Weight Loss - The First Fundamental Step
A disclamer
Making food recommendations to more than 1 person at any given time is similar to if a banking executive was to share his salary and bonus to a group of people he does not know: it’s dangerous, and also highly likely to make him sound like a prick. But for the purpose of caring about our tribe greatly, we will do it here.
Let’s Begin
We’ve read that on any given month, the simple phrase "How to Lose Weight?” will be plugged more than 135,000 times into Google. The constant quest (and sometimes battle) to lose weight and keep it off is one that nearly every single human being has already, or will be confronted with at any given point in their lives.
As you may know, we studied with the School for the Psychology of Eating. The School’s curriculum was excellent, and the learnings were larger than we could have ever anticipated. Weight loss, or course, was a critical part of our agenda, and after counselling with dozens of clients privately over the few years, we found a formula to weight loss should begin with one simple step.
Change only 1 meal a day
Everything else should remain untouched. Why?
Because weight loss is the same as so many other beasts in life: it’s more a question of execution, than of knowledge. Hence, it’s about habit formation & alteration. Small wins are critical, and changing just one meal per day is easily done. For most, it’s a very manageable small win, one upon which we can all easily build momentum.
The Specifics
1. If you were going to go do it, it would be in your best interest to make this meal your breakfast.
A Canadian comedian we love dearly once coined something along the following lines:
“Breakfast is funny, because eating toasts everyday of your life sounds perfectly fine, while eating the same diner two nights in a row sounds perfectly insane”
Louis-Josée Houde
This was meant to be funny, and it is. And in this joke lies a fundamental truth of weight loss: it’s about finding meals that work for you and repeating them often. Here is where the money is: chose wisely.
2. If you were to be flexible, you should experiment with a breakfast void of any source of carbohydrates.
The details behind this are beyond the scope of this article, but we will stick to the big lines on this. Breakfast, for most, is usually followed by long periods of inactivity. So even for those who are not keto-adapted, carbohydrates are simply not necessary. Your body simply returns to life from a long rest; it therefore holds much more energy than you should require to perform the tasks ahead.
3. It should be planned ahead.
Waking up and having no idea what to eat is never good. It’s simply too easy to reach out for the Cheerios in the cupboard. If you planned your meal ahead, you would have boiled eggs prepared and avocados ready, making it easy to have a powerful source of building blocks, and long-lasting, sustainable energy.
As a last point, we would point out that unless you've been successful and are well versed with intermittent fasting, skipping breakfast altogether is simply not a great idea. What you believe to gain by skipping the calories you will overcompensate for over the rest of the day by reaching out for carbohydrates when your cortisol level spikes from the burden of hunger.
We will leave it at this for now. If you are keen to get into details, and have a plan developed for you personally, we’re here for that too.