Just back from 8 days in the south of France, and yes, I ate differently than usual. But two things stood out enough to keep me thinking the whole trip: I saw far fewer overweight people than I expected, and I kept wondering why. The food itself, in ordinary restaurants, nothing with a Michelin star, was almost plain: meat was meat, no sauces, always some kind of salad on the side (usually green, with vinaigrette), and the other sides were not French fries.
I still ate French cuisine once a day, some days twice, that’s what a holiday is for. Coming home, first thing on the list was a huge supermarket order of my usuals: cottage cheese, protein rich yogurt (Skyr or Greek), knäckebröd, chicken and turkey fillet deli meats, smoked salmon, and of course every vegetable and piece of fruit I could fit in the cart. Then the scale, the next morning and the one after that. I follow my own advice here (see the travel carousel from a couple of weeks ago), and I hadn’t put on any weight.
Temperatures were so high in France, 35-40C from 8am to 10pm, that activity was low, very low. I ran 2x at 7:00am, because I just had to (I know: running is addictive, shoot me!), but most other days I was lucky if I made 8k steps, which for me is a drama. Back home, I have a race planned on 1 November and had missed a full week. I scaled back my training to 2/3 of usual for the first week back, 2 runs and 2 strength trainings instead of 3 of each. So far, so good, even if last night’s strength training only started at 21:00. I did it! For me!
And believe me: the laundry still isn’t done, the cooking has been “meh” but healthy, and this newsletter is going out a day later than usual.
Why This Isn’t About Me
Here’s the thing though: I already had a plan running before I left. Scaling it to two-thirds was the whole move, there was something to scale.
If you came back from holiday having gained a kilo or two, moved a lot less than usual, and you already know it, nobody needs to point it out, two-thirds of nothing isn’t a plan. And going straight to a strict new plan starting Monday won’t survive the week either. It never does.
Start With One Thing
What works instead is smaller than that: one thing. Just one, something you’ll actually keep doing. Once it’s just part of your week, not a decision anymore, come back and add a second one. Then a third.
Ten Small Changes to Choose From
Pick one to start with this week:
- Boil ten eggs on Sunday night. One goes on your plate every morning, part of breakfast, not the whole thing, done before you’ve had time to think about it.
- Move the biscuit tin off your desk and into a drawer, or another room entirely. You’ll still have one sometimes, just not without noticing.
- Halve the sugar in your coffee this week. Halve it again next week. In a month it’s gone and you never noticed the day it happened.
- Keep a water bottle on your desk, filled, in sight. What’s in front of you is what gets drunk.
- Cook a bit extra at dinner and pack the leftovers for lunch the next day, instead of buying whatever’s fastest on the way in.
- If lunch is a sandwich from downstairs, swap the salami for chicken. Same sandwich, same two minutes, different sandwich.
- Take the stairs. Not all of them, not yet. One floor this week. Two floors next week. Build it slowly, on purpose, the way you’d build anything else.
- Get off the tram, or park the car, one stop or one block further than you need to. Nobody notices, and it’s ten minutes of walking you didn’t have to schedule.
- Stand for the phone calls that don’t need a screen. A twenty-minute call is twenty minutes on your feet instead of twenty more minutes in the chair you’ve been in all day.
- Put your phone in another room 30 minutes before bed. See what that half hour usually spent scrolling turns into instead: 10 minutes of meditation, 10 minutes of journaling, 10 minutes for a facial.
Which one of these ten are you actually willing to keep doing, not just try once?
If you came back knowing something needs to change and you don’t know which one to start with, DEBs WAY Insight is a 30-minute, no-judgment look at where you actually stand. EUR 75.
