Are you one of those people who think about starting their gym membership from next Monday every Monday evening? Are you lost among all the fad diets that your friends follow and recommend? Did you lose considerable weight while on a ‘yo-yo’ diet and then ended up gaining all that back and feeling shit about yourself? If so, then welcome to the club. In today’s world where information is so abundant and readily available, it is very difficult to judge what is correct and what is just BS.

As a person who has been fat for the most part of his life (22 out of 24 years give or take) but has managed to go from 100kgs to under 80kgs (and yes maintain it for a year!), I can easily relate with all of this. This blog post will be all about what I have done to achieve this. How I tried to avoid all the BS in fitness and tried to keep it simple. So here we go.

Let’s start with the most important things that you should consider while starting your fitness journey in order of their priority (and No Protein supplement isn’t the first one!)

Finding Adherence: Losing weight is easy, keeping it off, well that’s another ballgame. For maintaining a new low body weight key part is finding a schedule, a routine, an eating pattern (yes I avoid calling it a diet) that you can adhere to in the long run. Don’t follow some crash diet where you just end up eating boiled veggies all day long! You cannot keep up with that diet for the rest of your life (in case you can, good for you!). Find something that you enjoy, adhere to and commit for the long run. That doesn’t mean you adhere to a diet that consists of all the junk food that you can think of.

So What’s the take away from this? Follow the golden “80:20” rule (more about this in coming blogs). 80% of your diet should consist of healthy nutritious food that you enjoy eating and can adhere to in the long run (think of next 20–30 years). Be it fruits, dairy products, or your favourite veggie (it doesn’t need to be boiled broccoli!) and 20% can be any type of food that you can have while socialising, enjoying the company of your friends, family or your partner.

Minding Calories: Weight loss is overly complicated yet lies on a single simple principle. Calorie Fucking Deficit. Now explaining the intricacies of this requires a separate blog (we’ll save this for later). For now what you should know is, calories are the king and they do matter. You need to concentrate on eating smaller portions of food rather than eating a specific food. This boils down to eating the same food that you have been eating, but just in less quantity if you want to lose weight (if you are happy with the current weight that is perfectly fine). But what happens if you eat more calories in an impromptu party. Sulk about it for the rest of the day and stop caring? No! Understand that these things do happen and will happen. Getting back on track is important. Eat less the next day and subsequently over the week to accommodate for those excess calories. The overall energy balance equation will average out.

Being Consistent and Patient: Please don’t be the guy/girl who buys a 6-month gym membership and then ends up going only for 1 month. You are only doing a favour for these mammoth gym chains that feed on such people. You may/may not get desired results within the time you expect (depends on the goal, time-frame, current body condition). That doesn’t mean you are not progressing. Be consistent and patient to see results that will last in the longer run. Speeding up your progress by crash dieting and over-training will give you results but will it last? No. Interestingly, when you regain all the fat that you have lost (and you will), your body through its self-defence mechanism will make it harder for you to again lose all those inches, and take it from me you don’t want to be there! Therefore going slow but steady will help you in the long run. Don’t start by training 6 days a week, doing every exercise that twists and turns your body in ways that only Lord Shiva could possibly do. Start by simple everyday movements – push-pull, squats and get better at these. Lift with better form give your 100 percent and make every rep count. This will make you stronger and improve you physically and mentally.

There are more things that can be mentioned here, but these 3 are the most important and golden rules that help you kickstart your journey towards a fit you. In Summary,

1. Eat what you enjoy and is nutritional.
2. Quantity of food matters

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