I still remember, sometimes in my worst nightmares (even worse than the ones where you dream you are naked in the middle of an examination hall), the cold sweat and the mind numbing blankness that accompanied receiving the question paper of my math exam all through my academic years.

You know like that scene in Taare Zameen Pe? Where the kid sees all the alphabets upside out, inside out? Well, thats how numbers have always looked to me. Maybe they should invent a new term – dyslexic but only when it comes to numbers – and then i will say – aaah!

Needless to say then, that I failed at everything to do with counting.

Which brings me to this very important point: I could not be bothered to count calories.

Unlike all my girlfriends who were always on diets. They’d say to me things like: this cappuccino has xyz calories and so we can drink this but skip something equivalent in calories to the cappuccino at dinner. Like maybe a chapati? Something bizarre like that.

So there I was, all of 16 or 17 or 23 or 25 or 26, plump, and happily so, chomping away on countless amounts of goodies, not knowing what the calories were that entered my body, not knowing how much I had to burn to get rid of them.

Of course I’d say the usual things overweight people say : I have no idea how I put on weight, I don’t eat that much. Or : I workout hard enough, I have no idea why I don’t lose weight.

And that was the summary of my weight loss (haha!) struggle for the first 29 years of my life.

Last year something beautiful happened. I learnt there is a way to be healthy, eat, eat, eat and eat, and I lost all the weight without even thinking of calories. Its been a year and a half, and there’s no looking back.

Here’s how…

I stopped eating processed food: Nothing that comes in fancily wrapped plastic packets, fruit juices and other things with hidden sugars. This includes everything that you buy from the health food aisles too. They are the worse culprits! All the grains we eat are also processed, and I stopped eating those.

I started eating foods high in nutrition: Foods high in nutrition are automatically high in calories. So the calorie counters will think 10 times before eating the highly nutritious and delicious egg yolk but will down a glass of awful, highly processed, terribly unhealthy, and un satiating, slim milk. Here in lies the problem. The slim milk has so many hidden elements that cannot be easily digested by your body, and causes tons of problems over time not to mention insidious weight gain. The egg yolk on the other hands, keeps you satiated, full for longer, and supplies you with so much nutrition which is most important for long term weight management. (And no it won’t induce a heart attack).So calories are just half the picture. And people tend to make it the whole picture.

I do not spend hours at the treadmill: If I did, I would have given up exercising ages ago, because nothing and I mean nothing, could be more boring. Instead I workout with other like minded energetic, happy people, and never, ever count how many calories I have burnt. Because my workouts include Bootcamp – which involves hight intensity interval training, and Taikwondo – which is the same plus flexibility training and core strength, as well as yoga -which promotes core strength and harmony and I lift heavy but only employ my functional strength by doing so, I build lean muscle and have increased my metabolism.
 
I have no idea how many calories I burn during any session of any workout. I have no idea how many calories I have eaten during any day. I have no idea how much weight I have lost in the last three months. I do know though that I had to go shopping the other day because all my jeans are suddenly too loose.

Don’t waste time on low calorie, nutritionally bereft, processed foods. Eat the real stuff
Don’t waste time counting the calories you have burnt. Do real exercise.