Starting a Healthy Lifestyle (Detailed and Game Plan Explained)

Hi everyone! Aneli here with a totally different kind of post and surprisingly a long one as well. Hopefully you are doing well. Lately I have been thinking about what is really important to me and what I need to do to improve and change my life. And the one and most important aspect of my life that I have not been able to change and fix in my life is my weight. Ever since I graduated from high school I just started gaining weight and my current weight is the biggest I have been my whole life. I am currently 290 pounds for anyone interested in the number. Now I could sit here and just write down the negative things about being a shortie at this weight but that is not why I am writing this post. The real reason for this post is to share my journey I am about to embark on and to share my game plan in case anyone is on a similar journey. Hopefully this game plan helps someone out and also informs the readers of this post about different tips people are recommending and just what is being discussed about losing weight. Now before I share anything else I am obviously not an expert on living a healthy lifestyle and definitely not an expert on losing weight so please take what you think might help you and leave what you think is not helpful. Remember everyone’s idea of a healthy lifestyle looks different and everyones losing weight journey will be different as well.

Ok now that we have established that, I like watching youtube and tik tok as much as the next person. So that is where most of my game plan is coming from. Last night I saw a tik tok that made me see the way we portion our food is incredibly important and is actually less complex than I imagined. The lady in the video is a personal trainer and she had a caption in the video that read ”do you want to lose weight?” which caught my attention. It was a very well liked video as well so I decided to watch it. She started by saying do you also want to keep it off for 20 years? And how about forever? Her name is Ilmee Mintz and she basically walks us through how to build your plate for every meal using portion control. She starts with 1 cup of veggies and she aims to eat 5 cups of veggies per day. When she says veggies she also means a salad if you prefer. Second she adds her protein of choice which is chicken and it is 2 thirds of a cup. Third she adds her carbs which for her it was a piece of squash. Last but not least she does a handful of almonds which is her fat of choice. But she said if you are allergic to nuts you can always do cheese, avocado or olives. In her tik tok she also recommends 2-3 servings of fruit a day and she says the serving would be 1 cup. Oh and very important she recommends drinking lots and lots of water, about 3 liters or more. She also says that she likes to add sauces or a sauce to her food which I find really important since sometimes when cooking the food might not have much flavor and that will make eating some healthy foods much easier. She had a sauce with no sugar and no salt. So I will try to follow her advice since to be honest it kind of gave me some relief after watching. Im not sure about you but when I hear portion control I instantly think restriction and starving myself which feels to me more of like a strict diet that is not sustainable for a long time. But after seeing her plate it gave me hope that it is a very good amount of food that I am able to eat so all that negativity disappeared and I think portion control is the way to go for me instead of counting calories. Now I think counting calories is super important because it is what most successful people do when losing weight which leads me to the second topic: calorie deficit.

No matter what you have watched or even if you feel you have lived under a rock till today I am pretty sure you have heard people rave about how being in a calorie deficit is the most important thing when losing weight and usually that means doing a little research and counting calories at the beginning of your journey . I already did a little bit of research and in my case 1,995 calories a day are the calories I should aim for every day in order to lose 2 pounds a week. Now not going to lie that seems a little bit of calories but with that said I think it is a good number to have. I plan on consuming a lot of low calorie veggies that will add volume and will hopefully fill me up till my next meal so that I don’t have the urge to snack here and there. There is also the fact that we might feel restricted and we might only lose 2 pounds a week so just remember that some weeks will be good and some will probably not and we have to remember that this will not be easy and we did not get this heavy overnight either. It took a long time, well at least for me it did, it took years. And daily bad choices and habits led to this so basically daily good choices and habits will help us bounce back. I guess what I am sure is that no matter what wether I mess up and that is for sure going to happen I will hopefully keep at it and just be consistent and keep at it because I know at the end if I succeed my life will be a million times better. Besides losing weight I am looking forward to the energy and how my body will react and how I am going to be able to do more things than before. Enough of that though. Time for the next topic: exercise and being active.

A lot and when I tell you that many if not more than 75 percent of the people that have lost weight walked their weight off according to a lot of people on YouTube. People stress the importance of walking to help lose weight. Now I have heard people say 30 minutes a day is enough and I have also heard that you need to hit 10k steps a day. I think ultimately it comes down with what you are able to do and the time you are willing to spend a day on walking. I personally going to go for 30 minutes of walking a day at the beginning and if i get used to it or it just becomes too easy I will add a couple more minutes. I have also heard that strength training is a must since building muscle burns fat. This really famous tik tok guy suggested we do 3 strength training workouts a week and walk daily as well.

This girl also said if we can not cut out some things from our diet we just need to replace that food with a healthier less calorie version. Som examples she gave were low calorie tortillas, low calorie yogurt options and sauces that are almost no calories or 0 calories. And yes small changes go a long way specially at the beginning. Some people do not restrict themselves completely right of the bat instead they have less of that item until they have barely any or they are able to cut it off completely. An example is if you have 2 soda cans per day you might want to cut it down to one per day or if you have to have sugar maybe once a day and portion it out instead of multiple a day and big portions. It really might come down to what you can’t live without at the beginning. I for example know someone that completely changed their lifestyle but couldn’t go without coffee in her day. So she completely eliminated junk food, fast food, and all sugar except for her daily starbucks. She commited to her regular meals and exercised every day and was able to lose weight despite her coffee addiction. Will this work for you or me, not sure but going into this we need to know what we really want and what we can live without.

Ok with that said here is my list of things I will be cutting and things I will be doing.

Portion Control: a cup of veggies, 2 thirds of protein, a small portion of carbs and I think I will eliminate carbs for dinner, a handful or 1/4 cup of fat, less sugar/less calorie sauces in every meal. Hopefully no more than 3 meals and I will aim for two servings of fruit as my snacks.

8 glasses of water regular glasses. Hopefully I will drink more further down the journey. But I think 8 glasses a day at the beginning is a great start.

30 minutes a day of walking every day. I will give strength training a try.

Since I will probably still indulge in fast food here and there I will make smarter healthier choices wherever we go and try to reduce the amount and portions.

Since sugar is my number one problem I will try to stick to a very tiny portion and only one sugary snack every other day as well as a can of soda only on saturday and sunday. Not going to lie this will be the hardest one to eliminate.

Last but definitely not least I will take this journey one day at a time and will try to have a lot of patience since this is a long journey and it might take a while to see results.

For anyone that read till the end thank you so so much. Hopefully this helps you in a way and you can take something away from this that will help you on your own journey to a healthier lifestyle. Have a great week! See you on the next post.