I am often asked how I started my “diet” when losing my 100 lbs, and people are often shocked when I say “My first meal for breakfast was Nutella on a white flour bagel.” Every person I tell this to looks stunned, and a few people even tried to work it through in their minds to see if there was somehow a nutritional component or benefit to such a breakfast. I readily tell those people that there is absolutely no nutritional or weight loss property to such a breakfast, and they remain mystified as to how such a plan lead to successful weight loss.
With that query, I tell them the following story….
Every day I would eat my Nutella on a white bagel for breakfast at 7:00am, and every day my wife at the time would come downstairs and give me a weird look. She and I were both obese, and as an unwritten rule, we never discussed each other’s eating habits with each other directly. However, she did know I was on a diet and she did know I was going to the gym every day and it was clear she could just not see this fitting in as part of a weight loss plan, but did not want to comment. So after about two weeks of these looks I said “So I bet you want to know why Nutella on a white bagel is part of my weight loss plan.” She nodded her head. I simply said to her “Prior to this, when was the last time you saw me make it down to eat breakfast at 7:00am in the morning, let alone doing so consistently over two weeks?” At that point, a wry and knowing grin came over my ex-wife’s face and the conversation pretty much ended there, because with that she could guess my strategy.
What she realized is that for years I didn’t eat breakfast or lunch. My eating habits were so far gone that I would often not eat until 4:00pm in the afternoon for my first meal of the day, and much of the time that meal would often be fast food. The very act of eating regularly, setting a schedule and being able to get-up every morning to eat a breakfast was my first start - that was my goal. The Nutella on a bagel was just a vehicle to get me to eat regularly, which was my real strategy.
My consumption of food was so bad and awful I needed something I could commit to and call an easy victory. When you are 100 lbs over weight and do not eat well or exercise, getting up in the morning at 7:00am to eat breakfast regularly is a challenge – so I needed something to induce me, something to reward me and Nutella on a bagel was able to do just that.
Now, would I recommend this strategy for anyone else starting on a diet or on a permanent weight loss journey? Absolutely not!!!!!!!!!! However, I would recommend that every person who wants to go on a permanent weight loss journey know themselves inside and out very well, and from that figure out the best strategy for them? Absolutely!!!!
See, my Nutella on a bagel strategy was informed by many pieces of self-knowledge that I knew prior to my weight loss journey. He is what they were:
- I knew I could not give up my junk food immediately, it would have been a disaster. However, I knew that I could taper it, so Nutella on a bagel was my junk, and a promise to myself not to snack in the evening. If I wanted a sweet snack in the evening (which I would compulsively do), I remembered my Nutella on a bagel was my limit, so I ate fruit or trail mix… and if I wanted the occasional binge, a simple spoonful of Nutella was allowed once or twice a week. So the Nutella on a bagel not only got me into regular breakfast habits, it was a way of breaking my reliance on sweets in the evening – pretty smart thinking, if you ask me.
- Why did I know I could not give up junk-food immediately or entirely? Because I knew I was an emotional eater and I still had bigger issues to sort through to understand my life and my emotions. I knew that cutting off my junk food - or my emotional crutch entirely - would not be possible. I had to know that I could scale back gradually.
- I knew that I could not work with any sort of nutritionist or trainer because I knew they would not support this aspect of my journey. So I needed to complete it before I sought professional help that would clearly not understand and/or shun my behaviour.
- I also knew that I could substitute my Nutella on a white bagel for other foods at breakfast and not feel deprived. Even moving to a sweetened cereal would have been a step in the right direction and still have kept me satisfied.
- Finally, even after the first few days, I was beginning to feel the ill physical impact of eating such a high dose of sugar in the morning (not to mention Nutella gets everywhere and is really sticky). I knew that if I could tap into that feeling of fogginess, that really yucky feeling of over-indulging on sugar, that feeling of rush and fall with such a high dose of sugar, I knew I could turn myself off that kind of treat.
Overall, within a month, I had substituted cheese, eggs, whole-grain non-sugar cereal, sausages, fruit and even the occasional piece of pork for breakfast and was on my way. Eating a regular breakfast also stabilized my eating throughout the day – I was eating three square meals a day, something I had not done for years, if not decades.
As I sit here and write this, a very interesting thought is occurring to me. No one I tell this story to has ever told me I was wrong in doing what I did. The reason is obvious – the proof is in the pudding, or the size 34 jeans that I have been wearing for almost five years. But what if, during my diet, people saw my Nutella on a white bagel for breakfast? Would they laugh at me, tell me I didn’t know what I was doing, assume that I bought into the false premise that Nutella is “healthy” (afterall, they do market it this way)? Would they assume I was weak, that I was setting myself up for failure? Most importantly, would they have believed that I knew myself well enough to know what I was doing? Who are they, or who are nutrition experts, to tell me how to eat and properly diet?
The fundamental goal of my story is this – a permanent weight loss journey is a very personal experience. When you are committed to losing weight long term, and when you know yourself, you will do what it takes to pace yourself accordingly. I simply could not imagine eating broccoli and cauliflower as my first diet food. I wasn’t ready for it and in fact it took me three years to actually start eating vegetables regularly. Is an out of shape person going to run a marathon as their first exercise or dead-lift 300 lbs? When I started at the gym with exercising, I could not even make it through my warm-up stretches for the first three weeks – why should I assume that my eating should be well ahead of where my body was?
When someone says “I’m going to commit to some sort of diet ‘plan’”, their commitment is entirely in the wrong place. However, when your commitment is to yourself – and when you’ve done the work to know yourself well - that’s when Nutella on a white bagel becomes a completely viable strategy for the first food on your diet. I should know, I did it!