Bringing the best version of myself every day, at work and home

I lost 30kgs and 10% of body fat.

This has been a 12 months journey—more a mindset battle with myself, IMHO.

As it is time for me to celebrate, it is also time to share my approach, as many have requested.

Frankly, you’ll be surprised that most I did are common sense.

Nevertheless, I applied some principles to that transformation, but let me explain why I started to do that.

First, I am a workaholic; I’ll confess that and always put my work above all. With two kids at home, you want a balanced life and managing your time is critical, especially when you know your workload. I wasn’t good at that work-life balance, which affected my health and stamina. One day I felt that lack of energy while playing in the snow with my boys, and I decided to change.

Let me tell you precisely what I did:

Introducing a micro-change per week

Every Monday, I started a new habit or stopped one and studied its impact for a week. If ok, I pushed it for a month and either kept it or quit. This goes for introducing new nutriments to manage my sleep better.

Stop eating anything transformed by a machine.

When I say everything, it is everything. So when you filter that, you start looking at various levels of transformation; for instance, yes, yoghurt is transformed but relatively less than cereals.

I am drinking more water and tea.

I recognised that hours could go by, and I was dehydrated at work. I fixed that. I was a giant diet coke drinker. I stopped that.

I am sleeping more with a minimum of 7h.

I was doing 3-4 hours on average.

I am eating less and counting my intake.

I used a simple app called Lose it to understand the average intake. I was eating 500 calories that, on average, I wasn’t burning with my metabolism, and this went to sustain my fat.

Eating more proteins

To burn fat, I had to increase my metabolism and protein levels to sustain my new activities. Usually, I kept 40% proteins, 40% vegetables/fruits and 20% fat/others.

Moving more

I tracked my activity with my apple watch and tried to do an average of 800. I also started exercising way more, from 4 to 6h a week. I wouldn’t say I liked cardio training, so I focused on heavy lifting/resistance and stretching. Ban elevators, and if you can walk, do that and avoid the car.

Stopped/reduced eating milk, oil, butter, bread, sugar, salt

Have one cheat meal every 30 proper meals for resting your mind (you can go berzerk on that one)

Regulate yourself at the weekly level (not the day level), as it was useless for me to track my weight and body fat daily.

Practice intermittent fasting at least once a week, two if you cheated more that week. I followed quite a lot of advice from a youtube channel called “Gravity Transformation.”

So overall, I feel more energised and healthier, and I am sorry that the food industry is feeding us some nasty stuff. I re-discovered many nutrients and think in line between my mind and body.

I discourage the diet programs out there. There is no one size fits all approach, unfortunately.

My approach was to take week after week good advice that made sense to me and adopts them continuously.

The hardest thing was to say no to others. Social conventions tempted me to break my code so often that I couldn’t count, especially within my family and mother.

So instead, respect your inner code of conduct and do it yourself.

Finally, weight tracking or BMI trackers are not always accurate, depending on your metabolism. Better focus on body fat %.

To not fall back on former habits is like having new software in me, preventing me from re-adopt bad habits. One good thing I learned is having tailored clothes so that you know when you have too much the other days. Self-regulation.

I hope this post will help others.

Good luck in your transformation if you started one.

H