Wanna Lose Weight? That's Easy, Just Eat Lunch Twice!

I am 5'8" and was 171 lbs three weeks ago - only 10 lbs over than my ideal weight. My weight was mostly concentrated around my waist. They say that women lose weight to look great and men lose weight to be healthy.


I am different; I do it for the gadgets!

What do you mean gadgets? Well, I have this habit of buying latest technology gadgets like laptop, iTouch, iPad etc. My eyes are already on the latest iPad from Apple and I also wanted to buy a Mac Mini to convert it into a media center. A few weeks ago my wife threw me a challenge and said, “Why don't you earn your gadgets - one gadget for every 5 lbs. That way you will get your gadgets and look good too”. I don’t know what my wife means when she says “I will look good” but an iPad in my hands will sure look fantastic!


So I took the challenge.


The results are in. In only 4 weeks, I was able to lose 5 lbs. I just bought my Mac Mini.


Losing 5 lbs in 3 weeks! Well, there is nothing dramatic there. You must have heard many stories with people losing four times that in less than half the time I took. There are two things to consider. One – losing the last 10 pounds is the toughest and second – I lost my weight by having lunch twice!


How can one lose weight by eating lunch twice?


Here is my analysis. To begin with, I did not follow any diet plan or changed my lifestyle or eating habits completely. I just did one thing - used common sense to observe what I ate and what calories they translate into. I then experimented with minimizing those calories without getting hungry. Following are some of my findings and suggestions:

1. Start with the "will": If you don't have the will, nothing will work. Forget all the diet plans and focus on motivating yourself. Some would like to have a better quality of life, better health, more energy, better looks or in my case better gadgets! Find out what motivates you. If you are not motivated you can never be committed and if you are not committed you will never lose weight.

2. Work with a friend or family member: This ties in nicely with the point above. If you share your goals or plans with a friend or a family member and work together with them to achieve your ideal weight, chances are, you will be more successful. The friend will keep you motivated and vice versa. He or she will also keep you honest too. You won't find yourself on your own. In my case I worked together with my wife at home and a colleague at work. My wife has already lost all the extra weight that she had gained after two kids. She is now working on toning and looking great. We both love to eat delicious food and find different ways to come up with low calorie recipes to fill us up.

3. Eat lunch twice: This is another way of saying that distributes your calories. I found out that my calories were bottom heavy. I rarely used to eat breakfast. I also used to have a quick lunch because of my busy work. As the evening approached, I used to feel famished. I will come home and start eating snacks, have a drink or two and just weight for the dinner to be served. I will then have a heavy dinner and go to bed almost immediately. I found out that I am consuming almost 60% of my calories during dinner. That was too much. Also, there was not enough time for the body to burn any of those calories as I used to go to bed soon after dinner. To get out of this rut, I started having breakfast regularly. It was a struggle to be hungry in the morning for a few days but my body quickly adapted to it. Then I started having sensible lunches - around 300-400 calories. I would have my lunch at 12:30pm but was starving again around 4:30pm. I tried to eat snacks - sometimes nuts, sometimes cereal and milk if I am at home, sometimes a granola bar and things like that. This helped but I was still famished in the evening. Also, the snacks were not always healthy and contained a lot of fat. One day, a thought came to my mind - I eat a sensible lunch of around 400 calories, why not have it twice. Its filling, it’s satisfying and has around the same calories as my snacks. That day I went to Subway and ordered a foot long turkey sandwich on a wheat bread. I ate 6" sandwich at 12:30pm and then another 6" at 4:30pm. That was the big difference! When I went home that day, I did not feel famished. I ate sensible dinner. As soon as I put this into routine, I started to lose pounds. It turns out that once I distributed my calories, I did not feel famished at any time. That was the trick.

4. Don't starve yourself: There is no sure way to succeed if you want to lose weight but in my experience a sure way to fail is to starve yourself. There are folks with great will power who have achieved success by doing this. I don't know if it is healthy to starve and lose weight but one thing is certain and everyone will agree with it that it is not practical. A human being goes through several emotions within a day - being excited to being passive to being exhausted to being tired to sometimes being depressed. Similarly a human being goes through many situations in a day - with guests, with clients, with kids, in a lunch meeting or in a celebratory dinner. In my experience it is difficult to overcome the urge to eat going through multiple combinations of emotions and situations that I talked above when you are starving. The best solution is to not be hungry.

5. Eat everything, Enjoy life: Another thing that works for me is the fact that I have very few restrictions as to what I can or cannot eat. In summary, I ate everything in moderation. Sometimes I went overboard and consumed many unnecessary calories but I did not make my one mistake negate everything I did in the past or all the good things I will continue to do in the future. Many people are too hard on themselves. They follow their diet religiously but one mistake and they give up everything and become depressed or de-motivated and start drinking and eating like crazy. Chill out, that was not murder, you just ate some pizza. Darn it, it smelled good, looked appetizing and was delicious especially after so many weeks! So enjoy the moment, don't punish yourself. Another way to eat everything would be to find new recipes that taste good and are not high calorie. My wife and I have found many. It was possible to have less than the required calories and fat grams while enjoying a delicious dinner of grilled vegetables and chicken, a glass of white wine that ended with hot tea with real sugar! I have realized that a teaspoon of sugar is 25 calories, nothing compared to almost 2000 calories that we consume every day. It is better to consume those extra sugar calories than to put chemicals in your body – some of which cause cancer. Yeah, cancer! Check the label next time.

6. The dreaded exercise: I don’t want to minimize the importance of exercise but doing regular exercise is a state of mind. There are many ways to do exercise – some people love to spend their time in a Gym, some love to play sport, some like to take long walks, some like to run in the morning, some like to ride their bicycle in the evening, some have young kids and cannot find time to rest! The bottom line is that one needs to find something that they like. That is the key. A gym membership is of no use if that is not what interests you. My wife and I spent almost $900 over the last Christmas and bought a Treadmill. But we both prefer to take walks outside of the house. So the Treadmill is OK if you motivate yourself to use it but for me the best thing would be to walk outside with a tangible goal – like walk to the strip mall and buy a book or climb the nearest hill and come back. Like I said with the food, there are many ways to succeed doing an exercise but the sure way to fail is to try to do something that is not your cup of tea. Another thing that helps is to do little changes in your lifestyle. In my case I decided to take the stairs instead of an elevator when possible. Remember, the key is “when possible”. As you must have noticed, I don’t believe in any impractical restrictions. My results and not my approach is important. We have a 4 story car park at work and I park on the third or fourth floor. My office is on the 5th floor and I take stairs to go to my office or my car whenever I can.

7. Define success, Define celebration: Most people are good at celebrating success but the key is to define what success is. If you are 300 pound over weight male in early 30s and if you decide to start watching what you eat. You are bound to lose 2-3 pound immediately but 2-3 pounds compared to what you may want to lose might be negligible. For example if I want to lose 60 pounds then losing 2 pounds is still less than 3 %. In my case I want to lose 10 pounds. I defined my first milestone for success to be 50 % or 5 lbs. But defining success is half the battle, the second important part is defining celebration. You can have a beer, an ice cream, buy new clothes, a gadget or anything that tickles your fancy. My experience is that you should have a pre-defined celebration – something that you miss and need dearly. In my case, I have my gadgets – a Mac Mini when I lose 5 lbs and an iPad for the next 5 lbs. My celebrations may not make sense to all of you but it makes sense to me. It keeps me motivated, it keeps me honest, and it keeps me driven. Once you find something that will do the same for you, you have defined both the success and the celebration.

8. Write down your journey - the good and the bad: What’s the one difference between successful, high profile people and us mere mortals? I am not talking about success in diets; I am talking successful scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, statesmen, revolutionaries, politicians and others. You will notice that most of these successful people have a habit of writing down their ideas, their observations, their thoughts, their struggles etc. – some publish their writings and some do not. But if you are successful, you have a habit of writing. I have discovered it so late in my life but as they say you are never too late. I have found that writing or documenting is also introspection. If provides fodder for you to analyze, evaluate and make changes to your future because the past cannot be changed unless you are part of a science fiction sitcom! The best thing I did when I started my effort to lose weight was to write down my calories every day. Nowadays it’s fairly easy to document these kinds of things. I am personally using a site called www.fatsecret.com to document all my calories and exercise details. The site is fairly intuitive and has a pretty good database of foods that we eat. One can also create custom food items and store them in the site. The site tracks your calories along with fat, proteins and carbohydrate consumption. I have noticed that there were days when I did very well with my calorie intake but my fat consumption was high, I have also noticed that there were days when I consumed 130% of the recommended calories i.e. I overate! There were days when I did very well with calorie and fat intake but felt tired or hungry. Basically, every day taught me something new. I learned from my mistakes and increased my chances to succeed. The biggest benefit of documenting was that I could analyze my food habits and improve them. This blog is once again helping me put everything in perspective. This is a great exercise. Even if nobody reads my blog, I still want to do it because it is for me. If I don’t do it, I would lose and it won’t be the weight!