Adapt your body based on your prioritizations, co-live with your desires

My best friend always feels guilty about unable to control his weight loss and food intake. He’s the type that when he drinks some water, the next day he can gain 2kg of weight. He doesn’t know what he can do and how can this ever be solved.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

So over the past few years, I’ve learned that my food intake heavily depends on what I choose to prioritize at that period in my life and how my daily schedule revolves around it.

I will explain a few modes that I observed from myself:

The stressed mode

Being in school is very stressful for me. And at school, especially university, I’ve realized when things gets super stressful or the work becomes extremely difficult, I stress eat.

Taking courses stress me out, this is something unchangeable. Usually during this time, I don’t think about what I eat, I eat whatever I crave for just to keep myself happy. At this moment, happiness is what I prioritize.

The result is, usually after two semesters of school from September to May, my weight increases from 60–69kg, then the summer I lose weight back to 60kg, and the cycle repeats until I graduated.

The weight loss mode

This is the period where I prioritize weight loss over everything else. Mentally fight against hunger takes alot of your ability to focus away, so during this period my productivity is always halved. It’s a trade off you have to make when you are obese.

Usually I am able to lose 1kg a week easily. This is the steps and tricks that I take to make this happen:

1. I have a sleep schedule of 2am — 11am. I realized when I wake up early in the morning, I get hungry very easily, but if I wake up late, I can hold it until like 2pm to have my first meal.
2. I do intermittent fasting. I eat two meals a day, First meal at 2pm, second meal at 6pm. You might say, how do you fight the hunger. So my trick is, from 11pm — 2am, you watch a very exciting movie or tv series that distracts your thought away against hunger, and when you get tried enough you would fall asleep (maybe I actually fainted).
3. I go for walks 4 times a week. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturaday, Sunday for more than 10k steps. The reason I don’t run is, I realize when I come back from running, I get extremely hungry and want to eat something, but if I walk, I don’t feel that hunger and the calories naturally burns out. During this time, I am also very lazy because of my calorie deficit, so the way I keep myself motivated to go out for the walk is through taking supermarket trips. I have 6 different supermarkets around me, I go to different supermarkets to get different items, and I buy very little everytime. So it forces me to walk, or else I have an empty fridge and nothing to eat.
4. I go to the gym 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I do full body exercises and different weight lifting routines for an hour.
5. I have a cheat day every week. I start to realize that if I do not add fluctuation into my diet, my metabolism just keeps decreasing and I can’t lose weight anymore. So my strategy against that is to have a cheat meal every week to eat whatever I want. Usually I end up ordering like from 5 different restaurants, a dish each of the things I like the most to enjoy it all at once.
6. I eat little carbs. So I do alot of replacements to trick myself. I replaced eating rice with eating eating kimpap, so less rice inside.
7. I waterboil everything. I waterboil my chicken breast, steaks, vegetables. I am a big fan of ketchup and soy sauce so I dip it in everything.
8. Little rewards everyday. Japanese kitcat, and different strange and interesting snacks in very small portions.
9. The following is my meal plan:
10. Meal plan 1: every day at lunch, water boiled 3/4 of a chicken breast, 3 rolls of kimpap, 1 egg, and one tiny buck choy, with ketchup and soy sauce.
11. Meal plan 2: every day after workout, water boiled steak, 3 rolls of kimpap, 1 egg, and one tiny buck choy, with ketchup and soy sauce, plus protein powder.
12. Meal plan 3: everyday after walking, half an avocado, 1 can of tuna, 1 egg, and fuji and soy sauce and ketchup.

The productive mode

Whenever I produce and be very productive, I have a natural tendency of wanting to eat, and the desire for carbs, probably the brain needs it for fueling energy. The following is my routine.

1. I have a sleep schedule of 12pm-9am.
2. I go for a 15 min run to wake up my body.
3. I do not have meals, instead, I cook everything in the morning and put it at the kitchen, cutting them into tiny pieces. and every hour after being productive, I go and hunt some food. I replaed everything with like healthy low carb alternatives to I don’t consume too much.
4. I still maintain the workout and walking routine like that of weightloss mode, but I increase my intake for carbs and the totally calories I eat.
5. I do yoga in the evening.

Ultimately I’ve realized I just had to accept what mode I was in and be ok with it until its over, weight maintenance it’s a life long journey, and it has taught me three important life lessons:

1. To delay gratification.
2. Manually creating some little ups and downs in life to stay easily happy. For example, when you eat very dry for a few days, going to any restaurant eating any food can taste like heaven, rather than eating so flavorful everyday, only going to michilin 3 stars or omesake can elevate your taste buds.
3. Taming primitive desires. Over the years I’ve learned that fighting against your cravings do not help. You have to find a way to co-live with it. It’s hard to change you, but you can use strategies and tricks to

I’m the 24-year-old of you from 2021, how have you been my best friend? Since 2021, I decided to start writing rawly on medium to track my problems, challenges, and how I overcome them, right when it’s fresh, so you can look back can see how you really made decisions to change your actions, and hope this can help you for your future.

This is the 2nd mail that I send to you.

March 1, 2021