Time to Diet... Again 🥹

During 2021, at the height of lockdown in the UK, I got into the shower one day and the bath creaked under my feet. That’s probably not a good sign, so I got the scales out and discovered that I weighed 92kg. A new personal record! Suddenly the creaking bath made a little more sense.

I’d always thought of myself as being somewhere around the border between a healthy weight and slightly overweight, but according to an online BMI calculator, 92kg put me firmly into the “Overweight” category. No borderline about it. The page helpfully informed me that a healthy weight for my height was somewhere between 60 and 80kg, followed by the usual advice about eating more healthily and exercising more.

Fine. I decided there and then that I was going to get the weight down, and over the following nine months I did exactly that. I changed my diet and eventually reached 71.8kg, losing more than 20kg and putting myself comfortably inside that healthy range.

Success!

Except, as it turns out, I had only solved half the problem.

Losing weight was the easy part

The world started opening up again, and from summer 2022 I started travelling much more. Restaurants reopened, socialising returned, and I began spending months at a time in other countries, particularly Japan. Gradually the weight came back. There was no dramatic moment where I abandoned everything and gained 20kg overnight; it just crept up a little here and a little there.

Then a couple of weeks ago my girlfriend gave me a new T-shirt. I tried it on and discovered that it was far too tight around the belly, so I checked the label to see what size she’d bought me. XL, or LL as it’s labelled in Japan.

Hmm.

It turns out that successfully losing weight once doesn’t mean you’ve solved weight management forever. In 2021 I’d built a system that was very effective at getting my weight down, but I hadn’t really built a system for keeping it there. So this time I have two problems to solve: first get the weight down, then keep it down.

The second one may turn out to be considerably harder.

Lockdown was actually quite helpful for dieting

There’s another major difference this time around. In 2021 there wasn’t much to do. Restaurants were closed or restricted, social activities were limited and I was at home most of the time, so if I wanted to control exactly what I ate, the outside world wasn’t putting up much resistance.

Tokyo is a rather different environment.

I can’t tell you how difficult it is to spend an entire day wandering around Shinjuku or Akihabara while trying not to eat out. Restaurants are everywhere, food is everywhere. More importantly, eating isn’t merely about hunger. A significant amount of my social life involves meeting somebody and eating together, and I don’t want to solve one problem by creating another. If maintaining relationships is something I’ve decided matters to me, permanently declining invitations because there might be calories involved isn’t much of a solution.

Unlike the lockdown diet, then, this one has to work while restaurants are open, friends want to meet and I have complete freedom to walk into any restaurant I want. Losing weight when the entire country is helping to prevent me from eating out is one thing. Losing weight in Tokyo is another.

The diet itself is boring

The basic theory behind losing weight isn’t particularly mysterious: I need to consume fewer calories than I expend. For me, that means eating less food, eating less calorie-dense food, or some combination of the two.

What I’m currently eating isn’t particularly exciting. Breakfast is oats, and throughout the day I eat a lot of boiled mixed vegetables, usually with a little spicy sauce and Parmesan cheese to make them more palatable. I mostly drink water and black coffee. This isn’t intended as a diet plan for anybody else, and I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone reading this rushes out and fills their freezer with mixed vegetables. It’s simply the system I’m currently experimenting with for myself.

The interesting part, at least to me, isn’t really what I eat when everything is going according to plan. It’s what happens when I don’t want to eat the vegetables at all.

I have an unlimited supply of vegetables

At the beginning, the cravings were pretty strong: sugar, chocolate, pizza, kebabs. Because I’m in Tokyo, I also regularly walk past restaurants I already know and like, and then there’s my stash of British chocolate that I bring over from home. British trash chocolate really is the best trash chocolate in the world.

I know it’s there, and it knows I’m here.

Sometimes the chocolate wins. I’ve caved in and eaten a Mars bar several times, and I’m not going to pretend I have some superhuman level of willpower where I can gaze serenely at chocolate and feel nothing. Because I’m not working, there isn’t even an office keeping me away from the kitchen for eight hours a day. If I want to visit the refrigerator, I can do it whenever I like.

Rather than depending entirely on willpower, I’ve therefore tried to make the thing I want myself to eat ridiculously easy. My freezer contains multiple bags of diced mixed vegetables, and I’ll boil an entire bag at once, enough for roughly two days, then keep the cooked vegetables in the refrigerator. When I’m hungry I don’t have to chop anything, cook a proper meal or make much of a decision. I put some vegetables in a bowl, microwave them and add a little sauce and Parmesan. Done.

If I get hungry between meals, I can do exactly the same thing again. There’s effectively an unlimited supply of food I’m happy for myself to eat, and four times out of five that seems to be enough to deal with the craving.

I’m gradually learning that one of the easiest ways to influence my own behaviour is simply to make the behaviour I want easier.

I eat one Pringle and put the cap back on

I haven’t completely removed snack food either. In fact, I deliberately make sure I have at least one tube of Pringles (cheap supermarket brand) available. But I have a rule: I take one out, then I put the cap back on.

If I want another one, that’s absolutely fine. I take the cap off, get another Pringle and put the cap back on again. Sometimes I’ll have another after that. The point isn’t that I’m only allowed one; the point is that every single time I want another, I have to open the tube again.

It’s an almost comically small inconvenience, but apparently it’s enough resistance to make a difference. Previously, I might buy a large bag of crisps, open it and eat the entire thing. Once the bag is open, there is essentially no friction between eating one crisp and eating fifty. The cap introduces just enough friction to interrupt that process. I’m hardly securing the Pringles behind a biometric lock, but every time I replace the cap I create another tiny moment where I have to decide whether I actually want another one.

I’ve noticed something similar with sweets and chocolate in Japan. They’re often individually wrapped, which as a foreigner normally strikes me as an extraordinary amount of unnecessary packaging. If your intention is to eat one, though, all that annoying packaging suddenly makes behavioural sense. Every additional wrapper creates another tiny decision: Do I actually want another one?

I’m still allowed to say yes. The trick is simply making myself answer the question.

Measure the signal, not the noise

I’m also measuring everything. I use MyFitnessPal to record what I eat — oats, vegetables, CalorieMate bars, crisps, sweets, chocolate, everything — and at the moment I’m usually ending up at around 1,500 calories per day. I also weigh myself every day.

Again, I’m not suggesting that my calorie target or approach is appropriate for anybody else. Individual energy and nutritional needs vary. What matters for this experiment is that I’m collecting consistent data about what I’m doing, because the daily weigh-ins have already taught me something useful: my weight is incredibly noisy.

It can fluctuate by as much as a couple of kilograms even when my eating hasn’t changed dramatically. Water, salt and everything else going on in the body can easily obscure what’s actually happening, which becomes particularly important when the underlying rate of weight loss is much smaller than the daily fluctuations. If I’m losing less than a kilogram per week but my weight can bounce around by two kilograms from one day to the next, reacting emotionally to each morning’s number would be ridiculous.

What I’m interested in is the signal, not the noise. One high measurement doesn’t mean the diet has stopped working, just as one unusually low measurement doesn’t mean I’ve suddenly achieved my goal. The trend is what matters.

This is actually quite similar to the traffic-light system I wrote about in Tuesday. Missing one task on one day isn’t particularly interesting; repeatedly neglecting it is. Individual events are noisy, while patterns tell me something.

Eating outside is harder

The biggest practical difficulty remains eating when I’m away from home. Tokyo is particularly awkward because if I want to sit somewhere for a while, I’m probably going to end up in a cafe or restaurant, and once I’m there it’s very easy for a coffee to become lunch.

At the moment, one solution when meeting friends is simply to meet somewhere like a cafe or McDonald’s where I can have a black coffee, and I’ll sometimes take a CalorieMate bar with me as well. It’s not exactly fine dining, but it keeps the hunger away and gives me a reasonably predictable amount of food.

I’m not pretending this is how I want to eat socially for the rest of my life, though. I still want to go to restaurants. I still want takeaway. I still want shabu-shabu.

So I’ve built those things into the system too.

I earn unrestricted meals

I’ve decided that whenever I reach a new kilogram threshold on the way down, I get one credit for a meal where I don’t worry about the diet. When I first dropped below 85kg and reached 84.8kg, I earned a credit, so that weekend I went for shabu-shabu.

A buffet.

I ate plenty, and predictably the scales subsequently shot back above 86kg. But that was okay. I hadn’t abandoned the diet or failed at anything, because I’d deliberately decided beforehand that this meal was part of the system. I went back to my normal eating afterwards and eventually reached 83.9kg, which meant another new threshold and another credit. The following weekend I got a takeaway.

I like this approach because it accommodates both the noisy daily weight measurements and the reality that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life refusing every meal I enjoy. Perhaps “reward” isn’t quite the right word for these meals, because I’m not trying to teach myself that vegetables are punishment and shabu-shabu is the prize for suffering enough. They’re more like planned exceptions.

The important part is that the exception has a boundary. A big meal doesn’t have to become a big weekend, followed by a bad Monday, followed by well, I’ve ruined the diet now anyway. I eat the meal, I enjoy it, and then I continue.

The real experiment starts when I reach my target

This is where my previous attempt failed. Last time I reached 71.8kg and effectively thought, Great, done. But weight isn’t something you complete. I gradually returned to normal eating, the world reopened, I travelled, I ate in restaurants and the number slowly crept upwards again.

So reaching my target weight this time isn’t the end of the experiment; it’s the beginning of phase two.

My current plan is extremely simple. Once I’m at the weight I want to maintain, I’ll continue weighing myself every day. If I’m above my target for one day, I’ll do nothing. If I’m above it for two days, I’ll still do nothing, because my weight fluctuates too much for individual measurements to mean very much.

If I’m above my target weight for five consecutive days, however, I’ll treat that as a signal that something may actually have changed. At that point I’ll return to my calorie-controlled diet until I’ve been below the target for five consecutive days, then I’ll stop again.

The five-day rule is there specifically because I don’t want to react to noise. One heavy restaurant meal shouldn’t cause me to panic and start dieting the following morning, but neither do I want to look at the scales six months later and discover I’ve somehow regained 10kg. I’m trying to build a feedback loop that corrects small deviations before they become large ones.

I’m getting suspicious of willpower

There’s a common theme running through most of the things that seem to work well for me: I don’t actually trust myself very much.

At least, I don’t trust the version of myself who is hungry, bored, tired, standing outside a pizza restaurant or staring into the refrigerator. That version of me makes different decisions from the version sitting calmly at a computer designing a sensible plan, so I’m increasingly interested in changing the environment around those decisions rather than expecting myself to heroically make the correct choice every time.

If I’m hungry, vegetables are already cooked. If I want crisps, I can have one, but the cap goes back on. If I want chocolate, I can eat it, but each individually wrapped piece forces another tiny decision. If I want a huge restaurant meal, that’s allowed too, but I’ve decided in advance where it fits into the system. And if the scales suddenly jump by a kilogram tomorrow, I don’t need to react at all.

None of these things removes my freedom. They just add a little structure around it.

Which, now that I think about it, sounds rather familiar.

Losing it is only phase one

So far, the weight is moving in the right direction. This attempt is definitely harder than the lockdown version because the restaurants are open, I’m surrounded by food every time I go outside and a lot of my social life naturally involves eating with other people.

But perhaps that’s a good thing. A diet that only works when the world is closed isn’t particularly useful to me anymore.

This time I’m trying to build something that can coexist with restaurants, chocolate, travel, friends, lazy days and the occasional enormous shabu-shabu. I don’t need every day to be perfect, because one Mars bar doesn’t matter, one buffet doesn’t matter and one unexpectedly high number on the scales doesn’t matter. What matters is whether those individual events remain individual events or quietly become the new normal.

Last time I proved to myself that I could lose the weight. What I didn’t prove was that I could keep it off.

So that’s the experiment this time.

Losing it is phase one. Keeping it off is phase two.

Ask me in a few years whether it worked.