If you have been trying to lose weight and achieve better health without success, despite your best efforts, do not despair. I have been there, and have recently stumbled upon a series of small changes that I think anyone can make, which have surprisingly led me to lose 15 pounds over the past 7 months. This may seem slow to some, but a steady weight loss of half a pound a week is a ticket to success in losing significant weight over a year or two, while still being able to enjoy holidays, vacations and celebrations. If you have struggled with steady weight gain over many years as I have, despite following good nutrition guidelines, this is actually a big win. I have not been hungry, and have lost weight steadily while maintaining all the busy parts of life that can often get in the way of focusing on one’s own health and self-care. My name is Jane, and my husband and I have a busy family of four children, including a teenager. We are happy and hands-on new grandparents to a beautiful one year old baby girl, and are both working part time as well. We live near the beach in southeastern Massachusetts, so beach walking has long been a very enjoyable exercise. I have been a registered nurse for 40 years in the areas of pediatrics, maternal/child health, cardiology, oncology, research nursing and community health. The views and information here are my own, reflective of my own experience, and are presented as examples of what has helped me. I recommend readers always discuss their personal health and any changes they wish to make with their own health care providers. But I hope my recent success in finally moving the needle down on the scale may inspire you and help you to make some effective changes for your own sustainable weight loss.

I plan to continue building on this platform of positive changes, and feel great hope that I will find long term success for my overall health with these simple lifestyle changes. I think you may find some of these healthy eating habits, increased activity in small doses, and other ideas to be very easy to add to your daily routine, and I hope they will become habits you can stick to in the long run, as they have become for me. I have happily discovered that my slow but steady weight loss has continued despite ups and downs in my energy levels, some days and weeks being busier than others, going on vacation, holidays with their celebratory gatherings which always include lots of food, and many more events that in the past have derailed my weight-loss efforts. 

I have been on a long-term weight loss journey for the past 20 years. I was not overweight in my childhood or my 20s and 30s. Having worked in the past as a research nurse, I have done systematic reviews of health and science articles over the years, from the Mayo Clinic postings to those from the National Institutes of Health and the journals Obesity and Nutrition. I have read such books as Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis, and Always Hungry? by Dr. David Ludwig. I tried many lifestyle changes, including low-fat diets, high-fat diets, low carb diets, Weight Watchers, Mediterranean diet, 1800 calories/day restriction, intermittent fasting, smaller portion sizes, plant-based diets, personal trainers, strength training on my own, and working with four different nutritionists/registered dieticians over 20 years. Nothing seemed to help, and my weight continued to go up, slowly but surely. It was beyond frustrating. I really could not understand what was happening, especially because I was not eating the foods that are generally associated with weight gain- my diet was mainly whole foods, with no soda, diet or otherwise, or other sugared drinks, and very little processed foods.

I discovered, almost by accident, that a cascade of small changes that I made starting several months ago, have been having a slow but steady positive impact on my weight loss journey. The first one started one day last fall, when I did an online search “how to eat fewer calories and still feel full.” My doctor was talking to me about weight loss injections with a drug similar to Ozempic (I have more than 50 pounds to lose). I really did not want to go that road, as I always seem to experience complications with many medications I have taken over the years, and among the possible side effects of semaglutide include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, gallstones and pancreatitis. I am very glad these drugs exist, and I know they are helping many people with such serious medical conditions as obesity and heart disease, and they have become a more manageable alternative to weight loss surgery- they are just not for me right now, if I can find an alternative way to reach a healthy weight. The changes I will describe may also help you if you are coming off weight loss medications and want to sustain your success, and maybe continue to lose.

I truly could not understand why my healthy choices of food had not been successful in helping me lose weight over so many years. I had eliminated almost all processed foods, and we have always endorsed healthy eating as a family. We raised our oldest three children never going to fast food restaurants, and have relented only slightly in allowing our fourth an occasional visit. I use whole grains in baking, (I have started making sourdough everything, and will write more about gut health and the microbiome in future blog posts), and have cooked healthy foods with no salt added for years in my kitchen, using the delicious flavors of garlic, pepper, onions, ginger, olive oil, lemon and fresh herbs from the garden in my recipes. Frequenting local farmer’s markets, even in the winter, for leafy greens and gorgeous root vegetables, is the best way to find the freshest ingredients for the table, and I prefer farmer’s markets over grocery store shopping any day of the week. We have a small garden which produces very tasty tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, beans and basil, among other cooking herbs.

One: Eat More Protein and more fiber: What came up on my google search of “eating less/feeling full” was a lot of nutritional information about how eating more protein and fiber can have a helpful effect on weight loss, which we all have heard for many years, but the chemistry behind it I find fascinating, and motivating. Higher servings of protein and fiber actually mimic the way some of the weight loss drug semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy and others) boost the secretion of GLP-1 peptide in the digestive system, which is a hormone that induces the feeling of satiety- feeling full. I was tired of feeling hungry a lot, with nothing to show for it. I found a few online sources of information I felt I could trust, as they had sound science backing their advice, and I started buying higher protein yogurt (skyr), as well as eating more eggs for breakfast and packing myself snacks with a lot of lean protein, including healthy fats, and optimizing vegetables and beans, while not cutting out any food groups. I did not feel as hungry as when I was trying to follow an 1800 calorie per day diet, (which was very difficult!), and over the past 7 months I have given up calorie counting completely. There is much information available to help find foods that boost the hormones that make us feel full, while also lowering the blood sugar spike after eating, which in my case has for years been followed by the chase game of higher insulin, which leads to extra calories being stored as fat, rather than burned for energy needs. (Chickpeas may be a whole blog post in future.) I try to eat about 30 grams of protein per meal, along with a good sized serving of vegetables. The protein can be 2 or 3 eggs, plus a container of skyr yogurt with 15 grams of protein. I sometimes add an egg white or two for more protein. But you can eat a turkey burger that you made the night before, or an english muffin with peanut butter instead of the eggs. Quinoa, beans, fish, nutritional yeast, nuts, seeds, chickpea pasta and more are all good sources of protein. I’ll be covering more of this in future posts- there is a lot of information on nutrition that has been super helpful to me.

Two: Body fat Scale: The second small change I made was in following the advice of one of the online nutritionists who recommended buying an inexpensive bio-impedence scale, sometimes called a body fat scale. The one I chose was by Arboleaf, (on Amazon- about $30.00). I didn’t particularly want to see the black and white numbers of not only my total body weight, but with a large waistline, I knew that the visceral fat number would be high, and the lean muscle mass, or skeletal  muscle, would be low. (Visceral fat, the fat around central vital organs, is particularly unhealthy.) This all turned out to be true, but overall, buying and using the scale was a great decision. (There are some restrictions about who should not use this type of scale, including people with pacemakers, pregnant women, and children. It works by sending an electrical impulse through your body when your feet make contact with the metal pads on the scale. I honestly was a little nervous about this, but I didn’t feel a thing.) With the app activated, it will send to your smartphone several readings, including total weight, body fat percentage, visceral fat, skeletal mass, body mass index and more. It is not as accurate as a the expensive Dexa scans that many fitness clubs have available, but over time, it can help track changes. I have been very happy to see the skeletal muscle percentage going up with the exercises I have incorporated, along with a slow but steady weight loss. I don’t mind the slow rate, it has been about a half of a pound per week. But again- these changes have not been hard! Weight loss has always seemed quite difficult for me in the past.

Three: Know your blood sugar: One of the most important things to monitor, if you have prediabetes as I do, is your blood sugar. The third addition I made was starting to use a continuous glucose monitor in mid-December 2023.  I have had high blood pressure and prediabetes for many years, (the two very often go hand in hand, with the higher insulin levels chasing the higher blood sugar, and acting on the blood vessels to stiffen them), and I had been tracking my morning fasting glucose in a daily calendar for the past 4-5 years. Those numbers were not budging, staying squarely in the middle of the “prediabetes” range , which is a fasting blood sugar of 100-126. At times when I was a whole lot more active than usual, like helping our daughter move out of a fourth floor walkup, and into a third floor walk up apartment, I would see a nice dip in my fasting blood sugar the next day to below 100, but almost always it had been between 107-117. A few times it was as high as 125, depending upon what I had eaten the previous day. This terrified me, as the cutoff for prediabetes morphing into diabetes is 126. I first noticed my increased fasting glucose at a doctor’s visit in 2003 when I was 41 years old, and it was 105 (normal is about 70-99). The following year it was 95 (normal range), but after that, it stayed above 100. My doctors over the next 10-15 years did not focus on it very much, (it was pretty close to 100), but if I had known then the complications that can ensue with prediabetes- especially the part where it can make it very hard to lose weight- I would have acted a lot faster and a lot sooner. Even as a nurse for over 40 years, I did not know that a fasting blood sugar of 105 is a very loud alarm bell, and needs to be acted upon right away, and consistently, until it is back down in the normal range. I would like to make it my mission to ring that alarm bell so that people can recognize this silent disease, and do the work to turn it around early, and avoid the years of complications that have ensued for me- mainly higher and higher blood pressure and weight, and losing out on being able to comfortably participate in many activities I used to enjoy easily with my children. At 35, I was running 4 miles with my 40 pound daughter in a jogging stroller. In my 40s, I often wore my toddler son in a backpack on walks through the woods in winter. I have lost a lot of that strength, agility and endurance. I am determined to regain the health benefits of a weight that is appropriate for my body, with the healthy habits I have adopted, and which happily now seem to fit in easily to a busy schedule. I think that is because they have been small, incremental changes that feel easy to keep up with. It is also very important to go over your lab results with your doctor. I had the model lab results for metabolic syndrome for years before I really started to have problems- but again, no alarm bells, just “try to lose the weight”. Metabolic syndrome is a mostly silent condition that increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. I recommend that you know your A1c, which tracks average blood sugar over the previous 3 months, your total cholesterol, LDL and HDL cholesterol, and triglycerides- (so important and they get less media attention than cholesterol), and talk to your doctor about metabolic syndrome to see if you are at risk for it.  A large waist circumference is another alarm bell: 35 inches for women and 40 inches for men. If you are at risk, start moving your muscles. Starting out slowly, with movements that feel comfortable, actually makes a big difference, and put it way up high on your daily to-do list. You can prevent a lot of disease and discomfort this way.

Four: Consider a Continuous Glucose Monitor: I found a company online, Signos, where I could get a CGM without a diagnosis of diabetes. Nutrasense is another one. They can be pricey, without a diagnosis of diabetes, they can run $150-$200/month, but I was feeling desperate to understand what was happening to me. In my opinion, one of the best ways these monitors can be used in the future will be to prevent type II diabetes in people with prediabetes (like me), and even to prevent prediabetes. I will go into the CGM more deeply in a future post, but the best way it has helped me has been to allow me to be able to see how just the smallest output of exercise can bring my blood sugar down quite a bit. It is hard to see a 10 minute walk as being crucial to one’s weight loss efforts over a long time, but when you see your blood sugar take a steep drop during what feels like a regular walk, it really gives you more incentive to walk just a little longer, or wait just another 30 minutes before eating the next meal. The monitor can be worn for 10 days, you can shower and swim, and it reads blood sugar levels every 5 minutes, which show on a graph on a smartphone app. Many people with Type I diabetes wear these. When I first started wearing it in mid December 2023, I ate my usual diet for several days, to see how my blood sugar levels responded to a usual day. The first thing to get tossed out (day one!) was my beloved no sugar, high fiber cereal (my one processed food!). It spiked my blood sugar over 50 points! When the blood sugar goes up that fast, the body sends out insulin to help the sugar get out of the bloodstream and into the muscles, but if you are not moving and exercising (which uses glucose), the excess glucose gets stored as fat. This has definitely been my problem, quite clearly, and my next biggest blood sugar spiker was, yes, you guessed it, pasta. Even whole wheat pasta, sadly. I have found the chickpea pasta by Banza to be very good, and almost not noticeable when substituted for regular pasta. But I can now eat a cup of regular pasta, mixed with a lot of delicious roasted vegetables, and preceded by a green salad with a vinegar-based dressing, without a major spike. The order in which you eat your food also makes a big difference- veggies first!! Everyone is different in their responses to food, but even if you never wear a CGM, take it from me that whenever you move, you are helping your body in a big way. A little really does go a long way, especially if done consistently through the day. I have heard muscles described as a “glucose sink”. The more muscle fibers you have, and the more you use them, the more glucose you pull out of your bloodstream (where it can cause damage) and into your muscles, which use the sugar as an energy source to help them contract.

It is also very clear for me in watching my CGM go up at times, how stress raises blood sugar, which has led me to focus on stress management, and how waiting about 4 hours between meals really helps bring my blood sugar numbers down into very normal levels, 80s and 90s, especially in the third to the fourth hour. I suspect this is the zone where much of my weight loss is happening. Signos also has a very helpful free podcast called Body Signals, which is full of very scientifically backed information on all things related to blood sugar- nutrition, exercise, stress and more.

You can buy an over the counter blood sugar monitor and test strips (also pricey, but much less expensive than a CGM) to keep an eye on your morning fasting blood sugar, as well as your response to foods, by using it an hour or two after meals. If you have a health spending card through your health insurance, it can be used for this type of equipment. Using the tiny needle is very easy- there are needle stick devices that make it almost painless, and the data you acquire can truly be life saving.

Five: Exercise, even just a little, but consistently. The best way to increase my exercise, I have found, is to add it slowly, and when starting out, to do the exercises that feel easiest for me. (They still work even if they’re easy!!) Again, I turned to an online search for “easy exercises”, and found the amazing and inspiring Caroline Jordan (whose motto is “Movement is Medicine”- so true!!), who has many exercise videos on You Tube in 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 or 30 minute increments, and longer, focusing on prediabetes, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other metabolic conditions. I found her standing exercises very easy to do, and if some of them were not, I would skip to the next. I can now do many of the ones that were too hard just a few months ago. She is a one-woman social support, as well as exercise coach. She encourages smiling, and gratitude, and other feel-good factors, and her 10 minute videos fly by. I started with one 10 minute video per day, and now I will do my own several little sessions of 3-4 minutes of muscle movement in the kitchen, or for a work break if I am sitting at the computer. My little granddaughter thinks I am very funny with my squats and standing jacks 🙂 There have been times I have done a 5 or 10 minute exercise video at 11 PM, just because I would like to see my blood sugar a little lower before bed- it really works. (I would never have done that in the past!) This kind of incremental but consistent exercise has made a big difference in the way my muscles feel, especially my shoulders, arms and quads. They feel stronger and springier, and I can tell my stamina has increased. I also can see the benefit on my blood sugar of even the shortest walk- 10 minutes with the dog will send it sharply down, even more so during a nice longer walk on the beach. Today I walked for 15 minutes in the parking lot while waiting for my son. My blood sugar went down 39 points. This was regular walking, not super fast, or pumping arms. I try to do a combination of these exercises daily-  a couple of 10 minute Caroline Jordan videos, or shorter sessions I do on my own, along with a couple of short dog walks or a longer one- whatever will fit in on any given day- and I find it has really jump-started my weight loss efforts. The best is a 20-30 minute walk after supper- it has a nice effect on blood sugar through the night and into the next day. But if the weather is bad, or you can’t get outside, do one or two of Caroline’s 10 minute videos after supper- they drop blood sugar as much as an outdoor walk for me. I now will do a few minutes in the kitchen several times a day if possible, if I am cooking or cleaning, just to get the movement in easily. I am rarely home all day, so I am doing these short stints of exercise sandwiched into the sometimes small increments of time I have in the kitchen each day.

Six: Try not to snack. The sixth and last recent addition I made to my eating pattern was to take my metabolic doctor’s advice, and not eat between meals. This is much easier to do if you are eating 20-30 grams of protein per meal. That keeps you feeling full and satisfied- not “snacky” two hours later. You may have heard of “time restricted eating”. It is not intermittent fasting, but it may be a cousin. I started setting my smart phone alarm for 4 hours at the start of my meal, and I would try not to eat for the next 4 hours. I drank water, and sometimes coffee in between. It surprised me to see how often I would look at my watch to see when it was time to eat again. I definitely could feel myself thinking about a little food when I was tired, or stressed, or faced with a task I did not much want to do. Even healthy snacks like a half of an apple and some natural peanut butter (one of my favorites) would send my blood sugar shooting up, so I learned to time that delicious snack with a walk right afterwards- and preferably 4 hours since my last meal. Another tip I have learned is that if you want to have dessert after a meal, and I sometimes do, then have it with the meal or right after- don’t wait an hour or two. The way I think about it is that your sweeter food can kind of “hitchhike” a ride on the insulin that your body is already secreting to help metabolize your dinner, rather than having to send out an extra burst of insulin later when you might normally eat dessert, which again sets up the blood sugar spike/insulin secretion chase game that often ends in storing extra energy sources as fat. 

Eating your food more slowly also decreases the rise in blood sugar. It can be challenging to do, but try eating a meal over 25-30 minutes if you can- it really does make a difference in how high and how fast your blood sugar goes up.

I’ll be writing more every week about matters of health, including topics such as the hormones GLP-1 and peptide YY, gut health, insulin response to foods, weight management, nutrition, stress management, exercise, gardening, sleep apnea and lots more. I hope my experience helps you in your own health journey, and nudges you to nurture yourself, so that you can live a more healthy, productive and happy life. Let me know if you have tried any of these habits, or others that you have found helpful, and thanks so much for checking out my first blog post!