Ever since the pandemic began, I've lost 10 pounds! Hurray for me! I've never been a skinny person, and my goal has always been to stay below the magical BMI index line from overweight to "normal." It's always been right at the edge, but due to a conglomerate of factors in March including a long winter, eating my parents' food (salty, oily, and too fatty, according to MJ), and unhealthy habits, I ballooned past the magical "80 kg" limit (MJ has a scale from Korea that measures in Kgs, which brings a whole new level of stress and anxiety when I add another number or Gasp, TWO! to the scale because each of those represents 2.2lbs). I'm a very number-based person, so I get a physical response from seeing my bank account and stock market account rise, and a similar response happens when I see my body weight go down.
1.) sleep well. May be a little counterintuitive, but getting a full night's rest allows the body to "reset" and burn off some calories (mentioned in Bill Bryson's book The Body!). I generally weigh the least when I wake up in the morning OR
2.) After I've exercised and exorcised my body of beaucoup water weight. I didn't know about water weight early in life, but it explains a lot.......I carry tons of water weight in the winter because running outside doesn't get enough pounds to come off due to sweat. In the summer, I'm usually at my lowest due to sweating profusely in the heat.
3.) Do a marathon. After I trained for a marathon, I was at my lowest weight since I was 13 years old... and then promptly put the weight back on back to a normalized setting.
4.) Diet. I've come to realize that this is probably the biggest factor in one's body weight (and possibly in one's overall health). It's not easy to start on a diet with so many nice-looking things around you and lifestyles that we've gotten used to over years and years of repetition. They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, which is true, but I actually don't think the first step is the hardest: most people can try a meal or two without fatty food, or meat, or sugars for a day. It's doing that day over day that becomes extremely difficult, to resist "cravings" as MJ calls them, to say no each time despite your stomach saying "YES, EAT IT!!!" I find for dieting at least it's the 3rd, 4th, 5th, maybe 6th steps that are really hard and not to just revert back to old ways cuz that's much easier, and that after getting over that hump (it's almost like running through an uphill and not stopping) that it becomes much easier and just a natural course of life. For MJ and I, we don't have much food in the house anyway, and most of is vegetables or plant-based, so there's no real risk of falling to temptation, because there is no temptation. The pandemic and staying indoors has definitely helped that. But now I'm confined to eating raw carrots for lunch or just a light salad or vegetable mix and feel fine...like letting my body know, "hey this is how it's going to be every day from now on!" and my body reluctantly agreeing. After a day of not eating anything sugar-based (no cookies, cakes, ice cream, chocolate, etc.), my body says, "OH Hey, this isn't so bad after all," and I need it a little less the next day until I've functionally cut it off (except for my birthday, when I had some birthday treats). Definitely evidence that sugar is as addicting as drugs and body needs to "detox" to wean off of it, and then it feels great.
A big thing is not eating too much rice or noodles.....those tend to pump up my body weight higher than anything (It's amazing how meticulous I am about checking the scale now, and being able to anticipate based on what I ate the day before how much I will weigh). Also, it depends on how quickly the food passes through your system (Bill Bryson delicately wrote in The Body that food lasts in your digestive system for about 24 to 36 hours before it passes through). Well, after that food, especially heavy food, gets "passed through," it will cause a massive change in body weight.
5.) Don't overeat. I've found from not overeating that I used to overeat before. Over the course of a meal, there's a certain point where I've probably satiated my hunger and don't need to eat anymore, but I blow past that like a California stop sign and keep going until I feel really full, which is a sure sign of unneeded calories. Stopping short of being too full also means I get hungry earlier later on, but then I can just have a really light snack later on that controls that burning desire to have food.
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