2 Week "Health" Streak

So for the past 2 weeks I've been on sort of a "health" streak...I've put quote unquote on health because it's subjective, and personally it's more of a diet streak than a really healthy one.

The main reason wasn't exactly the flu, though it did come at the same time I started my diet. The past few months working for my mum, I've altered my lifestyle a bit and found myself snacking ever so often, plus with gym now in session, I had bulked up a little, and that's fine actually, but I guess I wasn't too happy when I got up to 61.7kg from 58 which was back in 2010... wasn't feeling fat, I was just feeling a bit heavy, I do think some of the weight could have been contributed from when I started hitting the gym.

So to make "dieting" easy, I decided to plan my menu for the entire first week, what to eat for lunch, what to eat for dinner. I'm not a fan of dieting and to me most diets fail because people go to extremes selecting their diet meals that after its over, the rebound is scary. By planning your meals correctly, you get to pick variety in your meals, so that it won't end up being too boring or similar, though I admit fish soup seems to be my common dish for the past 2 weeks...I had to do so cause I figured the protein intake was important since I had fallen sick at the same time.

The above were dishes I had planned to eat in replace of other options to help with my dieting. Of course, cutting down on snacking, mainly, the mid day prata at the indian stall at the canteen helped as well. But of course, not all my choices for the past two weeks were just the options above.

The above foods were also consumed during this 2 week period, I guess that's why I had quote unquote health at the start, and if you were keeping track, I have 13 images of food that were considered "dieting options" and another 13 there well...aren't.

So technically, I didn't go on a strict diet, I still enjoyed a mix of good food through the last 2 weeks, I just cut down on snacks, and cut about half of my regular food to more selective stuff from the 13 images above.

I'm now at 59.2kg, which meant I've lost 2.5kg in the past 2 weeks...of course some are water weight I admit, but still it goes to show that if you make changes to your meal choices and stick to them, it works. Few things I used along the way to help me get by.

1. Planning is key, plan your meals for the week so that eating will not be too boring.
2. Skip the snacks, or rather, skip the unhealthy snacks...if you want to take it one step further I'd recommend checking up Colin's C1 diet (Link) that wil not only provide you with snacking recommendations, but a stricter diet if you wish to take your dieting one step further.
3. Exercise. Now if you want to skip this entirely, I'd say try the C1 diet, but if you're like me who enjoys food too much to make too many changes to your diet, then exercise is your next best bet, in other words, there's no easy way out of this, but either options above are better than skipping a meal or two for the sake of losing weight. <- I'm speaking from experience here.

Please note that this isn't a health post to the general public, this is just me documenting my own diet. In other words, I wouldn't recommend my food choices above to the average person going on a diet, I run a lot for one, and hence my food intake may be higher than most, so I guess it's better to eat more of the top set of images, and less of the second set of images...but the 3 tips apply and I do follow them.

Now that my dieting's over, it's back to the regular stuff again, but of course, I will stick to tip #2 so as not to go back to square one again.