Kat & Tshepi

Hello There,

Welcome back to the blog. In last week’s article we explained the importance of setting a vision before attempting to lose weight, which is the first step on our weight loss guide. Vision really gives you a sense of direction on your journey. This week we would like to elaborate on the second step of our weight loss guide, “Clean up your Nutrition”. Nutrition is the core of weight loss, we gain weight because of our nutrition choices and we lose weight based on the same criteria.

It is common to hear people who are into fitness and health say losing weight is determined by 80% nutrition and 20% training. This is somewhat contrary to what most people think when it comes to success factors for weight loss, mostly believe training is the number 1 success factor. This perception is very far from the truth, because you can successfully lose weight without training. If we remember to stay grounded and start from the basics, we do know very well that to lose weight you need to eat less.

A successful weight loss is an indication of a consistent caloric deficit, eating less for a significant amount of time. Reducing the amount of food that one normally consume can be a troubling thought and experience, troubling enough to deter people from even attempting to loses weight. This could possibly be one of the reasons there are other alternatives to losing weight without the intentional reduction of food. This makes sense to a certain degree, because we are wired to thrive and survive, and food is mainly our source of survival….why should we limit and reduce this source? our bodies naturally disagrees.

In light of our body’s natural inclination to eat more for survival, we propose a gentle but effective approach to eating less, ‘incremental dietary changes’. We propose that unhealthy foods be reduced one food at a time, whilst healthy foods are increased one food at a time. To achieve this successfully ,we firstly ask that a person desiring to lose weight list all foods that they are eating but think they are unhealthy. Secondly we ask for another list to be drawn up, this is a list of foods that one think are healthy and should be included in their diet. With the lists drawn-up, it is very insightful to see the amount of food that we consume but believe they are not good for us, and it is also amazing to see the health potential and benefits we are missing out when we look at the amount of food we should be eating but are not doing so.

There is so much power and benefits in writing things down, among them is the ability to see things clearly. When the two lists are drawn up and are in front of you, things become clear for you, you are able to plan and priorities the actions you need to clean up your nutrition, the truth is staring you in the face. In step 4 of our weight loss guide, we show how to implement an incremental dietary change strategy whereby each week a person focus on one food item to reduce and one food item to include or increase . In due course, the benefits are incremental, the nutrition becomes cleaner, and you know what, the weight loss naturally follows.

Cleaning a diet is a continuous effort. On a weight loss journey you keep learning and discover new information about food and nutrition that urges you to make dietary changes. It is therefore helpful to be patient and make small changes to avoid being overwhelmed. These small changes adds up over time. Our (Kat and Tshepi) diet is constantly changing, and we feel that it is getting better and healthier. Currently the food item that we are reducing is bread. We are now eating bread only on weekends, and it is home baked. In baking our own bread, we are eliminating the added sugar and additives that you get in store bread.

It has been several weeks now since we started reducing bread, sometimes we win and other times we lose but the change it is starting to stick. The food item that is new to our diet is Nutritional Yeast. It is a good source of Vitamins and Proteins, we just sprinkle around 5g on our vegetables. Therefore in cleaning our diet we have bread on one side that we are reducing, and nutritional yeast on the other side that we are introducing/increasing.

That’s it for this week, cleaning up a diet requires awareness of our food choices and the patience to change some of those changes. Socrates left us with a quote rooted in the basics when in comes to food consumption, “Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat “, let us try.

Until next week, stay blessed.

Kat & Tshepi