How to Lose 18 Kg in 124 Days, Naturally!

My friend Vipul Jain, recently made a resolution.  It was a stiff target. And boy, he did achieve it with fantastic results.

Almost everyone is always intrigued by weight loss brouhaha.  Those who have some extra Kgs to shed believe there’s lot of money involved, some complex methods involved – which is beyond them.   This inspiring story proves all of it wrong.

 

Weight loss is simple and can be achieved by anyone.  I personally, am very respectful to those who are able to reduce from fat to fit.  How to lose 18 Kgs in 124 days? Vipul Jain explains below –

 

“Our body is beyond comprehension for most of us. Those who yearn for weight loss find it tough to shed the extra kgs while those on the other end of the spectrum find it difficult to gain the mass. I have always belonged to the former category as my Body Mass Index (BMI) and Fat percentage were always on the upper side. I have tried six times in last 10 years to lower down my weight and in effect my BMI but would always go astray after a couple of months.

 

In June this year, after all the bashing from my wife and friends for my extreme weight gain (92 kgs precisely) with a BMI of 31.5, I decided to give another shot to my unresolved desire to be fit and healthy. While the basics behind weight loss were already known to me, the game this time was about consistency and determination. I gathered the essential elements and charted out the plan to be dictated by it for achieving the long pending goal.

 

Essential Items

I gathered three essential items for any weight loss regime which are listed below:-

 

Weighing Scale

A weighing scale is your best friend in your journey towards a healthy lifestyle.  I strongly feel that everyone should buy a scale, manual or digital, for keeping a constant track of their achievement. Your mirror may lie to you during your weight loss drive but a scale never does. It is advisable to check your weight early morning as you wake up. It should be noted that the weight measurements should always be comparable on the daily basis, in the sense that the weight taken in morning should never be compared to the weight noted in evening. It is a known fact that weight readings are always on a higher side in the evening because of the food and water consumption during the day.

 

Calorie measuring App

If you are serious enough to lose weight, download a calorie measuring app on your smartphone to keep a track of calories you take in during the day. I had tried many such apps but MyFitnessPal wins hands down. It has a database of all the food items which you possibly can eat with correct statistics on their nutritional values. While what you eat daily and what you manually enter would never be exactly similar but the calorie measurement on a regular basis works. More about it explained in subsequent paragraphs of the article.

 

Pedometer

Running on a lane blindfolded will take you nowhere and starting your weight loss schedule without a pedometer is akin to going blindly on the journey. It is always advisable to have a pedometer or a fitness band to keep track of the steps taken during the day. A basic fitness band like Xiaomi or a pedometer app on your smartphone will be sufficient.

 

The Process

After gathering the necessary things for weight loss, the next key step is to calculate your daily calorie requirement at your current weight level. There are several websites (MyFitnessPal, BodyBuilding.com, etc) which will measure your current calorie requirement based on some variables like your height, weight, gender, etc. At the start of my journey, my calorie requirement at 91 kgs was roughly 2700 calories with a sedentary lifestyle and close to 3000 calories with a lightly active schedule.

 

It is a proven and accepted fact that to lose 1 pounds (lbs) of weight in a week, you should take 500 calories lesser than your daily calorie requirement over a week long period. Going by this calculation, if you eat 500 calories lesser daily over 7 days, then your total shortfall would be 3500 calories over a week and you would lose 1 lbs. Multiply it by 4 weeks period and your total loss would be 4 lbs (close to 2 kgs) in a month. While it is generally agreed that a weight loss target of 2-3 kgs over a month is healthy, I had set a challenging target of weight loss of more than 4-5 kgs inn a month. For losing 1 kgs every week (4 kgs over a month), I had to consume less than 1700 net calories daily which seemed herculean at first but was successfully achieved by me over a 4 month long expedition.

 

Daily Schedule

After keying in my metrics in MyFitnessPal app, my daily calorie target was automatically set to 1600-1700 calories per day. In order to achieve a deficit of 1000 calories daily, I decided to burn off 500 calories in the Gym and the remaining 500 from reduction in my daily food intake. I had also read about the type of food to be eaten and combination of exercises to be done for maintaining a healthy body without taking much toll during the entire effort.

 

Food Items

I had completely stopped taking sugars (avoiding my 2 cups of daily tea, bakery items, etc) and junk food (bye-bye to McDs, Dominos, Pizzas, etc). Apart from avoiding the obvious choices of fatty food items, I also had read about some healthy food options to include in my daily appetite. Some of the food items which I have been consuming on a daily basis as part of my healthy diet are listed below.

• Peanut butter as a substitute for normal butter as it is rich in protein, potassium, good fats (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated) and many other nutrients.
• Multigrain or whole wheat brown bread as a substitute for white bread as they are rich in fibre and complex carbs.
• Mix flour roti instead of wheat roti made from soya atta, bajra atta and jowar atta.
• Green vegetables like ridge gourd, bottle gourd, capsicum, spinach, beans, etc.
• Eggs, soya beans, lentils, pulses and paneer to increase my daily protein requirement.

 

The list of healthy food items is endless but I have shared only some of them which were part of my diet. Various research articles agree on the fact that to lose weight in a rapid manner, the bulk of your diet should come from protein and the least from fats. It is because proteins help in muscle building which is heavier than your stored fats in the body and strong muscles aid in cutting fat in a swift manner. I followed this universally agreed principle and included protein rich foods as mentioned above in my daily calorie intake.

 

I list down an example of my diet from my daily schedule which I followed rigorously along with a screenshot of the weekly net calories consumption by me (total food eaten-calories burnt in exercise):-

Breakfast- Egg whites (3-4): 60-80 calories, 2 slices brown bread with 1 tbsp peanut butter: 300 calories, Toned Milk with Oats: 350 calories: Total: 750 calories

Lunch: Eating office lunch (one bowl rice, dal, roti, curd) with limiting the calories intake to 800 calories. Occasionally taking soya stuffed roti from home and boiled kala chana.

Snacks: 10-12 almonds (70-80 calories), Banana (100 calories)

Dinner: Hot milk with almonds, 1 slice of bread occasionally. Total 400 calories.

I was consuming 2000-2100 calories daily with focus on more protein and lesser fats. There is a concept of ‘Cheat day’ when you are dieting in which you can eat whatever you want on one specific day of the week. Though there is nothing wrong in this, I deliberately had not taken any cheat day for 2 months and continued with my boring diet.

 

I strongly believe that one of the important reasons for my swift weight loss was cutting down on my dinner for 2-3 months and not having any cheat day in between.

 

Exercise

Burning 500 calories through exercise was not a simple task either. I read myriad articles on the best combination of exercises, type of exercise, right time of exercise, etc to make the best possible regime to follow over the period. After a careful research, I devised an exercise plan having following salient features:-

• Though the best time of exercise is in the morning as your metabolism remains boosted during the entire day, I decided to devote 60-80 minutes daily from my evenings to spend in the gym based on my convenience.
• I was not doing only cardio or weight training on a particular day and I instead mixed up the two on a daily basis. While cardio like jogging and cycling are beneficial in reducing the overall body fat, weight training is essential to tone the body and giving it a droolworthy look.
• I understood from research articles that doing high intensity exercises in periodic intervals (technically known as HIITs) is the key to burn fat rapidly. Such exercises create a phenomena called EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) in your body which means that HIITs create a high deficit of oxygen in the body which keeps burning calories even after your HIITs session. This was experienced by me during my journey as doing a high intensity workout on a particular day without meeting the daily target of burning 500 calories would still not abruptly increase my weight.
• For reducing my paunch, I focused on core building exercise like doing sit-ups, crunches, planks and for adding an impetus to weight loss, I added compound exercises (which involve more than 1-2 muscle groups) to my schedule like Squats, Deadlifts and Lunges.

 

Some Useful Tips

Based on my experiences and leanings from articles over 5 month long period, I am sharing some useful tips which can be emulated in your plan without second thoughts:-

• Eat more protein in your daily diet and reduce fat consumption (but do not eliminate). Try to eat Carbs (rice, bread, roti) before evening only and limit your dinner to food items abundant in proteins liked boiled dal and beans. Experts recommend 0.8 to 1.2 gms into your total body weight in kgs of protein daily (example- An 80 kgs person should take 64-100 gms of protein daily). I have been taking more than 80 grams of protein daily to meet the benchmarks.
• I reiterate that for an effective weight loss regime, always do compound exercises once or twice a week. It can either be done freehand or with weights as per your convenience.
• Drink a glass of warm water with lemon and honey. Lemon detoxify your body and honey lubricates your digestion system.
• Find reasons to walk more steps during your day like meeting your friends {and even your bosses :-)} sitting at different floors, taking stairs to reach your workstation/canteen. I keep a target of climbing 8 flight of stairs in our HO (total 192 steps) once a day either in interval or at one stretch.
• Try to eat a healthy lunch twice or thrice a week by getting it from home instead of eating oily food in the canteen.
• During your cardio sessions, don’t waste time in running at your comfortable pace. A comfortable pace is one at which you can run at a stretch for over 2 minutes.

And I would conclude this article with an important remark, “It’s not only about achieving your set target, it’s also about sustaining what you have achieved’. And trust me, the latter part is the difficult of the two 🙂

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