A Personal Challenge, A Low-Carb Diet

Credits: Mae Mu (Unsplash)

Everyone had that feeling sometimes once in their life. The feeling that you are not as comfortable with yourself as you used to be and that you actually weigh a few pounds too much for your body length.

In this article, I would like to share my experience about my 10 kg weight loss in ten weeks thanks to my diet and eating habits.

IMPORTANT! First of all, I would like to say that I am not a doctor or a dietician, and that this is an experiment that I took on myself as a personal challenge. I also have little to no eating restrictions or allergic reactions to food.

Why this is more than losing weight

Losing pounds does more with your physical and mental state than you would expect. From achieving a goal to becoming more aware of what you eat. Below I have listed my personal benefits of losing weight:

• You achieve a healthy weight, which also makes you feel better.
• Your body does not have to put in as much effort because it does not have to carry as much weight as before. This gives you more energy to take that extra step.
• You have achieved a goal that you have worked hard for, this is very satisfying.
• You learn to be more aware of your diet.
• You will enjoy a “cheat” moment instead of “cheating” all day long.
• You can buy new clothes that give a much better fit than before, this will boost your confidence.
• You also learn that sugar has created an unconscious addiction over the years that you have now tamed.

The essence of this diet

Thanks to this diet, your body will burn unnecessary fats by stopping eating products that produce those extra fats. This means no sugar (not even fruit), no milk-containing products (milk, cheese, etc.) and no men-made food such as bread, pasta.

This stops the supply of sugars and fats, which we did not need anyway, and the body can start burning the excess sugars and fats that our body still contains.

Set a goal

Every beginning of a diet is difficult. But in this case you have nothing to lose and you do not have to exercise extra. But if you also exercise extra, this of course speeds up the process. This way of losing weight may lower your physical threshold, but the mental threshold is yet to come.

For example, I set a goal for myself to lose 10 kilos in 10 weeks. This is very ambitious but even if I came close to those 10 kilos, I would have gone a long way.

Make it your lifestyle

Since I live with my girlfriend, it was easy to get started. We started consuming all the products that were prohibited in this diet. And once there was no bad food in the house, you can only buy good food.

A list of foods that are NOT allowed in this diet:

• As little sugar as possible: fruit, candy, sauces, etc.
• As little pasta as possible: bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, etc.
• As little alcohol as possible, this was easy since I already didn’t have a lot of alcohol in my house.
• As little dairy as possible: cheese, milk. I had already switched to Soy milk because of a more vegetarian mindset.

In addition, this diet DOES allow:

• Insert 1 cheat day every week on which you can eat everything you want to eat (really everything). For me, it was best to plan on the weekend because of more social activities that increased temptation.
• Drink at least 2 liters of water a day. This ensures that you stay hydrated, but also a good sip of water hides your appetite that can arise between meals because of this diet.
• Furthermore, you should eat max. 100 grams of carbohydrates per day to make your body lose weight. In the beginning this is just looking for the right nutrition and make calculation (With MyFitnessPall app for example). After two weeks you know approximately what you can eat and you no longer have to calculate this.

The less carbohydrates you eat per day, the faster you lose weight. I went from 100 to sometimes 65 grams a day, so the kilos went off quickly.

Pay attention! This can sometimes make you feel faint because you have too little energy in your body. If this really didn’t work I ate 2 tablespoons of peanut butter to give me some energy again.

Develop a new pattern

After the first weeks it becomes difficult not to cheat, but even then you have to keep on persisting. Probably a few pounds have already gone off, but there is a danger that if you start cheating, they come back that easily.

The advantage of 10 weeks is that it should become a habit after the first couple of weeks. The funny thing is that after the first month I no longer felt the need to eat sweets, because you get rid of the sugars (addiction).

So to help I’ve setup some tips to help you keep going:

1. Weigh your weight every day in the morning just after you get out of bed. Then your body has burned the most energy during your night’s rest. And by weighing at the same time every day, there is no deviation in the results because you have just eaten, for example.
2. Write your weight on a list. This must be done with pen and paper. This ensures that you are aware of the weight you are recording. Over time you will see some fluctuations, but generally the weight will drop.
3. As mentioned before, don’t get bad food at home anymore. If you have a family, limit this and resist snacking.
4. Choose a few dishes per day of the week and repeat every week. It is true that it may be boring, but at least you stick to your end goal to move towards your target weight.
5. Eat your dinner for lunch the next day if you are not sure what to eat for lunch.
6. Do this together with a friend and continue to motivate each other. Share photos and tips of dishes with each other. This also makes it easier to talk to someone because they are in the same situation.

The finish and start

After 10 weeks of consistent diet, my weight had dropped by 8 kilos. I thought this was quite an achievement, but because I had already come this far, I started to maintain the diet and I was at the target weight two weeks later.

Because I had now adopted a new lifestyle, the extra two weeks were no problem. But it does not stop there, after experiencing this process I did not want to go back to then and I continued to maintain the lifestyle.

I turned the cheat day into a cheat weekend. Furthermore, I continued to adhere to the diet as much as I could and still live more consciously to this day.

A new start applies not only to me, but perhaps also to you. I was amazed by the results and the relatively simple way this happened. Partly because of this, I want to wish this to everyone to feel better about yourself and to get more energy. So I wrote this article for those who want to benefit from it. Entirely at your own risk but the entire process is already worth experiencing.

Thank you for reading this article!

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