I Lost 100lbs by Following 4 Rules

If you're anything like me, losing weight is not about trying to compete with the amazing physiques that you see online. I just want to reach the point where I'm confident in taking my t-shirt off when I go on holiday, when I go to the pool, when I go to the beach.

I've always hated the way that I look. It grinds me down, day in and day out. At my biggest, I was around 230lbs.

I lost over 40lbs a few years ago and felt the best I ever had during that summer. I was doing a lot of running and strength training at the gym, trying to build muscle, as well as playing rugby. My diet had improved. I was eating a lot more vegetables.

But then I started bulking to add muscle, and not in a healthy way. It's known as "dirty bulking". I was eating a lot of the wrong food and stopped making progress in the gym, and the belly I had worked so hard to lose came back.

I just wasn't happy with my weight. If you can be happy with how you look, I think you can be more confident in life and genuinely feel better about yourself. That's what I wanted for myself again.

So I took charge. I began documenting my weight loss journey on my YouTube channel. I tried all sorts of ways to lose weight and be healthy again, including running 5 kilometers every day for 30 days and adding a lot more protein back into my diet.

Then, recently, I broke my leg and put weight back on. So I'm planning to lose that again.

I don't believe in making yourself miserable to lose weight. It shouldn't be an uncomfortable process. It shouldn't feel like a job. Some people overcomplicate weight loss. At the end of the day, it's all just muscle and fat stuck to a skeleton.

But I do follow certain rules that have helped me to lose 100lbs since I started my own weight loss journey more than three years ago.

The first rule is to remember to drink a ton of water. This is one of the easiest things you can do immediately that doesn't affect the amount of food you're eating and will help you lose weight by stimulating your metabolism.

I do this and it works for me. In one experiment, I tried drinking a gallon of water a day for a whole week and dropped 11lbs. I didn't change anything else about my diet or exercise in those seven days. It's something you can start doing right away.

My second rule is to hold yourself accountable. It may sound obvious, but it's crucial. At the end of the day, you're the one who eats the food and you're the one who holds the key to the progress that you want to unlock.

Find a way to hold yourself to account. Think about the next time you want to go and eat something unhealthy or miss a workout—it's all your fault. It's horrible, but it's true. If you make a poor choice, it's your own fault.

In those moments, stop, think, and hold yourself to account for the decision you're about to make. Think about the future you want for yourself. Is that extra snack really worth it? Won't missing a gym session put your destination a little further away?

A third rule I follow is: Reward your cardio exercise with food. Many people feel hungrier as a result of doing more cardio. When you're losing weight, it can become much harder to resist eating food, because your body craves more of it after you've burned calories through cardio.

I have a counterintuitive way of thinking about this, and it has helped me to lose weight and sustain that loss over long periods of time.

To me, cardio is a way to eat more food. There are websites that allow you to calculate how many calories you need in a day based on factors such as your weight, age, sex and so on. I take that figure, and I add to it the calories lost through cardio.

If I go for a run and burn 350 calories, then I have an extra 350 calories to play with in my diet that day. I can go and eat something extra, so long as it doesn't exceed that number in calories.

As I said before, losing weight shouldn't be a miserable experience. Your diet is so important in this. When you combine more cardio with eating less food, you may feel great for a few days and lose a few pounds. But I don't find that a sustainable situation for me.

I've tried doing it that way so many times and it has never, ever worked. So if you're sitting there feeling hungry and you want to eat more, but you've reached your recommended calorie allowance for the day, do some cardio and earn what you want to eat.

Cardio has many health benefits in addition to burning calories. Reward yourself for cardio exercise, and you'll find yourself doing more of it, reaping the benefits. Cardio is not your enemy. It is hard work, and you do get breathless sometimes.

But the more exercise you do, the more food you can eat.

My fourth rule is, I found, the most powerful and impactful way I lost weight. And it's this: Separate your cravings from your conscience.

For me, losing weight has always been more of a mental battle than a physical one. Yes, it's the physical act of putting food in your mouth that actually does the damage. However, it's really acting on what your brain thinks.

When you get a craving for food—in my case, bread, which I love—talk to it. Ask what on Earth is that you're ruffling on about? A craving is just your brain trying to get that dopamine hit from eating sugar that it remembers from the last time.

Your brain thinks that it's benefiting your body by eating this food, and satisfying these dopamine cravings feels good in the moment.

When you think about it, right now you have the ability to slap yourself around the face. That's an extreme example of what I'm trying to get at. But it's to show that you are in control of your own body.

It boils down to basic human instincts. The reason I separate my cravings from my conscience is because when my brain is telling me I want some food so I should go and get a sandwich, I also have the mental power to snap myself out of that urge.

Ask yourself: Do I need that little dopamine hit, and how is it going to help me in the long term? The short answer is it's not, but even then I sometimes go and get the food anyway. I've done that before. But it's an internal battle you need to have.

Why would you want to risk that opportunity to have that great body for a five-minute dopamine spike? You are in control of what your body does. Giving in and eating is you losing that control. Remain focused.

It's the worst thing being stuck in this lump of lard when you just don't want to be. The horrible feeling consumes you completely. I don't want anyone to have to go through that.

Tom Morley is documenting his weight loss journey on his YouTube channel.

All views expressed in the article are the author's own.

Do you have a unique experience or personal story to share? Email the My Turn team at myturn@newsweek.com.

Uncommon Knowledge

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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

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