Kat & Tshepi

Hi There,

Welcome back to K&T blog, how was your week?

We hope it was a good one, full of health and fitness, and we hope it was singing and dancing to your tune. Embarking on a weight loss journey is like taking a roller coaster ride, some weeks are high , exhilarating and successful whilst some are low, saddening and full of failure. Both the highs and the lows are what makes the journey interesting, worthy and fulfilling, we bask in the glory of the highs and strengthen from the humility of the lows. Regardless of the highs and the lows, what is important for reaching your destination is treading forward, it is being consistent on your efforts, is to try week in and week out.

“It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives. It’s what we do consistently ” – Anthony Robbins.

This week we scoured our posts from last two years for some good tips we have shared before and feel that it would be helpful to re-share them in this post. This blog has been progressive and elaborative, it is based on our own fitness and health journey experience which is still unfolding, but it is presented with care and exactness to ensure that the blog is practical, useful and value adding. Going through the previous posts was a humbling experience, there is so much helpful information we shared every week, yet we feel that there is still so much more we still need to learn, experience and share.

Here are 30 tips to help with weight loss:

1. Be clear about your goals, what do you really want? how much weight do you want to lose?
2. Completely eliminate sodas and juices. This should probably be the first thing you do.
3. Eliminate sugar in tea, coffee, cereals, vegetables….everywhere you use direct sugar. The body does not need sugar to function.
4. You need to find a way to eat less than you are currently eating, and the best way to do so is to eat whole natural foods and eliminate sugar and processed foods.
5. Give your body a chance to digest food, e.g try not to eat anything for 3 hours after you ate, challenge yourself to do so.
6. Start resistance training, it is not only beneficial for improving metabolism but for overall health and longevity, more especially as we age because we naturally lose muscle mass with age.
7. Be patient, remember it took a while to gain weight, it will also take a while to lose it sustainably.
8. Reduce your salt intake – The best way to control the intake of salt(and sugar) is by eliminating or reducing processed foods.
9. Know what is metabolism (the process by which the body changes food and drink into energy) and do things that improves it (eating healthy and exercising).
10. The scale is an ally and not a foe, it is a tool that gives you insight on what is happening in your life at the time. Don’t view it negatively.
11. Measure your weight at least once a week, we measure ours every morning, every day. This is a daily reminder of our journey.
12. Get a training or weight loss partner or join a physical or virtual group, because weight loss is hard in isolation.
13. Change your snacks – Chocolates, cookies, biscuits, chips must be replaced with whole foods seeds, nuts, fruits and vegetables sticks, boiled eggs and biltong/jerky.
14. Don’t be in denial, accept that you have gained weight and have lost control. It takes serious humility but it is the start of progress.
15. Set an intentional and purposeful morning routine geared towards your weight loss goals.
16. Choose complex carbs instead of simple carbs. Complex carbs release energy slowly and are generally low in calories.
17. Grow your interest in weight management, e,g learn from Youtube, enroll in nutrition short course, frequently read blogs like this one 🙂 .
18. Start moving and continue to do so consistently. Walking, running ,gardening, playing with kids, exercising. Our bodies were meant to be moving and not to be sedentary.
19. Log and track your weight, tracking is good for making fitness and health improvements and for reaching a goal, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
20. Do your best to manage stress, the body makes responding to stress a priority, and when doing this it sacrifices other systems such as those that help with losing fat.
21. Make your weight loss goal part of your life, think and talk about it always. Let it not leave your mind because “out of mind, out of sight”.
22. Believe that you can lose the weight, don’t be discouraged when you fail. Try to improve every time you fail, your focus should be on continuous improvement.
23. Always try to have a balanced meal when you eat. Include carbs, proteins and fats on your plate.
24. Find your mission for losing weight, a bigger reason than looking good, it powers you through to completion. e.g being healthy and fit for your kids.
25. Try to eat earlier and less at night, you don’t need all that energy when you are asleep, most of it will get turned into fat.
26. Frequently review your goals to see if they are still relevant or realistic, the more you try to lose weight the more you learn what is realistic.
27. Have a long term view , having a short term view of losing weight results in gaining back the weight or even more. It needs to be your new lifestyle.
28. Appreciate and be grateful for your own body, having a negative view of your body will not make you feel good, and will create faulty expectations of your weight loss and lead to disappointment.
29. Prepare food in advance , having food readily available helps with not going too hungry for too long and helps with avoiding convenient foods.
30. Be aware of old habits trying to creep back up and address them early, they have the power to take you back where you started.

That’s it for this week, are there things from the list that you are not doing but could be helpful to your weight loss success? or maybe things that you are doing consistently but take for granted? . Looking at these tips, one cannot help but think that being successful at loosing weight is not only about physiological factors (food and exercise), but the mental and emotional factors also comes into play, it requires one’s various life aspects to be in sync, one’s full-being.

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” – Aristotle

Until next week, Stay blessed.

Kat & Tshepi