I've recently dropped a serious amount of body fat and gained a considerable amount of muscle (for 6 weeks work) so I thought I'd post what I did here in case anyone else is trying to do what I did (i.e. fight over-eating and improve both my health and aesthetic appearance)
After my summer internship, 10 weeks of drinking every single night / absent mindedly eating probably 4000+ calories a day, I had been left incredibly out of shape (to the point at which my otherwise irrelevant congenital heart defect actually started to cause respiratory issues due to the high blood pressure). My eating sort of improved when term started once more, but I kept up the heavy drinking until early January so I was still seriously overweight. Cooling off on the alcohol saw some mild improvements between January and March, but not really enough, so whilst writing my dissertation I decided to tackle my eating problem at its root, and have had some incredible results over the past 6 weeks!
My main issues were:
Seriously poor portion control
Binge Eating / Snacking
Generally poor diet
No exercise
Cravings for chocolate, cake etc whenever I tried improving my diet.
On top of this, being on campus all day severely limited my access to satisfying, healthy food (more like 4 sausages 4 hash browns and beans for breakfast) and I didn't have a huge amount of time for meal prep.
I appreciate that for many of you, things like portion control may seem incredibly obvious, but trust me - for someone that has spent a lifetime overeating, it's incredibly difficult to fix that mindset. You also don't realise the other ways in which it affects your life (concentration / attainment, depression) until you see positive changes in your own life.
I attempted to solve these issues by using a food-substitute product called
Queal. It's somewhat like Soylent, but it's produced in the EU to our nutritional standards, is somewhat less synthetic and from the reviews I've seen, tastes a hell of a lot better. I also went iron-willpower on myself and didn't buy any unhealthy snacks. The only snacks I had available were: Kiwi fruit, tomatoes, cucumber and small pieces of lean roast beef.
I'm a serious foodie, so the prospect of replacing most of my meals with a slightly more pleasant protein shake wasn't particularly pleasant, but I figured since what I was eating on campus was total trash anyway (chips, chocolate and crisps) I didn't have much to lose by trying it. It's also worth noting that I would still eat normally if I was going to a restaurant with friends - since my hunger response was dulled over time, it was easier to just hold off on a meal earlier in the day or fill up on cucumber and tomato to compensate for increased calories at dinner.
Queal is made from: Whey protein, Oat flour, Maltodextrin (from cornstarch), Soy Flour and Flaxseed oil (+ the vitamin and mineral profile), so consuming it didn't feel too unnatural. It's somewhat like one of those "cereal drinks", though the texture is massively improved by overnight refrigeration.
A beaker of reconstituted Queal is 700 kcal, which allows for easy calorie control when it comes to portion sizing. Furthermore, it's incredibly filling, and by sipping it gradually over the course of several hours, I found my general hunger response had been significantly dulled. I also felt more energised and able to focus (probably due to the fact I wasn't having constant glucose spikes any more) and was actually more motivated to start exercising.
On top of this, the chocolate flavour tastes like nesquick and the forest fruit flavour tastes like a victoria sponge cake milkshake, so most of my cravings went away, which made this much easier to stick to.
I would still have one normal meal in the morning before I headed to campus, usually some kind of Asian style vegetable stew with noodles / a small sweet potato and a small amount of lean meat, since I had easy access to a kitchen without disrupting my work. My current breakfast is lentils and vegetables with French-North African flavours and a small chilli and ginger chicken breast.
My week learning to windsurf prior to starting this diet had forced me to build a level of muscle mass, so I rolled with 3x4x10 upper body super-sets (5kg dumbbells since that's all I had) as soon as I woke up and right before I went to bed, eventually working in 50 goblet squats. Due to the fact my body was burning fat the whole time, I actually managed to bulk up considerably, and my arms now stretch the sleeves on a UK Medium T-shirt :D (Sadly this has come about during exam season so I can't use this newly acquired body confidence to pick up girls in clubs :( )
Over the course of the month of April, I dropped 3 inches from my hips (waist isn't a useful measurement for me since I didn't take any photos or measurements, I'm just going by old clothes I can once more fit into) and a shirt which previously was stretched close to bursting point now fits perfectly. Additionally, I can fit back into the rather expensive Jaeger suit I had bought a while before my internship, which makes me incredibly happy.
The fact that I was no longer distracted by hunger also meant that I was able to put in highly productive 14 hour days when writing my dissertation, and I'm ecstatic with the grade I achieved (76, in a subject that effectively marks up to 80)
Now that I'm not constantly occupied by a task as absorbing as my dissertation, this is admittedly more difficult to stick to. I'll probably post in the future about how I transition to a more normal lifestyle pattern, though since I'll be working in banking technology over the summer, this current model may well be feasible until I start my Master's degree.
