Its the little steps that really matter part 2

No blog should replace the advice of a medical professional.  Please see your doctor before you start any weight loss program.  This is just my experiences and opinions.  I am not a trained medical professional.  I am a normal person sharing my story of weight loss.

So what are some other things that you can do to take little steps every day towards a better lifestyle.  These are usually things we think of as obvious.  But how many do we actually implement in our own lives.

3. Getting some exercise in is not as hard as you think

Exercise alone is not going to solve your weight issues.  But it will help.  Exercise is also an important part of being healthy.

Most people think that exercise has to consume huge amounts of time.  But research has shown that anything you do can burn calories.  This includes things like housework.  You would be surprised where you can burn calories.

Small short walks are a great way to start.  Instead of driving to the corner shop, why not walk?  Anything less than a kilometre from your house don't drive, walk.  Then when you feel a bit more up to it make it any trip less than two kilometres.  When taking kids to school, park the car a kilometre from the school and walk the kids down.  Exercise for both you and your children as well as helping them to see the importance of exercise.

A dog can be a good way to encourage walking in the household.  Dogs need walks every day.  If you have room in your heart for a dog, there are many rescue shelters out there that can set up up with a lovely friendly dog and you can help to save a life.  If you have a dog why not use them to help you.  My dogs love walks and it helps them to be less destructive on my house!!

Ideally you want to exercise so you raise your heart rate.  But any movement is good movement.  Perhaps if you work in a building then when you have to go to another floor walk up the stairs rather than taking the elevator.  Be creative.  How many ways can you incorporate a few mins of walking into a day?  Take up the challenge and think of new creative ways to get active.

Human beings are designed to move so getting movement into your day will help you feel better and happier.  I combat my depression and other mental health issues with a work out.  This works far better than any pill a doctor can give me.  This is also far healthier.  If you can lift your mood then you will want to be more motivated to lose weight.  Its so easy to wallow in depression (I know this first hand).  Exercise I find is such a great motivator and once you start it just becomes a necessary part of life.

4. Swap a meal here and there rather than a big sudden change

If you start a fad diet you will probably fail.  Or you will get to where you want then go right back to your old habits and pack the weight back on.  A friend of mine does this.  She wonders why she is always having migraines and getting sick.  She is not giving her body the nutrients it needs to fight off infection and the "diet" products she consumes contain little if any food but a huge amount of chemicals.

This friend would be far better off if she ate vegetables and fruit.  But she doesn't like the taste.

Your far better off changing slowly over time than just jumping in feet first.  Like making your portions smaller, for example buying a regular or small meal when you go to a fast food restaurant instead of a large, changing what you eat is something you should do over time.

Salad is a great way to change your taste buds over from processed foods to more natural foods.  You have to remember that processed foods are high in things like salt and sugar to make them more palatable.  Raw foods can therefore taste very different from processed foods.  For me and my husband I make a chicken salad that is essentially a salad with a chicken steak cut up on top of it.  I use balsamic vinegar for the dressing.  So the meal is essentially salad vegetables and fruit and some protein to be filling.

Salads are very healthy but a lot of people make the mistake of loading them up with dressing and high calorie extras.  I try to stick to lettuce, tomato and cucumber (which is what my husband likes in a salad) with just a little bit protein.  I find this a great way to get some more veges and fruits into my husband who is very fussy with fresh food.

When I make my salad I will add in things like avocado, onion, carrot and other goodies.  This method can be a good way to introduce new flavours to someone who is otherwise a bit fussy.  Carrots can be quite sweet where as raw onion can be bitter.

You want to pick nice ripe fruit and veges as these will have more flavour.  Most fruit and vege found in a supermarket is picked when its not ripe then force ripened before being shipped to a super market.  This can make the fruit or veges not very tasty.  This method is more about transporting the fruit and vege rather than taste and also because then the fruit and vege can be frozen and stored for off peak times when fresh fruit is unavailable.  If you can get hold of fruit and vege grown fresh and picked fresh from the source then it tastes infinitely better than store brought.  Or better yet, teach your kids about where food comes from and grow some in your backyard.  In an apartment?  Doesn't take much space to put a pot with a couple of tomato plants in.


If you start making small changes now you will be surprised how fast they build up into big changes.  You will start feeling better and have more energy if you swap your french fries for salad.  It might not seem as tasty but the feeling of being well is so worth while.

My next post will have more ideas for small changes.

Image sources
http://www.chichester-march.org.uk/assets/images/walking-silhouette-clip-art.jpg
http://www.loveyourpet.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Whos-Walking-Who.jpg
http://www.shedyourweight.com/img/walking-exercise.jpg
http://abilityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/vegetables-fruit.jpg
http://kikichaos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/DSC01898.jpg

Its the little steps that really matter part 1

No blog should replace the advice of a medical professional.  Please see your doctor before you start any weight loss program.  This is just my experiences and opinions.  I am not a trained medical professional.  I am a normal person sharing my story of weight loss.

So now you have decided exactly where you want to end up.  You have your goal in site.  Now what you say.  Well now we have to work out how to achieve it.

The best way to achieve any major lifestyle change is slowly.  To suddenly halve our intake of calories can be detrimental to our bodies and probably not that efficient when our bodies get the shock of their lives and decide to start gearing up for a famine by storing more fat.  This is probably the easiest way to fail.  Too much too soon.

So we need to start thinking about what little baby steps we can make before we can run.

Here are some of the ideas I have had to help get me started:

1. Replace soft drink and fruit juice with water

Big deal you say.  That's easy you say.  I knew that one all already, tell me something new.  Well this one is probably harder than it sounds.  Our bodies become addicted to the sugar in these drinks.  This is actually a harder one than you might think.  Its probably the very first step you should take and you should probably do this one for at least a week before any other step.

Why is what you will be asking about now.  And I say this speaking from experience.  The withdrawal from the sugar is not easy.  You will crave it and you will be prepared to fight tooth and nail for it.  But you have to be strong.  Like any drug it takes a while for it to get out of your system.  It took me at least a week for the worst of the cravings to go away.  I'm now six months into this part of my weight loss.  And now, soft drink is tastes disgustingly sweet and I do not crave it.  I sometimes slip up but it only takes a couple of mouthfuls before I find myself feeling sick from its excessive amounts of sugar.

And if we think about how much sugar is in a soft drink or fruit juice this can help.  I found one soft drink I was consuming regularly that had 60 grams of sugar in each drink.  Most of the others had about 40 to 45 grams of sugar.  That is an huge amount of sugar in one hit.  And a huge amount of calories.  So as a first step in cutting calories this is a really good starting point.

To help me with my cravings I started reading the labels of the drinks to see how much sugar was in them.  And I was disgusted to find it next to impossible to get a soft drink or fruit juice (other than diet ones which are whole other story) with less than about 40 grams of sugar.  65 grams of sugar is about 240 calories.  And that is how much a 600 mL bottle of soft drink will set up back.  Check out this great link that has some very visual demonstrations of the amount of sugar in soft drink.  http://www.sugarstacks.com/beverages.htm

So if you are consuming 240 calories in one bottle of drink and you consume two a day, if we are talking about a 1200 calorie diet you have used up nearly half your daily calories in two drinks.  Water is free of calories and can help you feel better.  So generally a very good place to start with weight loss is simply to drink water.

However you should invest in a stainless steel drink bottle.  You will avoid contamination from plastics and help out the environment as virgin plastic has to be used to make the disposable bottles used in water you buy from a store.  Virgin plastic is plastic made from raw materials.  By using a drink bottle and refilling it (its rare to find taps that aren't safe to drink from but you should still check when filling your bottle) you are taking plastic out of the environment and not lining the corporate pockets of companies wanting to sell you something you can generally get from a number of places for free.

2. Eat smaller portions and stop the boredom eating

This might sound obvious but how many of us stop and think about how much food we each eat at one sitting?  If your like me you go until your full and then some.

Eating less is another easy and effective way to lose weight.  And it's not a major change in diet either.  So if you go to a fast food restaurant order a small meal instead of a large.  That's a great first step.  Or when you have your dinner at night, cook your usual amount then put half on your dinner plate and the other half away for lunch the next day.  You just saved yourself a couple dollars with that idea.  I often cook up too much for my husband and I and freeze the left overs for his lunch.  His work mates get jealous when he gets roast dinners for lunch and they don't.

This is another challenging thing to do but once you get through the first couple of weeks you will be ok.  Your body gets used to consuming a set number of calories so reducing them can be a bit difficult.  You will be hungry for the first week or two.  And it will be all consuming hunger.  This is because your body is adjusting.

Cutting the boredom eating is another good way to reduce calories.  We all know about boredom food.  That packet of chips we munch on while watching a movie or the packet of chocolate biscuits while sitting at the computer.  The food we don't really need but the food we eat because its habit or because its there and tasty and who doesn't like to sit down and eat a bar of chocolate as something to do?  I'm guilty of this one.

But giving up my boredom eating has helped me a lot.  I try to stick to meal times and smaller meal sizes for when I eat.  The in-between stuff is usually not because I'm hungry but because I need something to do with my hands.  Most health professionals advocate a little and often type of system which means your not as likely to over eat but I personally go with a eat when your hungry system and then make the choices healthy ones.  Also if I must snack I try to restrict myself to fruit and veges so at least I'm making it healthy.

A single chocolate biscuit can contain roughly 70-100 calories depending on the biscuit.  For me it would take me about half an hour of walking briskly to burn off one chocolate biscuit.  Just one biscuit.  You can enter your own details into this website Calories Burned Calculator and find out for yourself how many minutes you would need to walk briskly to burn off one chocolate biscuit then ask yourself  "is it worth it?"

My next post will continue on this theme of small changes to start stepping in the right direction.


Calorie information source
http://www.nutracheck.co.uk/calories/calories_in_biscuits/calories_in_biscuits.html
http://www.mydr.com.au/tools/calories-burned-calculator

Image sources
http://www.sheeshalounge.com.au/images/screenshot/soft_drinks.jpg
http://healthylifejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/glass-of-water1.jpg
http://www.thenutritionpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/fruits2.jpg
http://photos2.demandstudios.com/DM-Resize/photos.demandstudios.com/162/246/fotolia_5790079_XS.jpg?h=10000&w=400&keep_ratio=1

Like any journey its good to start with a goal

No blog should replace the advice of a medical professional.  Please see your doctor before you start any weight loss program.  This is just my experiences and opinions.  I am not a trained medical professional.  I am a normal person sharing my story of weight loss.

So now that you've read my introduction its time to get into the swing of things.  And I think the best place to start is with a discussion on goals.

Goals are the things we work towards.  They are what keeps us motivated and on track to achieve in life.  A goal can also help you to travel the path you need to travel because it gives you something to work towards.

Think of goals like a road trip.  There is your big goal.  The long term one.  Think of this goal as say going from one city to another.  I live in Australia so we could think of this as going from Melbourne to Sydney.  This is the goal that defines the trip.  Along the way we pass through little towns and these would be our medium term goals.  They are the milestones we measure our success along.  They are places we can stop off at and take a small break before moving forward more.  Then lastly we have small steps or goals that we cross along the way.  These could be mile markers that we see on the side of the road telling us we are that little bit closer to the next town.  They aren't very much in the grand scheme but they are small goals we can use to help us get closer to the bigger goal.

I look at goals in this way because like a road map we need a plan to get from point A to point B.  Or in this example we need to know how to get from Melbourne to Sydney.  We can try without a plan but research has shown your chance of success is much lower.  If we don't know the way we will get lost.

That doesn't mean you have to have all the answers right away.  But a good start is to have a long term goal. And it needs to be a realistic goal.  If you are five foot four inches, like I am, then to have a goal of being six foot two inches so I can start my modelling career is not likely to happen any time soon.

Defining a realistic end goal for your journey could make all the difference.  If you make a goal you can achieve then you'll be excited and motivated to keep moving forward.  If you set a goal that you cannot achieve then you will get discouraged and disappointed when you cannot achieve this goal.  You are setting yourself up to fail if you give yourself a goal you can never reach.

An example of this would be like above where my goal would be to grow taller so I can be a model.  At my age this is not going to happen as I have stopped growing.  But this also applies to weight.  I know I can safely get to 90 kg and that this is a healthy well rounded weight for me to reach.  However for me to say I'm going to weigh 50 kg at some point in the future is incredibly unrealistic for my size and build.  Or to make it my goal to fit into a pair of size 8 pants.  My hips simply are not those dimensions.  Its a physical impossibility

So it is critically important that you set an end goal that is achievable.  You also have to create a way of measuring this end goal that is realistic as well.  So my goal is to loose the excess fat around my stomach and to be healthy.  My definition, my measures, of when I achieve this need to clear so I can say to myself "yes I have achieved my goals".

The definition of success I will set for myself is as follows:

• I can comfortably wear the size 14 pants I have in my wardrobe
• My body fat percentage is in a healthy range for a woman
• My body weight is at most 90 kg

These three things are realistic for me, a bit of a challenge (the first time round it was definitely a challenge to get to this point) and measurable.  This is so critical.  This will make a big difference to the entire trip from A to B.

So now we can look at setting some medium term goals.  We can look at putting in some small towns which we can look forward to getting to.  This is also to help us stay the course.  If we take the example of dropping dress sizes we can think of it that I have to go from size 18 to size 16 then from size 16 to size 14.  Each time I drop a dress size this is a milestone, a large step in the direction of the big goal.  They are points that I can stop and breathe and pat myself on the back.

These are points were you should put in a reward.  Not a massive reward but something to look forward too.  Maybe treat yourself to something you've been wanting for a while or treat yourself to a pamper day.  I would avoid using food to reward yourself.  Your trying to lose weight and using food as a reward will set yourself up for failure.  I use food as a reward and that is a habit I need to stop this myself because it is a habit that threatens my success.

Now we get to the small goals.  These are goals that happen in the space of a day or perhaps at most a week.  They are very little steps that make up the medium goals which make up the large final goal.  A little step could be something like "I'm not going to drink soft drink today.  Instead I will only drink water."  Or it could be just getting to the gym that day.  Another small goal could be putting back that chocolate bar you were about to buy in the supermarket as a treat after a hard days work.  They are the little victories you have every day.  They don't need to be measurable but together they help get you in the right direction.

With small goals you could set yourself up with a tracking system.  So if you medium goal is to get into a routine of going to the gym five times a week, for example, then you could set up a chart and hang it on the wall.  You could use gold stars or something positive and say to yourself "If I achieve my goal of going to the gym five times a week for the next four weeks then I will reward myself with a day at the spa."  That way each daily small goal of getting to the gym combines to help get you moving in a good direction.

So now that we have a system of goals in place we need to discuss how to achieve each step.  We know where we are going and how to get there now.  This is so we don't get disheartened and we have a plan of attack.  There is nothing worse than setting a goal that is unachievable   Because then you are going to beat yourself up when you don't achieve it or fail.  And little milestones along the way mean that you can reward yourself in mini ways for taking a step in a positive direction.

The whole idea of goal setting in this manor is to keep you on track, give you those small successes that will lead to the bigger ones and to give you a plan of attack.  Setting out with just an idea of loosing weight will dishearten you because you will try for a while then give it up when the journey becomes too hard.  But by slowly and gradually changing over a longer period of time with a plan to do it you will have a better chance at success.  Also by rewarding those small steps and building up to the bigger ones it won't seem so difficult and you will look forward to the achievement.

Next time I want to discuss ideas of small steps.  The little things we can do every day to get to the big goal. I will finish off by asking you to think about what your end goal might be and what reward you can put at the end.  A tropical holiday?  A new wardrobe?  A new car?  Or perhaps just the thought of success.  That bit is really up to you.

Image sources:
http://www.abundancecoaching.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Create-Smart-Goals.jpg
http://www.jonmott.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/goals1.jpg
http://pursuitofhappy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/setting-goals.jpg
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~dfk/blog/Travel/Blog/Entries/2009/6/2_Great_Ocean_Road_and_Melbourne_files/Adelaide%20to%20Sydney.png
http://www.easywaystosavemoney.com.au/images/998.jpg

Lifestyle Makeover - an introduction

Welcome to my blog.  My name is Lady Pepper and I'm beginning a quest to improve my lifestyle and hopefully loose a bit of weight in the process.  I'm inviting the entire world to join me in this quest in the hope that I might inspire others to change their lives as well as letting the world see my struggles and triumphs. 

Me with my two dogs ... This was me at the worst of it.

I am an average Jane.  I am not a celebrity and I am not a rich woman which means I cannot afford a nutritionist, a private chef or a personal trainer.  Much like many other women in the world.  I face the same struggles that many of us face and I feel it is time that a voice of a normal average person should rise out of the mass of weight loss and diet fads.  I don't propose to have all the answers but I hope by writing this blog that I learn a bit along the way and maybe figure out what works and what doesn't.

So a little bit more about me.  I am in my late twenties and currently a house wife.  The only children me and my husband have at present are of the furry variety.  I wish to be a good healthy example to any future children that will grace the lives of me and my husband.  Therefore it's time to stop being lazy (for there is no other way to put it) and clean up my lifestyle.

Me on my wedding day, not quite the slender and healthy bride one aspires to be.

This means introducing to my life healthy eating and a healthy diet as well as exercise to my life.  These are things that are currently lacking.  These things will ensure that I live a happier, longer life for my children as well as have energy to enjoy them.  I hope that I will pass on to them the importance of eating healthy and exercise, two values I believe are increasing important in this modern world. 

All my life I have struggled with weight.  My weight has gone up and down.  Currently I weigh about 104 kg.  Not a lot you say?  Well for my build it is.  At my heaviest I weighed about 115 to 120 kg.  I'm not entirely sure but I was weighed at the doctors at 111 kg and I know I increased in weight after that before losing the 10 to 15 Kg I have currently achieved.  This was achieved simply by giving up the thing that caused me a huge amount of stress.  I was in a very bad situation with my job and after having a mental break down I had to give it up.  Now six months later I am well enough to move forward from it.

It is here I wish to discuss BMI.  My height is 163 cm.  This means for my BMI to be what is considered in the safe range I have to weigh about 66kg.  That's a weight loss of 44kg.  However my build will not support this.  I believe it would be too dangerous for me to get down to this weight.  My current BMI puts me in the morbidly obese category.  I certainly don't feel morbidly obese.  Over weight, maybe heading towards the obese side, but certainly not morbidly obese.

You see BMI is based on averages.  Averages are used to find the middle values, to normalise populations.  So if you look at a large number of people on average they will be within a certain range of values.  But that does not stop people from falling outside this standard model.  So if you are like me, short and stocky, this can mean that these averages do not apply for this build.  For instance I have a friend who is nearly six and a half feet tall but only weighs 65 kg.  That is a healthy weight for him.  My husband weighs the same as I do but he is about a foot taller than me so he still looks very lean.

I don't not advocate that you disregard medical advice with regard to weight loss.  You should never disregard a doctor's advice for the advice of a blog.  This is not what I am blogging about.  I do have a problem with modern measures of weight loss and gain and this is my opinion.  Mostly weight loss definitions focus on a very normalized ideal of the human form and it does not allow for those who do not fit this model.  I say this because I have lost weight in the past and I have achieved my goals previously.  It was a hard fight but I did it.  And when I was at my best I weighed 89 Kg.  According to the BMI charts I was still morbidly obese despite being able to run about 5 kilometres a day and being at the height of my fitness. 

This is me at my best.  Quite a difference.  This is where I want to get back too.

This is because I was mostly muscle and carried a lot less fat.  Muscle weighs much more than fat, any personal trainer or doctor can tell you this.  So a person can become very fit and healthy but weigh a lot more than expected.  I was building muscle at this stage of my life and therefore as the fat fell away it was replaced with much healthier muscle. 

I find it important also to redefine what is healthy.  Because we are blasted in this world with images of rail thin celebrities and sold this image as the idea of healthy.  For a woman my age its between 21-32% of my body weight.  For men it is much less.  Women need to have a healthy amount of fat, which I have read should be located primarily around the hips and thighs, to aid with bearing children.  While this seems like a high proportion of body fat, carrying a child to term is a horrendously energy intensive and demanding act for a woman.  Without this amount of fat on our bodies we would be at risk of serious harm or death from carrying a child and the human race would simply not be able to continue. 

To be healthy is different from being thin.  Not all women are blessed with the tall, thin, straight up and down build that the few lucky people who become Hollywood stars possess.  So being healthy means we have to let go of the illusion that Hollywood sells us.  I will never weigh 55 Kg or whatever feather weight most of these women weigh.  I have embraced this.  I have learned to accept it.  I accept who I am.  I have learned to accept myself and my body because this is the only body I will ever have and it cannot be that of any model or singer or actress that currently grace the many magazines out there.

This doesn't mean I don't realize that I do not have an issue.  I am an unhealthy weight.  But I will not beat myself up if I do not reach 66 Kg.  I will not be unhappy with myself if I do not get to being a size 8 (I think this is referred to as a size 0 in the US).  I will never be this size.  I will set myself achievable goals and fight against a world that wants me to be overweight rather than healthy. 

In my next post I am going to discuss goals.  I'm going to talk about setting a reasonable goal and then about taking little steps to reach the goal.  This introduction I admit has been longer than I expected.  But I hope that those who read this will be intrigued enough to stick around for future posts and hopefully follow my journey towards living a healthier life.  It's not going to be easy but I'm in it for the long haul.