Takeaways

• A calorie is a unit of energy your body uses to perform bodily functions. If you wish to lose weight, you must burn more calories than you consume (i.e., be in a calorie deficit).

• There are 2 things you could do to achieve a calorie deficit: 1) reduce your calorie intake, and 2) increase your calorie burn.

• Eating a balanced diet could help you reduce your calorie consumption. Other tips include using smaller bowls and choosing whole grains over refined carbohydrates.

• Increasing your activity level could help you burn more calories. Aim for 150 minutes of moderate exercise weekly; try to break that up over 3 or more days if possible.

• Take slow, incremental steps to improve your dietary and lifestyle choices instead of doing an overnight haul. It's a much more sustainable approach.

If you find yourself making new year resolutions to “slim down”, “eat healthier” or “exercise more” every January only to forget about it in April, this article is for you.

The article consist of 3 parts. Part 1 shares the fundamentals of weight loss, part 2 describes what you should do to lose weight, and part 3 is a collection of small goals that will make your weight loss journey as simple as possible.

Part 1: Understand the basics of weight loss. Know your calorie budget!

A calorie is a unit of energy that your body uses to perform bodily functions. Excess calories get stored as fats and if you have a shortage of calories, your body will convert your fats to calories.

If you want to lose weight, you need to consume less calories than your body burns. The amount of calories your body burns per day depends on multiple factors including age, sex, weight and activity level. To find out how many calories your body burns per day (your calorie budget), you can our calorie calculator below.

The amount of calories you consume is 100% based on the amount and type of food you eat. Most of the time, it is our food choices that undermines our effort to lose weight. In the next section, we’ll show you how you can eat well and satisfy your cravings at the same time.

Part 2: How to lose weight?

Now that we’ve established that weight loss is a result of consuming less calories than our body needs, we can start figuring out ways to help us (1) reduce our calorie consumption, and (2) increase our calorie budget.

Reducing calorie consumption.

The first thing to do is to get a sense of how many calories you consume in a day. Just google the amount of calories in the food you consume on an average day. After googling a few of your typical meals, you should have an idea of how the different meals contribute to your daily calorie intake, and identify the foods contributing the most towards your calorie count. These are the low hanging fruits to help you reduce your calorie intake!

Some tips to help you reduce your caloric intake includes:

• Swap food types instead of reducing intake completely. This will help reduce the feeling of hunger. e.g. instead of taking out carbs from your meal totally, reduce it by a portion and add a vegetable/fruit/lean meat to your meal. This will keep you full, while reducing your calorie intake!

• Use smaller bowls when you can. Smaller bowls can trick your mind into thinking that you are eating more than you really are.

• If you drink alcohol, try drinking lower calorie drinks. e.g. Drink whiskey on the rocks or with soda water instead of with sweetened mixers.

• Don’t change your diet overnight. Take time to ease into it. Change your diet a few meals per week at a time.

• Choose wholegrain if you are taking carbs. Whole grain carbohydrates such as wholemeal bread or brown rice takes a longer time to digest, allowing you to feel full for longer.

Consuming less calories is not just a matter of eating less. You need to work towards having a balanced diet. Depending on your current food habits, you may need to eat more of a certain food group and less of others. The basic proportion of food types that you should try to take per day is as follows:

• 2 portions or less of carbs

• 2 portions or more of protein

• 4 portions or more of vegetables and fruits

* A portion of food is approximately your palm size equivalent of it.

Increasing your calorie budget with exercise.

In order to increase your calorie budget, you need to increase your activity level. We recommend aiming for 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week. It is best to break up the 150 minutes into 3 or more days. Moderate intensity means exercising at a pace that is just outside of your comfort level. i.e. You should be able to say a complete sentence at the end of the workout, but you will need to take a couple of breaths while saying the sentence. You can play around with the calorie calculator above to see how increasing your activity level will increase your calorie budget.

Some tips to help you increase exercise:

• Put on your exercise attire. e.g. change into your exercise attire right after coming home from work or the first thing in the morning. Doing this small step of changing helps us to commit to doing the exercise.

• Exercise before dinner. After dinner you will need to take a break before exercising. Chances are that after the break you will not want to work out anymore.

• Find a buddy. Working out is more fun with company. Take a gym class with a friend instead of jogging on the treadmill alone!

• Choose a longer route. If you are walking to a restaurant, try to take a longer route there. The small extra distance will add up over time.

• 10 minutes is better than 0 minutes. If you can’t find time to exercise in a busy week, just get your blood pumping by doing a 10 minute body weight workout (pushups, squats, sit ups etc.). It’ll help with your weight loss as well as your mood.

Part 3: Simple steps to help you achieve your resolution easily

After understanding the specific areas you can work on for your diet and exercise, the next step is to set up smaller goals that will help you reach you resolution! Here are some common goals that you might want to adopt for yourself:

• Reduce rice/noodle or carb portion by 1/2 for lunch and dinner.

• Increase protein portion by 1 for lunch.

• Eat 1 portion of fruit every 2 days.

• Do a 30 minutes workout twice this week.

• Play basketball once this week.

• Choose brown rice when eating out twice this week.

• Buy wholemeal bread instead of white bread.

• Sign up for a spin class with a friend.

• Drink sugary beverages no more than 3 times a week.

• Learn how to play golf from a friend. Fix a session every 2 weeks.

You can start off with the goals above if they apply to you and then slowly increase their intensity over a few weeks. Focus on 2 - 3 goals per week, and slowly work them into your habit. By taking slow incremental steps, your weight loss journey will be much more tolerable. Sometimes you won’t even feel that you are changing your lifestyle. Before long you will notice your transformation and weight loss!

If you ever feel lost, reach out to us.

We believe that the only person who has the power to change our habits is ourselves. Hopefully this article will help you to understand how you can achieve and maintain weight loss. We understand that the process of identifying problem areas in your lifestyle can be time consuming and sometimes confusing. That’s why we set up our weight loss coaching program - NOVI Optimum. NOVI has a team of dieticians and fitness coaches that can help you to discover your problem areas and come up with strategies to help you adopt a balanced, sustainable lifestyle in a simple step by step way.

If you want to achieve your new year resolution without the hard work of figuring out an action plan for yourself, drop us a message. Change isn’t that difficult with us around!