little early, namely in September.
We thought it would be best to tell you what we needed and what we didn’t need for loosing weight.
It always depends but we found a pretty nice solution for ourselves and we wanna share it with you. That doesn’t mean that it applies to you as well, we can only speak for ourselves.
What we didn’t need
So-called superfood
These past years superfood became a real hype. We’re quite glad that it smoothens now but all that fuzz about goji-berries, chia, matcha and quinoa was hardly bearable for us. Believe it or not but we actually survived 2016 without any superfood. Crazy thing, right? We absolutely don’t argue that these things are not healthy but this hype was just too much. Fresh vegetable and fruit was definitely enough for us and it is the real superfood for so many hundreds of years now.
Light-products
We never have and probably never will buy any light products. There have been so many statistics now that they don’t help you. Often the reduced fat is replaced by sugar or some kind of sugar replacement from the chemistry lab. So it doesn’t do you any good. We better buy the usual things and just a little less of it.
Shakes
Same as before…never have and never will buy this stuff. We think that this is the most artificial disgusting thing anyone has ever invented. Ok, wee get that egg white is good for your body after working out, no doubt, but a quark with fruits or buttermilk is nice as well. We gotta admit that we never tried any of these and we’re full of prejudices, please forgive us 😉
A two weeks-diet by any women’s magazine.
Why do people still buy these magazines? Everyone who can think a little should know that these diets never work. Every single edition discovered a new diet to loose 7 pounds (so genius, sounds way more than 3,5 kg) in one or two weeks. Just doesn’t tell you that you gain the weight even faster than that again. Maybe if you wanna fit in a dress and have to loose some weight for the occasion, ok but we think that a long-term weight loss is way more efficient and usually what people aim. And we think that you can reach that aim through dietary change and sports.
What we needed:
A scale
For years we’ve been trying to loose weight now (without having a scale) and it doesn’t work. Looking back on it we would say that we needed a concrete number. Without a scale you have no overview about how much you gain or loose. Every gramm you loose motivates you to keep going and if you had a bit too much chocolate or less sports, you’ll recognize it.
One fixed day for weighing
We made the arrangement to take Friday. Because like that we have enough time to get rid of extra pounds caused by parties or feasts. Besides, the fix day motivates again because you keep track of every week and on Thursday for example we think, oh tomorrow is the day, we better work out a bit. It really works for us and almost every Friday the scale shows a smaller number.
Healthy recipes
Nutrition is everything when it comes to loosing weight. So bye bye chocolate and chips, cream sauce and bread, at least during the week. We try to keep the days as follows:
Monday-> low carb
Tuesday -> low carb
Wednesday -> whole grain pasta for example to fill up the carbs
Thursday -> low carb
Friday, Saturday, Sunday -> Whatever we want.
Well, as we said, we try to. It doesn’t always work out like this. Sometimes we just need some carbs and so we have pasta. But we try to eat the right carbs, so no white bread or whatever. But there will be some info on that in one of the following posts. We’re not strict, it should still be fun and I can tell you, some of the low carb recipes are so great, we wanna eat them at the weekends as well 😉
Fixed days for sweets
Right after weighing we reward ourselves and to be honest we continue Saturday and Sunday. The whole weekend is marked by pleasure for us. We don’t surveil what we eat but eat what we would like to. Especially for you psyche it is important to have these days. You can’t always restrict yourself and where would the pleasure be? Like that we have something to look forward to and it helps us a lot.
Sports
We really think that it is impossible to loose weight on a long-term scale without working out. Except you got a great metabolism but then you wouldn’t probably have to loose weight, right? Sports build up muscles which help increase you metabolic rate.
Let’s assume, you burn x calories a day at the moment, whatever that number might be, without working out. If you start working out then, you increase your daily calories by let’s say +10 (just an artificial number) So you have a metabolic rate of x+10 a day.
So it is definitely worth investing time and effort in sports. Best would be a combination of cardio and weight training. Cardio burns a lot of calories and weight training increases your muscles. If you never did any cardio, you can relate to Jana a few years ago. She wasn’t able to run a km right at the beginning. Ok, she got Asthma but that shouldn’t be any obstacle. We started by running 1 minute then walking 1. When she felt like she could run 2 minutes and go for 1 we did so and continually she got better. Now we participate in obstacle runs like the Men’s Health Urbanathlon in Hamburg with 12 km and a lot of obstacles. She wouldn’t have believed me that this would become our hobby some day if I had told her back then.
You just have to start. We usually combine running and strength-and stamina training. Just because it is the most fun and you feel that you did something. We also like to train with our own body weight, it is cheap, you don’t need a lot of stuff and while loosing weight you keep getting better and better soon.
That was about it. We don’t offer a super-diet but we found our way of loosing weight and hope that this is a long-term solution. If you have any ideas, tips or questions, let us now 🙂
