Dieting advice for the average person
Nikola Man
This will not be your usual fitness piece about nutrition. There won’t be macros. I might mention calories here and there, but I won’t mention food scales, counting calories, or any specific diet. Below, you shall find advice that can be immediately implemented into your life and that will have a significant impact on weight loss. Without further ado:
Equip your environment (apartment, room, work station) with filling, unprocessed food you enjoy. Obviously, this will be different for everybody, but as a general rule is – the less processing the more satiating. The odds are that if you follow this rule, the food you chose will also coincidentally have fewer calories. For me these foods include whole-grain breads, tomato, seasonal fruit, dairy products such as cottage cheese. It would be wise to reduce or completely eliminate the availability of snacks and sweets in your daily environment. Also don’t forget that nuts often have a lot of calories, despite the fact that they are unprocessed.
One of the biggest obstacles to weight loss are liquid calories such as fizzy drinks, juices, and alcohol. Drinks are extremely easy to consume and as such very easy to overdo. The actionable advice here is to keep these drinks out of your hands reach and to limit them in general.
A sensible and healthy rate of weight loss is about 4% of your body weight per month. For a 100-kg person that would be 4 kg per month. For extremely obese individuals this can and should be much faster. Don’t be discouraged by the fact that you lost “only” 500 grams in a week. Advice here is to drop anywhere between 500 grams and 1 kg a week. The biggest benefit of this reasonable rate of weight loss is the muscle retention.
The goal of a restaurant chef is to make you happy so dishes in restaurants usually have almost double the calories than the same dish would if you made it at home. Don’t overdo starters, drink a lot of water before eating out and choose lower calorie options. Your safest bet is to go for salads and grilled meats.
There are several options for breaking a weight loss plateau: you can eat less, move more, combine the two, or go over your intake to check if you are eating more than you think. However, it is more productive to re-frame a plateau as practice in maintenance. Plateaus are like Thanos, inevitable and as such are not negative. It is also very wise to remember that the end goal for almost everybody is a “plateau” or rather maintaining a desired look or weight.
Eat more protein and filling food. For people in the fitness industry and committed lifters this does not constitute news. For the average person however, increase in protein intake can help quite a bit. A higher protein intake will have two main benefits for weight loss. Firstly, protein has a high satiety factor which will help you combat overeating and hunger. Secondly, protein has anti-catabolic properties to help you retain or build muscle. Filling food on the other hand is the one that usually contains fewer calories even in high volumes. Good examples of high quality protein sources and filling food are the following: chicken breast, chicken thighs, turkey breast, minced beef, steak, tuna, trout, literally every single vegetable, and literally every single fruit.