My Record-Breaking Weight Loss Story

I surprised myself with this one. Never did I imagine where things would take me.

For 2 months of my life I held the unofficial record for the most amount of cottage cheese consumed by anyone in the southwest of England.

Ok, for real, I lost 10kg in 2 months. In a mostly healthy way.

Here are 7 takeaways.

1) I procrastinated for 2 years and made change in 2 months.

What's stupid is that my job as a coach is to get people motivated to make change. What made the difference? I spoke to a nutrition coach, and here is the first trap he stopped me from falling into.

I said, "I'll start next month."

Lee said, "You'll do as you're told." Ok, not really. He said, "Start now." So I faffed around for a few days in denial of some gluttonous habits I needed to say bye to, and got my head down.

2) I didn't know what I was doing.

I've done nutrition courses myself, I understand calorie balance, I'm book smart. But, putting it into action was uncomfortable. The first week I was talking myself into what I 'should' do, I was talking myself into goals I 'should' have. I was telling myself that I should get myself used to tracking, weighing, measuring.

There was a lot of overthinking: which batteries do I need to replace in the food scales? Small decisions are fatiguing, habits are easy (more on this later).

3) I can't count calories.

I actually never gave it a good chance. Well, I thought about it loads. But there was a mental block, it felt overwhelming, I didn't want to do it. But I did want to track so I could add precision to what I was doing. Talked to Lee (my nutrition coach) and said I want to do Precision Nutrition's hand portions instead. I was familiar with it from my own certifications.

I love to cook, I fancy myself as an improv chef. Here's the ingredients, what can I do with it? Ready, Steady, Cook. So, if I can see my protein, carbs, fibrous veg, fats by eye, I can be creative and win the crowd over to get my vote for the red tomatoes.

Lee told me to find something that works, and gave me a heads-up on some common pitfalls. Ultimately, I was reporting my progress; he was keeping me on track. If it works, we're both happy. Take whichever path gets you there.

4) Boredom is your friend

You've spent time finding a plan, executing it, it works, now, repetition.

This is where my cottage cheese addiction started to take over. I would walk in from my morning coaching at the gym, hungry, ready for lunch. Think of all the possibilities, the infinite food choices, knowing I had the perfect plan to enjoy my food and make the progress I wanted.

Then I would hear, 'Jack, Jack, I'm here, I've been waiting for you, don't leave me, it's cold and dark in here.' The sleep-deprived lazy me would hear the voices, try to resist. There must be another way. I would think, no, not today, I won't be trapped by this, it wasn't the deal I made.

I look down at my hands, it's too late, the damage is done, there's cheese on my hands, throw the spoon into the sink, drop the empty container into the bin. I've done it again. No self-control, sabotaging cheese addiction took over yet again.

But, it worked. When you can't fall back on motivation, fall back on habits. Raspberries and strawberries with Greek yogurt, lots of chicken, broccoli, frozen veggies, cottage cheese. This is the unglamorous base for most of my progress.

5) Illness sucks.

This one is short, but worth mentioning: 3kg of my 10kg weight loss came in one bed-bound week of illness.

When I wanted to binge and rebound, I spoke to Lee. Sunk cost fallacy: no amount of binge eating is going to undo the week of illness I just had. Get back to tracking. I had a few days of giving myself a bit more leniency and got back on track.

I guess the takeaway is minimise the setbacks.

6) Stopping the diet is hard

Making change needs control, precision, it needs you to adopt a different mindset.

When the mindset gets you results, you enjoy it, you become attached to it, you don't want to let go.

For me, I wasn't working to a target weight, but a target timeframe, to do my best and then accept whatever position I was in. This worked for me. But, honestly, not the easiest thing to stop. I can see how people develop obsessive behaviours, even in healthy approaches.

My diet was healthy before; I just ate a few too many leftovers. It has been fairly easy to get back to my baseline. But... if I knew my diet strategy looked significantly different to my diet before, I would absolutely keep hold of a nutrition coach to help me manage the change. The long-term success of a diet could be changed dramatically from the taper back into normality.

7) It makes a huge difference to the way I feel.

If you made it this far, and this point is the first point you found clichéd and irritating, then you are the target audience. I feel lighter, faster, more energetic, more confident. I was making excuses for holding onto fat before that just didn't serve me. Making nonsense excuses about wanting to be strong or that I'm not that fat really. Keep the list coming, add your own versions of why this doesn't apply to you. Surely, me writing this now, I can't possibly know your position, or be talking to you.

Ok, let me say this: being lean is good for health, it's good for performance, it's good for mental and physical wellbeing. There are caveats, but, with a certainty, I can say that there is an athletic body composition that shows optimal health.

In CrossFit, in the search for being the best all-rounder, people love to focus on training and miss the mark on nutrition consistently.

Nutrition is a gateway to a huge list of gains all at once. Give it focus, you won't regret it.

Head Coach
Jack Ashwood

Notable mention to @leen nutrition