I found myself gaining weight with each passing year.
The last time I had my six-pack abs was probably during my NS days. I haven’t seen them for more than a decade.
Not that I really desire the abs but a protruding belly is unsightly. It isn’t acceptable to me.
I tried to run every now and then. It helps to control the weight and reduce my appetite thereafter. There were even streaks where I could run 5km for many days in a week. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really sustain it throughout a year.
I have also tried HIIT at home as it had scientific proof of being more effective to burn fats despite spending 30 mins to exercise. Similarly, my discipline and motivation waned after a while and fail to follow through.
Moreover, I can’t out-exercise my diet.
I find comfort in snacking (including beer) and I hate the sight of food waste. Hence, I find myself gobbling up the leftovers despite having a full stomach.
I tried having less rice for each meal but I ended up eating more meat and veg. Or I found myself snacking thereafter.
Intermittent fasting was something that I have tried as well. Doing a 16-hour fasting cycle meant I would stop eating by 8pm and only resume my meals after 12pm the following day. I did this over a month and gave up. Not that it was difficult but it wasn’t nice to not eat the breakfast my family had prepared for me.
It seems like I just couldn’t form a healthy habit.
Recently I started to track my diet using the HPB’s app. I love it so much probably because I am a numbers person and it was natural for me to count my calories. There’s also a little gamification involved – there’s a goal of a diet deficit to meet each day. I could easily cut my diet without much effort and my diet pattern was totally changed. I only did this for the past 8 days and was able to have a deficit diet for 7 days. Within this short period of time I could notice my tummy shrinking and becoming more taut. This is the fastest result I have achieved when compared with all my previous attempts using various slimming methods. The best of all is that I don’t find it a chore which means I am more likely to sustain this over a long period of time. What gets measured gets improved worked for me. I guess different strokes for different folks.
Would I give up again? Only time will tell.