August 2015, I decided I need to lose some weight and get healthier. I wasn’t happy with my image and I wasn’t happy that my son kicks my ass in soccer when I get tired after 10 minutes. At that point I was about 105kg – today I am 71kg

I’ve had a few people ask how I did it, so here is the steps I took and why I went this route rather than a specific diet.

My scrum board

I started off by just tracking what I ate. I had a Windows Phone at the time and found some apps for it. They were pretty quality. What I found useful is to have rough data, use it to compare different food, help understand my choices and that the data should correlate day to day, so you get a feel that today is a good day or a bad day in comparison to history. I moved to Samsung Galaxy S7 which comes with S Health and that is what I use now, it is way better than any Windows Phone option.

Each and every meal was tracked just so I could understand how much is going into me, where the calories, carbs etc.. are coming from and to start to have a way to improve.

Iterative improvement

The next step happened naturally – I started picking what I ate differently because I had more knowledge. My portions also got smaller. This really brought me down to about 90kg just with making smarter eating choices.

I am also not shying away from certain foods, to me there are no bad foods. There are bad amounts and what that amount is is based on the food and varies person to person. You can’t take what works for you and assume it will work for others.

That said though, personally I feel better now that I have lowered the following foods in my diet:

• Wheat
• Dairy
• Sugary drinks

The difference is not to say no, so you end up just thinking of them rather it is taking one piece of toast instead of two cause it makes me feel healthier. This applies to cheat days too, they are kinda smart at helping with willpower management but they just don’t work for me. If I want cake – I eat cake… I just need to work it into the plan for the day.

Remove technical debt

Next was cleaning up my house. No snack foods. No sugary drinks. *sigh*

This was hard but my willpower at 11pm is low. I know my weaknesses so I remove the issues when I am strong so I don’t make mistakes when I am weak.

Cycles

This isn’t just about weight loss, although that is what I have covered so far, it equally is about fitness too. For me, it meant starting to cycle again. This brought up my fitness and helped with about 20kg of weight loss too. It isn’t easy, but it is essential for me. As McDonalds reminds you – it is what you eat and what you do.

Diets don’t work

The problem with diets is that as you lose weight you body needs less calories yet your mind and life don’t change, which leads to fast drops and fast gains. Willpower is hard to do all the time, yet I find when you have data to assist you, it isn’t so much about raw willpower as thinking and I find that is easier. I am approaching this like I would a dev project – learn, implement, review, improve (LIRI).