Hi There,
Welcome back to Kat & Tshepi blog. How was your week? We hope you had a good one. On our side, it was a great week. We are starting to adjust to Winter, our minds and bodies are finally accepting the realities of the new season and letting go of the intimacies of the bright and jovial summer season. We fulfilled our training quota for this week. A new development on our training regimen is that we are starting to pay attention to proper form of the exercises we do and we are also slowly introducing CrossFit exercises. CrossFit has become the latest object of our fitness desire, we find it scary and awe striking but exciting at the same time 🙂 , let us see where it will take us.
Whilst training is the warm rays of winter sunshine, our nutrition has become a bleak countenance of the winter’s short and tiring days. We have improved slightly from the early winter days, we are more in control of our choice of foods and portions but we have realized that it gets difficult to stick to our diet plan in the late afternoon and evenings. In the afternoons and evenings, the body seems to want it all and it is becoming a constant challenge to tame the desire for warm calorific foods, this is a monster to deal with but we try our best. These nutrition challenges made us to ponder a bit about sustainability, about an ideal diet that we can stick to daily without feeling like we are in a deficit, is it possible? This leads us to this week’s topic “Sustainability”.
1. Sustainability
The term “YO YO Dieting” is common in the fitness and health industry. It is a term that describes a scourge of an impractical weight loss plan. YO YO dieting basically means the cycle of losing weight and then unfortunately regaining the weight or even more thereafter. It is a painful and discouraging experience because it appears to nullify all the efforts and time dedicated to a goal. If one thinks about it rationally, it is clear that YO YO dieting came to existence due to the lack of sustainability of the training and diet plan that was followed. The training and diet plan works for a short while as a dream and then the reality sets in thereafter to void the dream.
It then seems to make sense to consider sustainability when setting out on a fitness and weight loss journey. To look beyond the target, to envision the lifestyle after the goal has been reached. To avoid the risk of regaining the weight that was lost, one needs to think about continuing with what they were doing to a certain extent. The journey of losing weight always involves changes and sacrifices for a specific period and the results are the birth of a new person with developed new habits. If these new habits are given up after the target is met, it is obvious that the benefits of the habits will also be lost. This then begs the question, how does one sustain the habits developed during a weight loss period?
Currently we are in the middle of the fifth month of a six-month weight loss journey. On this journey, we have developed new habits regarding training, nutrition and tracking progress. If after the six months we abandon these habits, we know for a fact that we will go back to where we have started (not a fun thought). In lieu of this unforgiving reality, we have started to reflect on how will we sustain our habits and keep making progress on our fitness without feeling the restrictions of the six months’ journey. We came up with a few suggestions that will help us to be sustainable:
- We will increase our daily calorie target slightly. We will still be in a calorie deficit but to a point where we are not feeling restricted.
- We will continue with the diet plan but increase the portions size. This highlight the importance of choosing a diet plan with foods you enjoy, you are able to continue with them.
- We will adjust our macro nutrients ratio to cater for and favor our individual macro inclinations. It will most likely be Carbohydrates for Kat and Fats for Tshepi.
- We will continue with the baseline of our training plan (e.g training days) and adjust the intensity by either increasing it or reducing it to suit our needs. Unfortunately for us the intensity will increase as our new goal will be to improve our fitness and athleticism 😦 , whew more pain.
So far these are the ideas that have surfaced, we hope to get more along the way to ensure that we don’t enter the YO YO dieting cycle. Thinking about sustainability at this stage of our journey also strengthens us and improves our commitment to our journey. At this stage we are in fatigue and it is easy for the mind to think that the restrictions will go on forever, therefore thinking about what we will be doing after the goal is reached appetize the mind and assures it that there will be change along the way and that the restrictions are not permanent, very comforting 🙂 .
That’s it for this week, we realize that for results of a weight loss journey to be sustainable, some of the habits (if not all) that were developed during the process needs to be kept and adjusted to suit the current needs. Furthermore, choosing the habits that one enjoys at the beginning of the journey is a good recipe for sustainability thereafter. In the coming week, the day for tracking the 5th Months progress is looming, therefore we will be putting in efforts on executing our plans to ensure that we have a positive progress tracking. Until next week, stay blessed.
Kat & Tshepi
Kat & Tshepi 