I lamented in one of my isolation posts about my weight loss journey and how it had been disrupted by COVID-19. Since getting back to school when New Zealand went down to Level 2 I was able to resume my restricted kilojoule intake and get the last pesky kilograms off. It wasn’t always easy to stick to the plan, and I did break my budget multiple times (especially on the weekends we played our tabletop RPG and the wedding I went to for one of my primary-school friends), but I persevered and have rewarded myself by buying a new pair of jeans that show off my butt!

One of the reasons I decided that now was the time to lose weight was due to the very gradual weight gain over the last several of years, since starting my teaching career. Although I am on my feet for several hours a day while teaching, the work intensity moved from the physical side (when I was a waitress and nearly constantly on the move for 6-10 hours per shift) to having more emphasis on the mental/emotional spectrum, and the walking I do during the day now would probably fall under the category of roving. Combine that with the tendency to go out for fast food on the weekends and a bad habit of bingeing whole blocks of chocolate while marking, and you can see how my lifestyle led me to gain roughly a kilogram every year. My goal was my university weight: 58kg. I decided that kilojoule counting was the method I wanted to try and researched the different apps which were available. I eventually decided on the one to get things started: Noom.

Noom was $1 for a 14 day trial. It was based on psychology and used a combination of different techniques to get you engaged with the app. These ranged from assigning you a ‘personal trainer’ (although I found the experience of interacting with them like using a bot, but I imagine that if you pay for the full subscription then you would get improved service), making you set goals and then asking probing questions to find out about your true reason for setting the goal, having a daily quiz, articles to read and free recipes available to bookmark for future reference. I found that it provided a really good base for me to start challenging my eating habits by making me recognise the unhealthy ones and offering alternatives instead of passing judgement. I thought that the price for the full version was quite high, however since the app puts you into a support group with other people also losing weight and gives you the personal trainer, I can see why the price is higher than the other app I used. In saying that, however, when I requested to leave the program so that I would not be automatically charged when the 14 day trial expired, I was offered a significant discount to encourage me to remain, so if you are considering using Noom then you might like to use this trick.

The second app I used is MyNetDiary which is completely free, or you can pay a small monthly fee to get the premium version. While there are some functions that I thought looked very useful in the Premium version (such as adding in calorie cycling so that you can have a final weight loss goal but plan for the days during the week when you are likely to eat more, and automatically lowering the daily kilojoule limit when undergoing weightloss so that your lowered metabolism is accounted for) I stuck to the free version. The dashboard (as seen in the image above) accounted for each meal, how much exercise you did that day and provided graphs of your progress and a daily analysis with data on fats, protein, sugars and several different minerals/vitamins. One thing that I like more about MND is the foods that are registered in it. Noom had very few brands from New Zealand (or Australia since we have several of the same brands) so logging my kilojoules was much easier with MND.

I probably make this strategy sound easy: plan your food so that you come in under your daily allowance (there are not forbidden foods, just make sure you budget for those big ticket items) and the weight will fall off at a rate that it equivalent to how gently you are starving yourself. Not so, your body has other plans.

A plateau is where you are continuing to stick to your kilojoule budget but there is no observable change in weight. Heck, even though you are running more and have made it a personal challenge to be 250kJ under your current budget every day this week, you might even have appeared to have gained some weight back. This can last from a week to over a month (my longest was three weeks long but I didn’t grab a screenshot of it so you’ll have to make do with this shorter one in the image above instead). It can be demotivating but know that as long as you are on a restricted kilojoule budget you are still decreasing the amount of fat tissue in your body. If you have been going to the gym then you may be increasing muscle mass, and since muscle is more dense than fat (1.1 grams per mililitre vs 0.9 grams per mililitre) that can also account for part of it, but water weight is more important. Your body can store water and this is likely what is happening when you plateau. I noticed that when I poked some of my fatty areas during a plateau I could sometimes predict when the ‘woosh’ (the sudden decrease in weight due to passing of stored water out of the body, not a technical term) was going to happen as the fat suddenly felt squishier than normal. I would then need to urinate more frequently overnight and in the morning over the next couple of days I would wee away 0.5kg or more and see a dramatic drop at my morning weigh ins.

Back on target!

However, there are definitely times when I went over budget and the app would tell me that the expected weight at my goal date was higher than I wanted (see red days in image). I even went into weight gain kilojoules more than once, but the thing is you must acknowledge what happened (those croquettes were way higher in kilojoules than you thought they would be? It must be all that cheese they had in them) and accept it as a learning experience. One day of going over will not ruin all of the hard work you have already put into yourself. You shouldn’t have the ‘all or nothing’ mentality (I have gone over for today, so I might as well have extra dessert since today is ruined!) because tomorrow is another day. You will learn, you may feel hungry, but you can do it.

Perserverence is key.

Although I complained about the lockdown ruining my progress at the time, it was actually quite useful. I changed my kilojoules to a weight maintenance rate and was able to view the natural fluctuations in my weight during the week and across the month (as seen in the image above). From this I learnt that my weight naturally goes up and down by about a kilo, and that I can expect a larger than average spike when it is nearly the time of the month for my period. I used this data in two ways, firstly I altered my goal so that it was 0.5kg lower, so that my average weight across the natural fluctuations would be 58kg, and secondly, while I continue to log my weight and food I can use this past data to compare to my current pattern.

When on a restricted kilojoule plan the average person needs 8000kJ for weight maintenance, and the bare minimum daily kilojoules for normal bodily functions is 5700kJ (one calorie is equal to four kilojoules, so the weight maintenance is 2000cal and minimum is 1425cal), so if you are considering using this technique make sure you are doing it safely and in a way that is manageable for you. You can modify your plan at any time (like I did) to make it tighter or less restrictive. Simple steps to start changing your routines are things such as taking the stairs at work, swap foods for lower energy density foods eg. swap a museli bar (between 600-800kJ) for a piece of fruit (an apple is approx 250-400kJ), and learn to like black coffee (1/2 cup of milk is 300kJ).

This plan worked for me because I like numbers, I have my phone with me at most meal times, and because I used the psychology tips from Noom as the foundation. It also helps that my partner or I cook most nights so I know exactly what goes into a meal and can log it during the day to see how many kilojoules I’ll have left over for snacks. Funnily enough, since going back to weight maintenance kilojoules I have found it a bit difficult to eat enough kilojoules without resorting to having some dessert in the evenings (sarcastic ‘oh no!’) due to my healthier eating habits.