Why am I gaining weight and how do I lose it? A series.

We are constantly being bombarded with adverts promoting meal supplements, personal training programs and gym memberships.

This is obviously very smart marketing as it provides business for these brands based off of peoples’ lack of knowledge.

And most of the time, these options for weight loss and fitness do help. But they can be costly.

I wanted to talk about the knowledge I’ve learnt to lose weight and tone up for free. In fact, it will probably SAVE you money! It definitely made things cheaper for me.

Firstly, I’m going to tell you something that you’ve probably heard so many times but never believed or acted on, because why would you when there are so many free tummy workout videos on YouTube?!

Food. Is. Genuinely. The. Most. Important. Thing.

I’ll use an example because my aim is to help you believe it, not just know it.

So I’m 20 years old and when I was in school (about 2 years ago now) I wouldn’t eat much food. It was a sporty school so I was always running around playing some type of team sport.

This amount of exercise paired with the massive calorie deficit I was having each day meant that I was super super skinny; probably a bit too skinny.

But wait, the reason why this is important to our topic is the fact that when I left school in 2018, I started waitressing full-time. So I was doing 40 hours a week of absolute speed-walking through a restaurant carrying heavy plates.

So as you can imagine, this was probably about the same amount of exercise as I had been doing at school.

However, I somehow managed to gain over 8 kilos (that’s around 17 pounds I think) between leaving school and summer 2019.

I know some people may not think this is a lot of weight but being a young teenage girl who had been very skinny all her life and never thought about weight, this was a shock.

The difference was that I was now not confined to school eating schedules and meal choices being made for me. So instead of having a small bowl of bland cereal, a handful of rice and Chilli con carne and a slice of pizza for a day’s food, I was now able to eat whatever I wanted when I wanted.

And let me tell you I took advantage of that so much. On my way home from work I would buy tubs of ice cream, whole batten-burg cakes, crisps, chocolate, everything you can think of.

It was a mess. An absolute calorie overload.

I think back to it now and can’t believe I was able to ignore looking at the calorie levels on each of the packets.

Anyway, back to the point, no matter how much exercise you do, whether you sprint 10km each day or do nothing at all. You will not lose weight naturally if you are eating more calories than you are burning off.

I do not recommend doing this one bit because another big part of this is self appreciation - I’ll get onto that in one of the next parts – BUT as an example, if someone were to do absolutely no deliberate exercise, but didn’t eat anything either, they would still be able to lose weight.

This is because they are consuming no calories whatsoever and it still takes your body a certain amount of calories to run itself daily and do simple things like driving or cooking; they have a calorie deficit.

Now it is very easy to find a nutritionalist or a diet coach nowadays, you simply go online and search for it and thousands of options will come up. These will be followed by the box where you type in your bank details and part with about £20,000 for an hour-long consultation!

And for people like me, this really isn’t an option.

I’ll admit it, when I first realised I was gaining weight I was very worried because I wasn’t aware of calories or deficits or healthy eating or anything like that.

I was so confused and panicked that I did what a lot of people do and got myself online to search things like ‘How to lose 10 stone in a week!’ or ‘How I went from a size 16 to a size 8 overnight!’

After realising that 10 sit-ups each night with this same diet wasn’t going to get me back to my normal weight again, I decided to educate myself.

After about a week, my Instagram ‘saved’ bit was full of different food charts and fitness gurus blog posts and posts about calories that I found interesting.

My main tip for educating yourself about calories and food groups and how to make sure you’re eating the correct stuff for your body and goals is to get yourself on Instagram (no I’m not joking).

I know Instagram can be quite a toxic place in some ways but nowadays, there is no one that I know (older than about 12) who doesn’t have Instagram or an interest in the content on Instagram.

It is literally the modern hub for visually pleasing knowledge and ideas. Everyone is constantly on it, they’re constantly sharing, constantly liking, you can learn about anything on there. It’s not just selfies anymore!

So instead of trying to educate yourself through some expensive nutrition course, spend a bit of time scanning the explore page for accounts with health, lifestyle or nutrition in their name and dive into the images showing which vegetable has the most calories or which meat is better for which part of the body or which fruits provide which vitamins.

If you find something that doesn’t have much information surrounding it and you want to know more, then you can simply ask google to elaborate.

Because I promise you, once you have taken up an interest in the foods and calories you’re putting into your body, losing the weight will be that much easier.

It may turn you into a calorie counter but that is not a bad thing if you do it safely and don’t deprive your body of what it truly needs.

My next post will include more insight into how to cut out foods healthily and how you can pair exercise with this newfound food knowledge that you’re going to gain, in order to become the healthiest, happiest version of yourself.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading this far, I’m going on a run now. Let’s get through this journey together.

Feel free to contact me on Instagram @evakingsbury if you have any questions or simply want to talk:)

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